If this looks familiar it should - Marx used the same stampings for this Blue Bird Garage as it did for the Union Station. The Union Station's were more common though and these garages don't become available too often in good condition. Enjoy! Opa Fritz
I've taken out a couple of my favorite Pre-War American Flyer trains and gave them some run time on the Edge of Town. The engines are the small sized Hiawatha's which look right at home on a small layout like this. The first consist has the #1122 & #1123 passenger cars while the second consist is the streamlined Hiawatha passenger set.
The Plasticville Corner Store has been replaced with, umm a Plasticville Corner Store LOL. Okay the first one was complete and has the original box and was a tad pricey. The second one has different colored walls and was incomplete. I intend to re-purpose it from a corner store to a....
...stay tuned to this station!
No new scenery work as of this installment
Enjoy! Opa Fritz
hmmmm, looks like a visitor to the Edge of Town!
I took out the white-walled Plasticville Corner Store and replaced it with this gray-walled store. This one was missing a window insert and sign above the door which is fine because I have other plans for it!
I'm not 100% conversant on MPC figures having mostly their Ringhands and a TON of astronauts. That being siad, I know that somewhere out in The Cave are more Cowboys and Indians but I haven't looked them over for some time. Okay, anywho, I was given a lesson in terminology by Kent Owen Sprecher (Toy Soldier HQ - see sidebar) who stated that although these figures - which are clearly 54mm - are considered 45mm by collector's!!! I haven't yet pulled one of my Marx (or other) 54mm figures to do a side-by-side comparison but I can see that these would be smaller. Soooo, apparently way back in the day when toys were started to be differentiated by millimeter sizes, a near sighted collector either a) didn't have a ruler handy delineated in millimeters or b) couldn't read the ruler he had and figured, "Oh hell, let's just call these 45mm just cuz!". Unfortunately, here we are decades down the road and this stuff has been carved in stone **sigh**
So fine! MPC 54mm figures are 45mm and if we don't want to confuse other collector's by calling them the wrong thing we then need to get used to poor terminology!
Slowly-but-surely I've been adding to my MPC collection. I'll have some interesting updates in the weeks to follow (that is IF I don't get diverted LOL). Having said it before, I had a bunch of MPC as a kid but certainly not all of it. Growing up in the '50s and '60s my go-to choice for Western forts was Marx and I had a Fort Apache playset. Today's selection would have been nice as well to have as a kid. The original playsets I've seen had more figures and wagons and such than what is shown here and would have been an action packed toy for any kid growing up back in the day.
The stockade is more compact than the Fort Apache but still nice. It features soft plastic walls with an opening gate and more simplified block houses than Marx's forts and there are catwalks inside the walls for figures to stand on. The stockade measures 11 1/4" (28.57cm) W x 5 3/4" (14.60cm) D x 2 7/8" (7.30cm) H (to top of walls) or 5 1/2" (13.97cm) H (to top of gate house). The figures are 54mm and not the ring hand figs many people associate with MPC. This one is in good shape but, having been sold as a loose set, there's no horses, no Teepees, no wagons, etc. Okay, something to look forward to in my quest to flesh out the playset. Enjoy! Opa Fritz
Besides the figures shown in the photos above, this loose set of riders was also included - no horses though
