As some of you may know, along with collecting all vintage and modern Toy Trains, I also like to collect rare and unusual (and a lot of the time vintage) Thomas The Tank Engine merchandise. I recently acquired this item from Ebay. This one is very overlooked yet very significant in the world of trains.
What we have here is the very first Thomas The Tank Engine train ever produced. It's a clockwork powered O gauge Percy set produced by Meccano (owned by Hornby) in 1965. This was before it was even called "Thomas The Tank Engine", Thomas and his friends were just part of "The Railway Series", a set of books published by the Rev. W. Awdry starting in 1945 and later his son Christopher Awdry. The box is in poor shape, but not terrible for its age. You can see the detail in the art style not present in todays Thomas items. And here's Percy on regular tubular Lionel track. He fits and runs very well on it. This Item, although seldom known, started the ball rolling and helped create the Thomas empire that exists today. Without Thomas the world of trains might be vastly different today, and he's played a big role in getting kids into railroads, both model and real.
What we have here is the very first Thomas The Tank Engine train ever produced. It's a clockwork powered O gauge Percy set produced by Meccano (owned by Hornby) in 1965.
This was before it was even called "Thomas The Tank Engine", Thomas and his friends were just part of "The Railway Series", a set of books published by the Rev. W. Awdry starting in 1945 and later his son Christopher Awdry. The box is in poor shape, but not terrible for its age. You can see the detail in the art style not present in todays Thomas items. And here's Percy on regular tubular Lionel track. He fits and runs very well on it. This Item, although seldom known, started the ball rolling and helped create the Thomas empire that exists today. Without Thomas the world of trains might be vastly different today, and he's played a big role in getting kids into railroads, both model and real.
This was before it was even called "Thomas The Tank Engine", Thomas and his friends were just part of "The Railway Series", a set of books published by the Rev. W. Awdry starting in 1945 and later his son Christopher Awdry.
The box is in poor shape, but not terrible for its age. You can see the detail in the art style not present in todays Thomas items. And here's Percy on regular tubular Lionel track. He fits and runs very well on it. This Item, although seldom known, started the ball rolling and helped create the Thomas empire that exists today. Without Thomas the world of trains might be vastly different today, and he's played a big role in getting kids into railroads, both model and real.
The box is in poor shape, but not terrible for its age. You can see the detail in the art style not present in todays Thomas items.
And here's Percy on regular tubular Lionel track. He fits and runs very well on it. This Item, although seldom known, started the ball rolling and helped create the Thomas empire that exists today. Without Thomas the world of trains might be vastly different today, and he's played a big role in getting kids into railroads, both model and real.
And here's Percy on regular tubular Lionel track. He fits and runs very well on it.
This Item, although seldom known, started the ball rolling and helped create the Thomas empire that exists today. Without Thomas the world of trains might be vastly different today, and he's played a big role in getting kids into railroads, both model and real.
"No childhood should be without a train!"
That is just flat out cool! I had no idea that Thomas and Friends had been around that long.
I remember that set arriving in the shops.
It was effectively the last of the Hornby O gauge models which I had had as a child, and the clockwork mechanism was that from the Hornby M1 series, which had actually been my first model train. These were later made in an improved form as the 31 series, which was my last clockwork model.
The M1 and 31 series ran on tubular track much like Lionel. Pre WW II Hornby made three rail electric with tubular track that was pretty much interchangeable with Lionel but with 48 inch diameter curves. So it isn't surprising that the "Percy" model suits Lionel tubular track.
The plastic track was newly designed for the Percy set, as were the two freight vehicles and the Percy locomotive body.
Percy was selected as the only four wheel locomotive in the original "Railway Series" that could use an existing Hornby mechanism. By this time the Hornby name was associated with British OO models so the name of the parent company Meccano was used.
This was the last of the line. As indicated, this was well before the TV series, and relied on the children's books illustrated on the box (of which I had three myself, in the original miniature landscape format). The box lid art was a close copy of the book illustrations. But it was not successful enough for a six wheel Thomas to follow, as was presumably originally intended.
Hornby now make an extensive range of Thomas models in British OO (1:76 scale on HO track) which are all based on older scale models in their OO series.
M636C
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