About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Thursday, March 21, 2024

T is for Two - Foreign Minor Makes - HO Railways Figures

Many thanks again to Jon Attwood, as these are all his images, I brightened them up a bit in Picasa, and can add a few points of note, but mostly, just eye candy as we box-tick a couple of the lesser makes, but, if you were a Spanish or Danish railway modeller in the 1960/70's, they wouldn't have been that 'minor' to you, as you feasted your eyes on the display at your local hobby shop, so these things are always relative!

Now Aneste Datank, and offering a basic range of Preiser in their own-brand, as a catalogue box-ticker, originally Dat Ank or Datank (?) are a Spanish railway model maker, who, for a while, under the semi-cold war conditions of being in Franco's Spain, were free to produce knock-off's to their hearts' content!
 
And they seem to have settled upon Walter Merten as the target of their plagiarism, although, the lower set may be old Preiser sculpts? Nevertheless, for metal copies of finely-detailed plastic figures, they aren't bad, quite colourful, and were clearly quite plentiful, as, since Jon sent me these images, I have seen quite a few on evilBay.
 
One is reminded of the efforts of Bermania, from Argentina, but these are a superior finish.
 
While up in the colder, wetter north of the continent, Reisler was producing these in an early Cellulose or glass-like polystyrene. We have actually seen these here before, or something similar, different sculpts, but at the time they were 'unknown' or 'maybe Märklin', now maybe Reisler or maybe Lego! They really only have the heavy bases in common.

While these have no bases, and the farm we also looked at previously here at Small Scale World, have very thin bases? So an odd range of sets, which may be bigger than listed on the Tohan site, until someone ID's those others, we won't know!

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