M is for More Model Matlots

Seen before, both as contributed images and as a donation to the Blog, Brian Berke(who was behind the previous two viewings) sent these a while ago, ostensively off the back of the HO-railway figure season, and I know it's really only, and all about the imagery with this blogging marlarky, so here's some more!

 

Pyro's diminutive ship's crew; as I've mentioned before, there was back in the 50/60's (and to this day some of the mouldings are around) a series of vessel kits of tugs and similar vessels in scales around 1:86/7, 1:90 or even 1:100'ish, mostly copies of each other, and these chaps, are ideal for those kits, most of which had no figures (one had a couple, who are in the stash somewhere!), and a couple of Brian's are painted and serving on the tug-boat in the background!

 

It's the 1:87th scale Pyro Diesel Tug, later carried by Lifelike (briefly) and Lindberg, which could be motorised and taken down to the municipal boating pond for a putter-about, not many left now, but Basingrad still has quite a large one down at Eastrop Park! The beauty of the slightly smaller scale is that they take up less room on an OO-gauge railway layout, while retaining substantiality, and if you need more;

 

https://www.scalemates.com/kits/pyro-207-sea-going-diesel-tug--1172808

 

Many thanks to Brian for the images.

R is for Railway Figures - Primex and Vollmer, Not!

Quite a few model railway companies never paid more than lip-service to scenic, producing a basic station or a few lineside accessories like signals, or a level-crossing, but from time to time would buy in other makers products to 'make up the numbers' in a glossy catalogue, this is true for figures too, and, later in the series, we will look at some interesting British ones from Jon, but these two obvious candidates have come-up in the research!

Primex were a budget firm set up by Märklin, while Vollmer are one of the three or four main producers of ready-coloured building kits, however both have, from time to time taken-in what seem to be Preiser figures, to enhance otherwise rather one-trick catalogues.

 

Primex getting sets of six, as per Preiser, but with basic paint, Vollmer having the indignity of only five figures per set, along with the simple paint! Both firms also get a few of the earlier animal sculpts.

A is for Art Studio

Not really a part of the current sequence of railway figure posts per se, but rather a follow-up to this old post, and in particular the artists which I mentioned had been included in a Faller set, and we actually looked at that set's contents in an even earlier post here.

 

It happened that while looking for everything else, I passed this in the files, and while I'm not going to subject you to all the 'lost directions' in those files (but a lot will feature on the A-Z's one day), these do illustrate the use of Presier figures in a Faller set, something which probably only occurred a few times if again, and I stress, I'm not aware of another set that actually had figures, but they are often in the catalogues wandering about, and the odd, other Faller set, lends itself to some 'subject-related' figures?

 

The blackout sheet for electrification of the interior also contained a few paintings to be set up around the studio or on the easels, and there were three teeny nameplates on the set's packing sheet!

Bottom left shows the Preiser accessory runner with the art equipment, and that's it really, just ticking a box re. old references!

P is for Siku, S is for Pola . . . no, they're all DS Plastics!

Or they were for a while! Continuing the season of occasional model railway figure posts, with one of the more esoteric and hard to find in any guise set of figures, originally issued by Siku, used by Pola and passed-on to DS Plastics in Holland where De Gryter definitely used them.

How they are believed to have been issued originally by Siku, and as such they may have had a margarine-premium type issue as well, that being where a lot of Siku's output was going at the time (1950's), but as these fleshy-tan colour they were probably issued as model railway accessories.

I've only picked a few up over the years (the above is an old auction shot), and most are damaged, they are hard to find, in part due to their age now, and the material, they will be 70+ years old now.

Equally hard to find are the painted versions, these from Jon Attwood being the only ones I think I've ever seen, although I recognise the chap with skis as one from my 'unknown' zone! Possibly given to me by Peter Evans or Adrian Little? And almost certainly actually Pola, or technically Pola-Quick, down to the fact that the colours match the catalogue images!

 

Those catalogue scans, the figures are very similar to the Layla/Kibri set, copied in Hong Kong, being semi-flat and somewhat cute in the sculpting, indeed Siku may have been behind some of that too (?), they were very busy with small/novelty plastics alongside Manurba and another one I can never remember the name of, and while the above are all a hard styrene, there are soft-ethylene versions to be found, which look very Hong Kong'y, but they aren't . . . 

 

. . . they are De Gruyter supermarket premiums from Holland, first brought to our attention by Jan Boers in Plastic Warrior magazine many years ago. Here seen, rendered as artwork, in the DS Plastics trade catalogue where/whom De Gruyter would have commissioned them from. DS having inherited a bunch of Siku tooling.

In fact, going on dates, Pola probably had to go to DS Plastics too, unless Siku had a duplicate set? Always more questions than answers when building these networks of clues from fragmentary evidence!

L is for Layouts and Little People!

There were quite a few figures in the huge box of mostly animals Jon Attwood sent recently, and we're looking at the smaller-scaled stuff in this post. Of interest as my intention is to get some model-railway stuff posted over Christmas, because it's a long time since we looked at any of it in any depth, and the last time we did, it was all that Preiser/Merten stuff, which won't feature this time round!

A late ('yellow' pull-off lid) box of Airfix Platform Figures was stuffed with small scale . . . err . . . stuff! And this is me sorting it into piles! Most of it is grist-to-the-mill stuff you wouldn't want me to go through pile by pile, but what can you spot - the image enlarges quite big, but a little pixel-fuzzy.

 

Some highlights from the previous though; the paratrooper is from a parachute-plane kit, but I can never remember which is which, as there are more than one with a figure, one is Airfix, another Monogram I think, which may be this one? Then a Blue Box German throwing  grenade over a damaged, but rather fine (Edwardian?) board-game piece, to his US oppo', while another of my favourite little Hong Kong cowboys charges into the fray!

 

Faller scenic sets, these are the really useful sets of 'bits', rather than specific kits, and I well remember those coin-operated railway dioramas at mainline and terminus stations in Germany having the contents of 973 stacked round the two cottages under construction, which would be made to look on fire with blackened timbers, cotton wool, hidden red and yellow grain-of-wheat bulbs &ect . . . so the fire equipment of Roco, Preiser, Herta, Praline and/or Wiking could be given something to do, for a feature in one corner of the layout!

 

A lovely sample, of samples, of metal railway figures, both bigger name and after-market, old and new'ish. Jon has also sent images, and I have also had both a photography and scanning sessions, so there will be intermittent posts on some of this in December, all going well.

 

We looked at these years ago, they were samples from a dodgy outfit in China/US/Germany, and Mike Niederman confirmed Tomolio's suspicions they were Presier copies, but fun nevertheless, as figure collectables, and seen here in what looks to be OO- and O-gauges. Upper shot is duplicate poses in the two sizes, lower shot are colour variations of the OO figures.

 

Hong Kong knock-offs of Merit/Randall scenery, with the white stuff attributed to Blue Box and through their Sunshine lable, Marx!

 

Jon also sent this for a very interesting advert on figures from a maker I only knew from their similar ad's in the military modelling press, where they were promoting 1:90 or 1:100th NATO recognition models of Cold War armour! All for the forthcoming posts on Railway figures!

Thanks again to Jon, for all this, which is already proving useful and will continue to do so for years to come. You know, everything which you physically have in the 'stash', is something you don't have to search for, at some point in the future, to feed blog articles or illustrate points!

T is for Two - Euro-Armour

To go with their largish '54mm' Airfix resembling 54mm combat infantry, technically US troops, but aimed at a NATO , or Bundeswher recogniseing fan-base, Jean Hoefler produced a Leopard Tank, and to utilise the chassis tool, a nice conversion to this beast . . .

. . . the Flugabwehrkanonenpanzer Gepard (Cheetah), an all-weather-capable day-and-night, self-propelled anti-aircraft gun (SPAAG) currently doing sterling-service in Ukraine, bringing down Russian tactical missiles and their 'indestructible' hypersonic bollocks, as well as drones, large and small!

Seen-elsewhere shot, you can see it goes well with pretty-much any large-scale toy soldiers you throw at it with Crescent, Cherilea and a couple of Reisler, used here as scale/size compatibility guides.

 

While this is - I'm pretty sure - a Bonux premium from France, next-door, but it's unmarked, the ex-Manurba-Tallon stuff they carried is marked with the soap-powder's name, but it seems the more unique items weren't. Fictional but fun!

T is for Teeny-Tiny Taiwanese Trucks, Tanks and Tippers!

I picked these up a few weeks ago, as a cheapie on that there evilBay, I don't know anything about them, and the only clue is a small, uneven 'TAIWAN' on the underside of each vehicle/a single component.

I suspect they are [earlyish?] examples of what the Japanese call Gashepon, or vending-machine toys, but - obviously - Taiwanese in origin, and as we will see, very much 'box scale' and simplified, but charming for that. They are also quite idiosyncratic, so we'll start with the easy one!

It's basically a 6x6 Pinzguaer high mobility all-terrain vehicle/artillery tractor, or similar militarised 'mini-van' type vehicle, and comes in at around the 1:90th mark, which would make it an additional asset to a Roco or Roscopf army! It's even in a similar olive-drab colour, and consists of five parts; three clip-in wheels and two body-halves.

The Gepard-decorated box actually contains a late-mark (1A5?) Leopard MBT with a pair of carpet wheels for perambulation. As the build-instructions are for the same, I don't know why they went with a Gepard SPAAG for the artwork? But I did say the set was idiosyncratic!

An idiosyncrasy which continues with this pair, where each has the other's exploded construction view on the back of the box! The heavy ore-truck was lacking a pair of wheels, but they are the same mouldings as the 'Pinzgauer' so I nicked a pair of them for the shots, while the bulldozer will need tracks made-up, which I will do one day from old inner-tube and cyclist's rubber cement.

The final two are a really rather good jeep (basic wheels mind!) and what is best described as a simplified Stridsvagn 103 'S-Tank', but it could just as easily be an attempt at a Scorpion CVRT! It comes from the box with a Tiger I as artwork! You can see the underside is the same as the Leopard's.

The whole line-up, with the dump-truck retaining the spare wheels! The boxes shout 1970's at you, but at least two of the vehicles depicted are screaming 1990's, so your guess is as good as mine as to when/where these first appeared, and I suspect - from the limited number of duplicated parts - there are more to the full range.

T is for They Were Verh'verh'ry Drunk!

This one took me a while to locate and pin down, but I am now satisfied enough to share it with you, despite the fact that I may be wrong, but given how little we seem to know about some Western manufactures, researching the Eastern ones is no easier!

The following was - I now believe - manufactured by The People's Soviet Socialist Republic of Russia's Medical & Labor Dispensary №.1 Tambov Region, Zelenyi Settlement but I stand to be corrected . . . and may have extended the title somewhat, for comedic effect!

First, however, a rant; a small rant! We have all been lied to, and are continually lied to by those in power, and those who control the media or have other 'vested interests'. There is no difference between 'them' and 'us', which is not to say there aren't differences in funding, or finance, in political will or behavior, in economic model or philosophy, but ultimately the Russians ("the 'Commie' Sov's") and us were far more similar than you might think from what we were told.

Today's toy (below) was basically manufactured by recovering alcoholics, they could just as easily have been disabled people, or ex-servicemen, but that 'meaningful, gainful employment' by way of therapy or as a means to aid convalescence - in the Soviet Union - is (was!) no different to the work being done by the blind at PZG in Poland, by ex-servicemen at Enham Alamein or Linburn (both latterly: Remploy) or (because a lot of the drunks were at Tambov custodially) Prindus (Prison Industries).

Now, there are two points to take away from this, the first is that the Soviets had a rehabilitation system for habitual drunks . . . they didn't send them to Siberia, they didn't 'disappear' them out of helicopters (a trick of US backed/funded/trained regimes in Central and South America), no, like any normal, day-to-day society, they had a rehabilitation program for troubled (or troublesom) citizens; just like ours.

The second point is that the facilities at Tambov (which is how I'll refer to it for the rest of the article, as otherwise their title - any other way you cut-it - is a mouthful!) are now derelict, as PZG seems to have ceased producing toys, as Linburn disappeared, as Enham was swallowed by civilian (state funded) 'charity' bureaucracy and has now lost it's Remploy unit. So the parallels of good programs under social responsibility are mirrored in the later neglect of today's Thatcherite-Raganomic 'free-market' Capitalists . . . everywhere!

All simplistic (and a bit muddle-headed), I'll grant you, but you know what I'm trying to get across and to do the above properly would require a wordy tome on nuanced-parallels of socio-economic conditions in differing political systems, which only academics would read! But, if Tambov, PZG, Linburn and Prindus were still making toys; what a nicer world it would be!

And if Remploy (all units, Britain-wide, closed without warming by the Cameron-Glegg administration) were still going last December, they could have scaled-up and been producing the PPE we needed, before we needed it, negating the need for Boris to give £122m for PPE to a company with no assets formed seven or eight weeks ago . . . by someone he gave a peerage to!

You see, as well as there being no difference between us all at the bottom, there's no real difference between them all at the top!

This is the item in question, a towed field-gun with caterpillar-tractor, all as a one-moulding 'readymade'. Similar to the solid ones we looked at a while ago from Chris (both rockets and large howitzers being towed on that occasion), but hollowed-out to lessen material costs, and the heat shrinkage.

It was in a mixed lot with some other stuff, among which was this chap, who being the same semi-transparent polymer which - after recent conversations with Polish collectors - is probably nylon66 (what in the past I have called a nylon/rayon type or Polypropylene!) and a similar scale, is I suspect part of the same set? They go well together anyway!

Foreshortening from the camera-angle has made him look a lot smaller than the Airfix figure, he's not, but he is only HO-compatible to the Airfix 1:76th scale.

This was the logo, and it wasn't in the list of 160-odd I use as a first point of reference for these things (many thanks to Nazar Marchenko for that heads-up), so I had some days looking, but in the end I think I've called it right . . .

. . . for the Tambov 'clinic' (on the left here), while other contenders were both too circular and the toy-vehicle's mark lacks anything which might be the tree's trunk (Roshal Chemical Plant 'A.A. Kosyakov')* or the lettering of the Mercedes/Pizza Hut-hat (Moscow Factory 'Spetsstanok'), so I think the rather crude mark on the toy (carved with an engineer's chisel straight into the tool?) is the one we're after? But . . . I stand to be corrected!

* Also now derelict (I like the construction guide-board for a noddy-suit respirator, all laid-out like an O-Level lab-rat!) and like Tambov; known for colourful sets of blow-moulded figures; manufactured on an armaments site!

T is for Two - Contributions

We've had some pretty eclectic stuff here at Small Scale World in the last week or so haven't we! I'm sort of clearing the decks for other things which doesn't mean the other things won't get thrown on the back burner at some future point, but I mean well as I'm going-about it! Here's a couple of things of interest sent in by loyal readers in the last few months;

Theo van de Weerden picked this 150mm figurine up cheap-as-chips (I believe) in a mixed lot at a sort of car-boot sale a while back, and isn't she a cutie . . . no, no, she really is  . . . a 'Campus Cutie' from Marx and one of the ones I would imagine it's harder to find in perfect condition as that oar she's holding must be a candidate for damage? Nice find Theo, thanks for sharing!

While Brian Berke sent this as a follow-up to his own donation of HO/1:87-90th scale Pyro figures, and which I then forgot when I did publish a follow-up the other day . . . also from Brian (who didn't remind me these were in the queue, so it's easy to lose track of this stuff!),  it's a model Tug outfitted with the very figures we looked at the last two times! Thanks Brain and sorry I lost track of them!

F is for Follow-up - Pyro Sailors

By way of a follow-up to his own donation to the Blog, Brian Berke has sent the following to add to the post with the Pyro sailors from April gone . . .

The Pyro Schooner model kit came with colour-matched runners of the figures we previously saw as stand-alone marine-modelling accessories and - for a second - I thought "What a swizz, you had to buy two packs (of the seperates) to get all of them!", then I realised the kit has two duplicate runners!

However Brian further reports that the later iterations of the kit (Life Like and Lindberg 'Classics' boxings above) don't have the figures included, which is odd as Pyro being gone (for the moulds to move-on/change hands) you wouldn't be able to source the little set we saw last time, or not with assumed ease?

I guess it was a separate mould, which would make it a smallish, man portable tool, which may have been nicked at some point, damaged or lost? Anyway, whatever happened to the figure mould; many thanks to Brian for the follow-up!

T is for Thames Trader Trucks

Which were actually Ford's! Neither are they strictly rack-toys, as they would have been in a stack on a shelf somewhere, but as they would have been priced below a single Dinky, Corgi or Spot On toy and probably no more than two Matchbox's, they fit the bill, which in RTM is Hong Kong (or China) cheapies!

Before moving on - a quick apology for all the typos and lack of editing the last few days, but that BT-Wifi has decided to play-up big-time and I'm now fighting to get the posts up as quick as possible before the mast drops Fleet off the map for the third time in an hour!

Also while I always try to credit stuff which has been donated, gifted or come-in rediculasly (and delibereately) cheap, I don't normally credit for stuff I've bought normally as A) I couldn't possibly rememeber every purchase or who from and B) if you buy something in the normal way, it's yours to do what you will with, but I would like to thank Paul (of 'Saint and Grievesy' for those on the circuit who know who I mean) who came up to me at the end of a show in some forsaken sports hall in Sussex or somewhere, about 12-years ago and said it looked like the kind of thing I'd be interested in - it was!

"True to scale", but no scale given!

Typical of all eight; the axles are the worst part being cut by hand and therefore all lengths from tight-in to extra-wide 'Carlos Fandango'! It's one of those weird things about HK production in the 1950's, 60's & '70's, some used a jig to cat axles the same length, others did them by hand or a finger section or something and ended up with none the same length - this is one of those assemblers!

A body is slid over a flatbed, integral to the cab and the floor-pan holds an un-glued chrome-plated radiator/headlights part in two pre-formed slots. In this case the body has an additional refrigeration-unit (red plastic) glued on and a sticker.

Yes I said 'sticker', this is so cheap it's criminal as the cost-saving is minimal to the manufacturer, but the disappointment to the child (probably already used to cheap plastic toys instead of the die-cast stuff of his middle-class counterparts) will be measureable, and repeated, every time, but they really only put a sticker on the widow-showing side!

They are fitted into the trays with a bar that has twin pinch-points, on either end, which grab the axles, and make useful construction material! The pipe-truck is reminiscent of the Matchbox one, but that was a later vehicle - another Ford I think, but later '60's to the Thames Trader's 1959 birthday.

The tipper is a bit naff to be honest and the lorry being loaded with beams is someone's conversion chuck-out, another pipe-truck which I suspect was destined for military service - in a war games army - but only got as far as losing it's stakes/stachions. All have the dhrome hubs/rims and rubber (PVC) tyres.

You can see from the USAAF figure that they are a reasonable 1:72nd scale.

Comparisons with - from the left - an Empire Bedford RL, an interesting variant of this oeuvre as it is heavier than the (possibly absent)* Blue Box truck you'd think it was a clone of, and just as well made, so Blue Box may have been the copyist here?

Then a copy of [or] the Blue Box animal transporter (I think I've had this in a Blue Box set?)* from one of any number of 'Home Farm' sets or clone-sets, another Bedford RL type (the civi' version was an S-series I think?) which has given today's subject it's equally cloned-body.

Finally; a smaller (HO-compatible), later model of a 1960's Ford (?), copied from Matchbox with a different body which is a combination of the others - a drop-side with stake/fence for animal transport. It has single-moulding running-gear sprayed chromey-silver, but it allows for duel-wheel sculpts on the rears.

What unites all these is basic, glueable, model-kit quality, brittle polystyrene plastic for all bodies, chassis and cabs, with variation of materials restricted to the wheels and axels.

*I think the Blue Box and this are the same, even to the sub-copies by other brandings (as we saw with the Noah sets), but the Blue Box weren’t to hand when I shot these, so we’ll compare the other way, another day although the smaller Blue Box shell tanker has been on here once or twice I think?

Box-art close-ups of the Thames, a similar lorry from Commer (?) and the rest of the smaller sample which came from Trevor Rudkin a few years ago, the silver body is an older shipping/rail container, which were made of wood, rather than the stamped steel of the modern international standard. Stock-code may help someone, but I thought it might be E for Empire until the superior Empire truck turned-up!

 

A week later - I've now seen a five-truck closed-box set of these branded to Emson

S is for Soma's Star Rider Space City

Picked this up a few weeks back going unloved and un-bid, on that there evilBay, a month or so ago, I had no idea it existed and was looking for something-else entirely when I found it. Not really a rack-toy in the traditional sense, but I bet that when it was originally retailed it would have been half the price of a Bluebird Mighty Max or Polly Pocket set, and a quarter of the price of a similar Galoob Star Wars toy?

Folding-up to very small (6"x4¼x1¾-deep - 150x100x44mm), there's enough play-value to keep any kid happy in a caravan on a wet week in Rhyl! These days - of course - it'll either be too-hot to play in a caravan without cooking yourself, or so wet there's a danger the caravan will float away!

Fully unfolded; the gun-tower has shades of 'Hoth', the rest is - dare I suggest - more Flash Gordon than Coruscant! It comes with four of the diminutive little HO-figures I think I've shown before (we'll look at them again in a second) and a small truck the seller (alkim96) kindly added to the lot before sending, but which hadn't been in the sales shots.

And this is it, I think it's based on one of the ex-Giogi/for-Kinder mini fire engines, dated to 1997 (the Soma set) that's quite possible, but only as a vague copy; the Kinder ones were clip-together while this is screwed, following the Micro-Machine principle.

"Plastic smalls" as those with little finesse refer to them! I think we have looked at these before, and I think I've only added the four new ones, all duplicates, this is one of each from my sample, spacemen in grey and 'pilots' in green, each numbered on the base from 1 (on the left, purple and orange) to 12 on the far right.

My whole sample, most of them came mint with their aircraft and or 'spaceships' all of which went to charity about 20-odd years ago, found in generic packaging (I think) in Woolworth's it was only the little Soma on the base, and I think I'm right in saying the fighters came with one figure, the spaceships with two, hence the imbalance.

Also I don't know why I'm missing grey-5, as I should have all of them? You can also see there are some minor colour variations within each sub-tranche, but schemes stay true. Hopefully, one day, I'll be able to show you all of them, but they are not a high priority, with only two found in addition to the new four, over the years.

I have joked (at length) on the assorted panoply of weapons, clothing, equipment and headdresses so won't bore you with all that again, you can see what an eclectic mix of 1990's 'straight-to-video' post-apocalyptic B-movie extras they are! And they make an excellent set of extra bounty-hunters for Galoob's Star Wars Micro-Machines!