F is for Follow-up - Khaki Runnings!

I managed to grab the Battle Space, at the weekend after all, so managed a quick shoot of the closest Model Power  'twins' and took one of the military locomotive pool while I was at it!

Mobile missiles; both utilising their maker's flat-car, both spring-loaded and both having the large elevation tap-wheels, but otherwise quite different, the Model Power is err . . . underpowered, but as it's a polystyrene model, it would break quickly under the power of the Tri-Ang launcher which packs a serious, pre-H&S punch!

To which end, the Triang-Hornby missile is a rubber-tipped affair in softer polyethylene to take the strain, it also looks more like a Tallboy or Grand Slam (aerial bombs) than the Model Power's Honest John lines. "It'll 'av someone's eye out"!

Tank transporters; the earlier British one being a bogie well-wagon (that is a lower cargo 'well' between the raised twin-bogie (truck)-mountings) which reduces the height of the center of gravity, while Model Power utilise a clip-on set of chocks with a standard flat-car.

In fact, in the West, tanks are chained down with between four and eight chains which are screw-tightened, you only have to watch a few 'funny' tank-fail videos to understand the current Russian failings in Ukraine; while we winch-on and tie down, they rev-up and mount like dogs on heat and drive off, losing the thing at the next roundabout if it didn't fall-off on loading, or crush its own lorry!

Exploding cars; mechanisms were actually quite different (I didn't have time or space for more detailed shots this time, and while both have the look of North American 'reefer' wagons, Model Power go with a 50ft one, we Brits matched our road wagon limit with a  40-footer! Rememeber also HO is also scaled smaller (1:86/90) than OO (1:76/72), so the British model looks a bit 'chunkier'!

I have an old 1970's Walther's or two, and among the pages and pages of transfers for home-builders, mostly for reefers or passenger stock, are quite a few military ones, so you could with the two Q-Cars, this pair and a few kits, build a long, but visually rather boring (if more realistic) logistics train, but you'd need to glue these two shut first!

The loco's; we've seen the two main brands before, but of interest is the one down the front left, which is a clockwork 'cheapie' from Playcraft via Jouef of France. not specifically military, it happens to be the right colour, and adds variety to my fleet!

We loved our 'starter set' clockwork's when we were kids, and used to run them on a figure-eight inside our electrified double-oval, if we were quick we could get four trains moving at once without a crash . . . we weren't always lucky - figure-8's have a crossroad!

It's one of those quirks of toy history that at one point you had OO-guage train sets/lines from/branded-to Tri-Ang, Rovex and Mettoy Playcraft . . . all ultimately Lines Brothers! I should also mention the track, which happens to still be around despite having long lost its usefulness.

It's a sort of resinated or 'Bakelite' treated card (like the ties in old plugs which hold the cable tight), obviously for power-insulation, with the shiny (non-ferrous) rail fasteners (chairs or tie-plates) riveted through the card every forth sleeper (tie), I did have a brand name for it, well . . . it's somewhere in the archive, Hammant & Morgan maybe (our transformer was theirs), Hamblings, or early Hannants? One of the mail-order catalogues in the archive has/lists something which fits the description anyway!

It was the home-fitted rail on our train-set which was bought 2nd hand by Mum at Persons Auctions here in Fleet (long-gone, along with County Tractors and First Inertia), and somehow she managed to hide it (about 6ft x 8ft) from us until Christmas morning, I'm hoping, when I lift the boards in the loft, in the next few weeks, that I may find it's still there with its household gloss 'landscaping', but it may have gone years ago? It was old, crumbly, early (1960's) chipboard.

B is for British Boys by Blue Box, Pt. II - Penny Based

So we move to the figures I call - for obvious reasons - the 'penny-based' family. These start with Blue Box 30mm originals, move through the Hornby-Triang commission and then get into the realms of copies and copies of copies until we're looking at 20/23mm blobs that could be used to reinforce the old Combat Group from Airfix.

I would suppose that in order to fulfil the Triang contract for Battle Space figures a  permanent change was made to the bases, which meant that when green figures were required by BB for their own issues, they too appeared with the new discs.

The top row above are the hard plastic (polystyrene) figures from Blue Box that replaced the older kidney-based figures. The figures themselves are exactly the same as the older ones, in the same five Crescent poses, led by the Britains Herald officer.

Eventually, like the US troops there was a soft (polyethylene) issue - unlike the US troops though, these were painted as the older figures had been. The shade of green varies so I've shot a darker group and a lighter group to give some idea of the variation.

Decoration on  these was crude, as with all BB figures, what I call the stab-and-hope school of painting - the impressionist period! There was a variation; smaller figures on smaller bases, so far I have only found three, in two poses - the figures bottom centre; standing firing and the radio operator.

There are also a few Polypropylene figures in a tinny-sounding rigid 'soft' plastic, there is no visual difference at all, but I've shown one bottom right for the hell of it! Other shots are colour variations and a shrinkage figure who appears to have gone to the Airfix Paratrooper training school!

There is no real reason for numbering the soft plastic ones as type 3, but with the extra bases it sort of makes sense. The Battle Space figures on the other hand only get a 'b' as they are to all extents the same as the green styrene figures, but in brown! There is a type 2c, the unmarked based figures that come between the BB set and the grey set, which being all new poses (albeit very similar to the Blue Box figures) deserves a number outside the sequence.

All the above types were also looked at in the previously referenced earlier post Here, so apart from lining them up there's not much new here.

Close-ups of a size variation or two and the bases, along with decent views of the two type x prone poses. The smaller grey officer seems to be standard mould shrinkage (his chest has swelled as it fills with the plastic withdrawing from the extremities), however the smaller (unmarked) type 2c brown figure is a separate moulding, and - along with the smaller based type 3's - would seem to point toward mould damage leading to the x type being developed to replace the old Blue Box moulds?

However, before the mould was replaced it was run with various colours of soft ethylene by Blue Box and a seventh figure was added (type 4 above), namely; the standing firing pose from Britains Herald, similar to but distinct from the Crescent firer who had been run since the kidney based days of the late 1950's/early 1960's.

As this was all happening around the time of the Triang figures, the shrunken officer and the smaller bases, it all points to the moulds coming to the end of their useful life, although these figures are very clean and well detailed so they were probably cleaned-up at the same time as the additional figure's inclusion.

Type 5 are pretending to be Blue Box, but are smaller, and made from a more modern glossy polymer. Probably Ri-Toys, they came painted (a) and unpainted (b) and there has been a slight loss of size and detail.

The subsequent types listed above take us firmly into the realm of sub-piracy's, ie; those figures form small Hong Kong manufacturers, who rather than bothering to go to the source material (Crescent and Britains 54mm figures), just copy the copies from their 'rivals' down the alleyway, across the road or at the other end of the industrial park!

7a and 7b are the same mouldings with different base markings, they have yet to come together in the same lot, so can be considered different 'sets'.

A closer look at the type 4; Size differences point to a second set of mould inserts and as can be seen from the officer this is not a case of the coloured ones being later, both sizes come in both colours in the same lots and were clearing running together...by the 1970's there was more wealth in the west and greater demand for pocket-money toys. The second mouldings are clearly both smaller and thinner than the first and will have been copied from the earlier set. Along with the problems already covered it's another pointer to the death of the Blue Box/model railway's penny-based British Infantry.

There's also a close-up of the new Herald pose and the grenade-thrower on the far right has been caught by the machinery and pinched in half!

Comparison between the above figures, excluding the Triang-Hornby sets, with a size comparison and the various base markings. Photographing the bases is - to put it mildly - an inexact science!...trying to get then all readable, in focus and out of glare or flash-back at the same time is not easy. Also, these three shots are not to the same scale.

A heat-shrink top left and the marking variation of the 7's. Also shown here is a close-up of type X2, this is not actually a true member of the penny based family, as it is a throw-back from some figures we'll be looking at in about three posts time (if I've got my head round these!). As a pose it seems to be the torso of the Britains Herald charging with pack attached to the Britains Swoppet mortar crewman's legs!

The final true penny based figures based on the Blue Box offering (we will look at the 'interim' sets next) are mainly in small samples of poor quality and were mostly issued with Lucky Bags or in Christmas Crackers, in small quantities - often only one or two. As a result they are hard to find or amass in quantity, and there will almost certainly be other poses missing from the above samples, and other types/sub-types still to be annotated into the family/oeuvre.

Another size-comparison shot - the final figure (type 14) is every bit compatible with the contemporary Airfix 23mils and most of these late figures can be painted-up and used with that size of war gaming figures. Some of these - if not all - will be copies of copies of copies.

The weapon used by all the British Infantry figures in the penny based family - and the later figures we will be looking at soon - is the EM2, a bull-pup designed automatic weapon which never saw service. Wikipedia EM2 page states it did, but uses few references, mostly a single Canadian work. The fact is that it was given a designation; the Rifle, Number 9, but outside of the Demonstration Battalion at the School of Infantry, Warminster saw little or no 'real' service.

The Demo. Btn. would have provided the troops for press-days (and the Lulworth Cove fire-power demo's) in the Cold War, from whence it (the EM2) would have garnered column inches in the tabloids, and through them the boys magazines and annuals. This coverage of it led to Britains, Crescent, Lone*Star and Taffy Toys adopting it for their toy and model soldiers.

Interestingly, the first Zang Herald figure was equipped with a Lee Enfield and the latter Swoppets had SLR's.

The beauty of these small scale copies is that the external appearance of the weapon is similar to the modern SA80 and when painted these figures make better late 1980's figures than they ever made 1960's troops!

B is for Battle-Space and Blue Box

One of those little quirks in collecting toy soldiers back when I started was why did I keep finding small quantities of brown versions of the Blue Box 'penny-based' rip-offs of Britians and Crescent Khaki Infantry in bags of mainly civilian railway figures?

The answer was that they weren't Blue Box (or were they?!), but actually the Tri-ang (Later; Triang-Hornby) 'Battle Space' commandos. Almost certainly actually supplied by Blue Box, the original catalogue illustration for the space marines was a shot of the Marx miniature masterpiece US Infantry/G.I.'s, but as far as I know they were never actually included in the Battle Space sets.

A second quirk (there are still a lot of unanswered 'quirks' in my 'unknown...' boxes!) was the similar but rarer grey rip-offs of the rip-offs...

Above are the commoner brown versions, being straight production from the Blue Box green ones, with the same stab-and-hope paint style but in a different palette. The grey ones (below), although being similar, are 'original' sculpts, having subtle differences from the standard Britains/Crescent/Blue Box poses. Although in the case of the three closest matches, that consists of simply lifting one foot off the ground and placing it on a pink rock!

Both types came in a little bag stuffed into whichever box or set they accompanied. With the case of the brown ones the rule is simple; 6 or 12 assorted figures - as per the catalogue, usually from or including all five poses. However, the later grey figures tend to come in 7's and 14's, being one or two of each pose. I guess being smaller (which they are) there was room and it meant they could be painted on the sprue and then decanted into the little bag, which - in the case of the rocket-firing tank - was just wedged against the glacis-plate.

Blue Box originals - Top left are the four poses made in the same hard styrene as the Battle-Space figures, to the right are the soft ethylene plastic versions with both sizes of base so far identified for the radio-operator (penny and er...cent!).

Below are the versions I consider the older as they seem to appear in the earlier Blue Box sets, I call these the kidney-based. They also include a grey type, as enemy, although of the same pose and a lighter grey, rather than the olive-drab-grey of the Battle-Space figures.

Turning to the rest of the kidney-based figures (the Marx-like Germans having Marx-like bases, along with the Resistance fighters - we'll look at both another day), we come to the Blue-Box US G.I.'s.; seven combat poses and a medical unit, one of the poses doubling-up to serve in both squads.

Top left is again the hard styrene polymer, with the medics below, while to the top right are later soft plastic versions with no paint and no medics. The lot bottom right - although stored in the same box, by me - are almost certainly a rip-off by one of Blue Box's cheaper/smaller rivals, and with a Blue-Box-like paint job and mish-mash of poses from both British and US sets along with the old Monogram radio-man!

In the harder plastics there is a clear difference in plastic colour with both olive green and olive drab being issued. The red helmets of the US figures are very rare and must have come with some specific play set (although someone will now start painting green ones red and sticking them on eBay - for sure!). I also have a memory of yellow helmeted figures form my childhood, but have yet to find one, despite loads of these in the collection along with various play sets and carded items, so I'm guessing it's a false memory based on the later unpainted yellow ones from Rado/RI Toys (look at another day!) and the amount of yellow in the paint scheme of the earlier Blue Box ones.

The various base marks and styles, the unmarked brown base is less common than the 'HONG KONG' one, but not as rare as the grey figures, so I'm guessing an interim or transitional version, next to them you have hard. soft and small green. Note how the little rip-offs have different markings, while the soft plastic version looks similar to the Marx mark. The fact that Marx keeps cropping-up when dealing with Blue-Box is something I looked at in Plastic Warrior's of-shoot; 1 Inch Warrior and will come back to here one day.

The medics paint-up quite well, the artist is unknown, give us a shout if you recognise your work!

T is for Triang Minic Part 1; Military Vehicles

Lines Brothers had as part of their empire the Trade Mark 'Minic' which for years was synonymous with British School-boys as a maker of large sized tin-plate wind-up/Clockwork toys. In the 1950's the range began to include Dinky type die-casts, and plastic followed in the late '60's. Eventually some of these would find their way into the Triang railway (later Triang-Hornby) range. Today we're looking at some of the Minic Plastics from my collection.

Here are both versions of the 'Tank', on the left the Triang/Triang-Hornby Battle-Space rocket-firing tank, with the Minic sparking tank on the right, the hull is identical on both, with different slip-on turrets. The hull is a generic cross between the prototype Conqueror and Centurion tanks of the 1960's, while the turret of the sparker is more Conqueror. Missiles fire about 3.5 meters!

The missile mechanism was also used on two and four-round turreted bunkers as part of the Battle-Space range, the larger turret also being fitted to one of the rolling stock wagons in the same series. The tank version was re-issued in a sandy colour in 1982 as part of a short-lived 'Task Force play-set, part celebration of/part tie-in to the action in the South Atlantic (reaching it's conclusion earlier the same year) which ensured that the will of the Falkland Islander's not to have their home renamed 'Malvinas' was upheld.

Triang Minic AFV's, both vehicles in both colour-schemes. The tank is a vague Centurion, while the A/C is a generic WWII thing with an AEC'ish body and Staghound'ish turret? All fitted with a 'pull-back' motor.

These vehicles also come in blue-grey as RAF equipment, with a Cole's type crane and low-loader along with an aircraft, in a large boxed set. Civilian versions also exist. Earlier versions of these trucks - especially the civilian ones - are subject to warping and were made with some form of phenolic plastic, later ones however; are a more stable styrene compound.

T is for Triang Minic Part 3; Rivet Counting Bit

Here we see the sparking mechanism, with the spark-channel - unused on the Battle-Space version. A simple gravity feed presses the flint onto a carborundum coated wheel revolving as part of the 'pull-back' motor.

A comparison shot, front to back; Roco-minitanks Conqueror, Minic 'Tank', Airfix Centurion and Roco Centurion. It seems that the Triang vehicle has the wheels of a Conqueror, and a hybrid deck that's more Centurion than Conqueror, with a turret that's more Conqueror than Centurion!

For 'Old School' war-gaming you could use it as a 1:87/HO Conqueror, or a 1:76/72 Centurion.

[The Airfix example was painted by me in about 1976, and if anybody can guess the colour (from a photo' - which is never easy!) I'd love to track down a tin, it's an old Humbrol Authenticolour in a yellowish-olive and along with the Azure Blue, was one of my favorite tins as a kid. I used the Azure for German Paratroop helmets!]

The three types of 'Pull-back' kinetic/stored-energy/flywheel motor used in the Minic plastic range. You can see how the carborundum was just adhered to the main flywheel.

Earlier versions of these trucks - especially the civilian ones - are subject to warping and were made with some form of phenolic plastic, later ones however; are a more stable styrene compound.

A comparison of the scales used, the Minic/Triang-Hornby/Battle-Space tank is big at around 1:72 and had a tendency to collide with track-side accessories, particularly if you placed them on an inside bend, as the low-loader that carried it would 'cut' the corner! The truck range and limousine are approximately 1:76 (a bit narrow in the case of the lorries), while the little tank and armoured car were 'silly size' say...1:100'ish. The Triang-Hornby/Minix cars are a reasonably true 1:87/Ho scale.

T is for Triang Battle Space

Some more movements on the Triang rail network.

Here we have some regular wagons pressed into service to move some HQ elements up the coast from Alex, protection is provided by a 6lbr. travelling forward of the locomotive.

These trucks are on the early, non-military well-wagons, in grey, orange and blue, Triang would issue many variations of their rolling stock, with further variations coming from places like New-Zealand.

Khaki well-wagons with East-German armour moving up to their start positions for a race to the Fulda Gap!

The first incarnation of 'Battle Space' was in a British racing green NATO scheme, this is the helicopter launcher and the searchlight wagon, it's missing its little bits, but the light still works. The helicopter was a bit of fun, couldn't fly for toffee, no working tail rotor to keep it strait so it would spin off at a rakish angle and fly into the locomotive bringing the whole train to a catastrophic halt in the middle of the station, which is why the man with newspaper and bowler hat is always missing his feet, which were glued to the platform in the factory!

Khaki version of the helicopter launcher and 'plane launcher, I'm missing the 'plane, but most people are, unless you want to pay Monopoly money for a mint boxed version! I have the body as it was plastic, but the wings were card and have not passed the test of time.

T is for Triang (or Tri-Ang)

Both are correct, both were used on packaging. Well...what have we here? Another of my favourites, that's what! The beauty of having your own blog!!! Triang Battle Space, the best range of trains anyone ever had to run round the living-room floor!

I couldn't find the correct rocket for the rocket-launchers, until I'd taken the photo's and put everything away, so here is the correct missile, I have no idea what the other (yellow one in below shots) one was from! Crescent's Space Rocket

These are early issues, when the items were stand alone rolling stock, 'Battle Space' had not yet arrived as a concept, the first aid wagon is - I think - a guards or parcel carriage with a new paint job.

The sniper who pops up and down due to the action of a track-side accessory on a counterweight under the wagon, the same mechanism was used for the giraffe of which this is a khaki version of the same wagon.

This is the sniper wagon (I'm missing the roof) and the exploding wagon, again a track-side gizmo tripped a switch and the whole thing blew sky high.

Finally the khaki rocket-launcher and the Command Car, this was nothing more complicated than the travelling post-office in military colours, it would pick up and drop off post-bags...sorry, secret dispatches!