Entering A Gas Cloud by Andy B

Hi Paul,

In case you wanted another image of the Tarheel Nova, I have produced this. I realised looking at your artwork what a good design this is - albeit partly an Angel Interceptor! I was playing about about, and decided to go for a slightly blurred image, as though entering a gas cloud - not that I know much about such things!

Andy.

Airfix becomes 'Spacefix'

In 1982 Airfix took on the production and marketing of MPC Star Wars kits and churned out a number of well known models, some of better quality that others. In order to capitalise on the wave of space fever generated by the Star Wars films, Airfix decided to remarket some older kits and add a few new ones from outside the Star Wars series. Besides the old staple of the Space Shuttle and the (by now) ancient Lunar Module, they re-released the Pan Am Orion Space Clipper in a god awful colour scheme.

However, besides the rather good Space 1999 kits and the Angel Interceptor - high points of Airfix model making career, 1982 saw the inclusion of all new models for the sci fi enthusiast. In the Snap-Fix range, a substantially easier to build range of kits, there was the great Star Cruiser and a slightly odd choice of the Star Cruiser Interceptor, a rather lack lustre model in a slightly larger scale. Another rather useless kit was the 10 piece UFO kit - this was basically a Tupperware space station bedecked with random bits of modelmaking greebly to make the surface suitably 'death star' interesting.

 

But the real big one for me - quite literally as it came in a substantial box, was the Cosmic Clipper. This seemed to borrow heavily from the 'tramp freighter' look in Star Wars without looking too derivative. The man body of the ship was a long angular craft with a multitude of small observation domes at the front, two large detachable fuel nacelles and four nice chunky looking engines. On the back of this rode a large shuttle like ship, slightly aerodynamic with lots of surface detail and on the back of this, a third smaller ship as an escape shuttle.

 When I got the model immediately after release, I eschewed the suggested white colour scheme and went for something a little more sombre. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm once more outstripped my skill and the model ended up looking a complete dogs breakfast as usual as the blue paint for the stripes on the 'Alligator' as I chose to call it, was gloss and the rest was a more realistic matt. But the kit has survived a couple of decades in the attic with only the loss of two of the engines a few small bits and an appalling paintjob.

Construction was again simple and the whole thing was more toy than kit, like the earlier Star Cruiser, but it was an original design and not a bad one at that.

The Triang Zone: Battle Space II

 Scouring my collection of old catalogues, I came across more sections dedicated to Battle Space in the Tri-ang range. These scans show how the original 'Exploding Car' was further adapted to become the Q Car or a disguised missile attack unit.

 

Tri-ang added another level of playability by producing non-track based models to further the range and seem to have taken a cue from Dinky with their Honest John Rocket launcher on a small base. Also the original Mail Train has been drafted in and re-decoed to fit the military theme. Shortly after the 14th Triang Railway catalogue, the Battle Space theme seems to have been discarded in favour of more traditional models once more.

The US company Lionel made a similar range of train sets at a larger scale and had strong connections with Tri-ang in the early sixties, providing the Science sets for the english company. Some of the Lionel trains are very similar in style to the Battle Space models and also early Tri-ang sets have a very american flavour, such as the Can-Am transcontinental express and the cool Snow Plough Rescue sets. I shall be looking at the Lionel space themed trains in a future article.

The Triang Zone:Battle Space

The Triang Zone articles were originally inspired by Andy Bs timely reminder of the Triang Hornby Battlespace Train sets recently. As a boy I was surrounded by trains and train books as my dad was a serious enthusiast. Generally, I liked the train sets, but anytime I wanted to play with the trains my dad had to supervise. This was mainly because almost all the engines were (and still are) in their original boxes and had to be freed with meticulous care before being run sedately on the rails. Invariably, i'd end up overrunning the loco and causing a pile up and my dad would chew the end of his pipe in disgust and mutter profusely as he realigned everything. I would soon get bored and the trains would disappear into the loft for another day.

Meanwhile, Triang were producing some amazing items to improve the play value of impatient and easily bored children like myself, by adding action features to the train sets. These initially included a zoo wagon with a giraffes head which would dutifully duck as it passed an overhead barrier and a cool mail train that collected tiny mailbags from a hook next to the track and deposit them elsewhere in a special hopper, all completely automatically. Soon the company added more exciting features such as the rocket launcher truck and the rescue helicopter and searchlight truck which used an electric searchlight and launching copter. As the Space Race infused toy lines with a need to include rockets and missiles, Triang introduced the Battle Space theme. Although no distinct 'enemy' was ever identified and the space element was never truly apparent, the trains all took on a distinctly military flavour. Some of the rolling stock was simple retooling of existing models such as the early exploding wagon and rocket launcher, but other models had special modifications such as the zoo car having the giraffe replaced by a sniper and a coat of olive drab instead of yellow. Drawing on its Minic experience, Battlespace included some cool tanks and gun emplacements, all fitted with streamlined missiles which could be launched by hand.

The Strike Force Ten set initially included a catapult launched card airplane to take the battle into the garden for the more daring and the bomb truck carried a large red cap fired bomb which could be thrown about to detonate on hard ground.

For some reason my dad was never keen on the military trains or the military cars from the first matchbox ranges, so I never got any of the Battlespace series at the time. I have picked up a couple of loose models since then. The helicopter wagon shown below and the figures are from my current collection, but the copter and figures are from a Blue Box army set available at the same time, which copied the Triang copter almost identically. It does not, however include the mechanism to enable the wagon to launch the copter.

Again because most of the models have firing missiles, finding complete versions today is very difficult although there are reproduction parts available.

 As the Battlespace series peaked, the first real space themed model arrived in the form of the satellite launcher. A variation on the copter car, the satellite launcher included a small 'propellor' shaped satellite that shoots off after running over a trackside switch. The tender behind the truck had a revolving radar  and a small light. Following on from this came the superb Turbo Car. Initially it appeared in Issue 11 of the Triang catalogue as a different beast, a low slung yellow affair, but the production version was a garish red vehicle complete with ramming spike and a large yellow propellor that spun madly as it charged around the track, very distant from the slow shunting locos of earlier years!

STOP PRESS - just this morning found evidence in a Tri-ang catalogue of marketing of Lionel models. US companies train sets had almost identical army and space themed toys. More to follow in the future.

The Triang Zone: Shoot to Thrill

Christmas was always an exciting time for me and Xmas 1968 was no exception. Tucked under the tree that year amongst other goodies was a large low box with one of the most innovative and fun toys I ever had as a child. Evidently chosen by my dad as I had never seen it before, the Triang Shoot or Surrender! set was the perfect accompaniment for carpet wars.

Inside the box was (what seemed to my small hands) a huge remote control tank, loosely based on the Churchill. Named the Wildcat, it had a big clumsy looking wired handheld control which looked very much like an army field radio. The chunky, important looking switches had a very practical look to them and allowed the tank to move back and to and turn left and right. A grenade style pull ring activated the missiles. The whole control system had obviously been carefully designed to look and feel as militarily functional as possible and worked like a dream. I was able to hide about three feet away from the tank behind a barricade of cushions and slowly approach the target.

The target in question was a cool Anti Tank Gun, which being a Triang product, used the chunky rocket from the BattleSpace Rocket Launcher wagon. This used a powerful spring driven mechanism with a plastic missile with heavy rubber tip. The gun itself followed standard field gun lines, except for the missile and could be elevated and lowered by means of a small geared mechanism allowing very precise aiming. Precision was the order of the day as the idea of the game was to knock out your opponent before he did. With the antitank gun, this was achieved by taking a hit on the square shield on the front of the gun, which would then fall forward, disabling the rocket mechanism. The tank had a slightly upper hand in that it had three missiles at its disposal, again rubber tipped, but not quite as powerful.

Just beneath the row of missiles on the tank turret was a small rectangular plate that served as a switch. If the red rocket struck the plate, it pushed back a connection inside the body, releasing a sprung figure in the front of the tank and flipping off the front cover panel. The figure popped up, arms raised in surrender. The clever part of this arrangement was a metal contact on the drivers helmet which completed the electric circuit and when released, immobilised the tank.

The mucho resourceful Philosophic Toad discovered the page above from a 1968 Boys World annual (the same edition which held the Pleasure Cruiser origin) which shows the toy to great effect. The tank itself was also made available as a stand alone item as the Super 7 Action Tank as seen on this pic from Ebay.

 

My original tank was so well played with that it eventually gave up the ghost. The rubber tipped missiles perish easily and I have only managed to preserve one of the Anti Tank rockets along with most of the gun. However, the tanks do appear on ebay regularly and I bough a 'fixer-upper' recently, which had replaced the ring pull on the handset with a sliding switch. Again the tank featured the same logo as the Minic Missile Tank, a mushroom cloud with lightning bolt. The gun has a small logo with an exploding tank featured on it.

Incidentally, I know I have intentionally left the hyphen out of the word Tri-ang throughout this series of articles, this is out of pure laziness and reasons of ecomomy of time and not a typo!

The Triang Zone: Moving with the Times

In the first post we saw Triang toys begin to expand from simple dolls and prams into areas such as Minic vehicles and other wider appeal toys. As the company entered the 1960's, the zeitgeist once more saw the shadows of war and conflict appearing in the global culture as well as the nascent space race capturing the publics attention. The first man in space had briefly orbited the Earth and the race to reach the Moon had begun. Toys naturally reflected the cultural trends of the day and jet planes, tanks and rockets began to appear in abundance in the Boys toy sections of stores. The threat of cold war meant that missiles and rockets appeared as toys and models, Americas involvement in Vietnam highlighting their profile considerably.

The 1961 Triang catalogue had the usual fare of dolls, prams and the full range of Minic models, but was now joined by FROG model kits of Nike Hercules ground to air missiles and the ONTOS vehicle with six recoilless rifle missile launchers strapped to its armoured sides. The Minic range which had formerly included the WWII Sherman tank opted for a more up to date version of the classic machine - the Rocket Firing Tank. Ostensibly a Sherman with a new turret, the futuristic looking monster also featured a newer logo which had crept in towards the end of the run of the older Sherman, a mushroom cloud overlaid with an ominous red lightning bolt.

The Tank itself was essentially, the Sherman chassis - the original mold had been retooled slightly to add a large panel just behind the turret and some work on the upper surface to admit the bigger steel dome. The turret sported four metal barrels and an integral mechanism to elevate them. The missiles themselves were more like harpoons as the majority of the body of the missile had to reach deep inside the turret to the firing spring.

 

I had originally seen the Missile tank in the catalogue long before I saw the Sherman and had been immediately impressed by it. Not long after buying the Sherman on Ebay, a 'spares or repair' model of the missile tank appeared and I was able to buy it. It was missing the missiles and box and the motor was in worse shape than the earlier tank, but after a lick of paint and some cosmetic fixes, it displays quite well. Below is shown a more complete version on ebay, the missiles tended to have rubber tips which were prone to perishing with age, so after forty odd years, its unlikely that I will find any now!

The Triang Zone: Tanks for the Memory

Back in the late 1950's, some years before I was born, my dad began a small work which I would years later, take up. He had always been a keen railway enthusiast and collected magazines and books, made models and copied copious details on the various rolling stocks of the UK in volumes of notebooks. When in 1962, I was born, he must have realised that here was a crying, squealing excuse to start buying toys and model trains for my futurity, but more importantly, for his own enjoyment. Whilst touring the model shops and toy stores, he picked up reams of catalogues and leaflets, storing them away in a cupboard at home. Thanks to his magpie instinct, I have been left now, some ten years after his passing, with an invaluable archive of ephemeral paperwork. He would often let me browse through the box of old Airfix, Matchbox and Hornby catalogues as a boy, but it was only when I had unrestricted access to the books that I began to discover the less obvious inclusions in the collection.

One noteable item is the apparently diminutive Triang Minic catalogue. Just about 3" high and about 1.5" when folded, it opens out into a concertina arrangement of panels showing the whole Minic Clockwork range.

 The early range of toys covers all manner of cars and vehicles and the catalogue also shows some of Triangs early plastic toys such as the Jabberwocky, Loch Ness Monster and Spider.

As a boy, besides space toys and rockets, I also loved Army vehicles. The Minic range included a small armoured car and a Sherman Tank. As I was not familiar with the old Minic toys, I assumed that the majority would be small clockwork models in the vein of similar clockwork tanks I had as a boy. A few years ago, I found a Minic Sherman advertised on ebay for a few pounds and bought it. It was only when it arrived, that I discovered to my surprise that it was in fact a huge, weighty toy - some eight inches long with a mighty clockwork motor and a bellows arrangement inside that blew powdery smoke. The model I bought had damage to the motor and the main spring had burst open the body and was in bad repair, but it also came with a dilapidated box too.

Shortly after I found a later version of the tank too with an eye to make one whole working version, but I only managed to recover the tracks.

On further inspection of Triang catalogues from the beginning of the sixties, I noticed that the tank was a regular feature each Christmas.

This undated catalogue (presumably 1958-1960) has some wonderful monochrome illustrations of the toys and also includes Triangs very first foray into the space theme, the tinplate and plastic 'Space Cruiser'. This carried a flying propellor on the back in the style of the much later Nuclear Pulse. Also visible on the page are vehicles from the 'Push and Go' series such as the aeroplane transporter and Missile Carrier.

The last catalogue shown here certainly displays the variety of toys made by Lines Bros at the time, everything from the new Comet Airliner to a clockwork Crab! Its interesting to note that early releases of the Sherman Tank have a standard US Army star on the turret, but the later release shown in the Xmas special brochure above, designed to promote a dedicated TV commercial on the new medium, shows a different 'atomic' style logo. This logo would appear again on several other toys as we shall see shortly.

Hot List 1967

Sorting through boxes of old catalogues while preparing a series of articles for the forthcoming Triang Zone, I found some of my old Hot Wheels paperwork and rediscovered that childhood thrill that I always got while seeing the extravagancies of automobile design produced by Mattel in the mid sixties. The small catalogue that came with the boxed sets had cool illustrations of the first line of cars, simple line and wash drawings that really didn't do justice to the actual cars, but still looked wonderful in their almost futuristic economy of line.

Later still I got a large format A4 catalogue of Hot Wheels Racing World which showed the extended ranges of cars and tracks including the limited release Heavyweights and electrically powered Sizzzlers.
The listing for the standard Redlines always made me drool with expectation of my next purchase, but sadly my collection never really expanded beyond one or two cars.

The short lived Heavyweights range remind me of the General Motors cargo hauler design 'Bison 1' from the Futurama II display at the New York Worlds Fair back in 1964. Which brings me back to the perennial question as to why long distance and heavy haulage trucks are always so un-aerodynamic and boxy when fuel economy and efficiency must be an important consideration in design ?