Railway Handcars

Saturday, February 7, 2015
Cloudy and cold

Railway Hand Cars

   I saw today's interesting grouping of railway handcars earlier in the week. when I was looking at toys on Liveauctioneers. I narrowed the search for several of the people who have helped me out, and I came up with Morphy Auctions.  Dan Morphy has been one of the earliest people and auctioneer who helped me out when I stopped buying and selling toys on ebay. The company has expanded over the recent years, and purchased an auction company in Las Vegas. As well, they now sell old and rare cars.

Please click here to visit this fine American auction company

Most of these toys are probably from the 1930's-1940's. At the time, cartoons were an important feature in most newspapers, leading to their being designed into toys. I always wanted to try a handcar. I've never seen one up close, but I think they're quite heavy looking at photos. Now these would be great if you wanted a good outdoor exercise to keep fit. The original "real" handcar could be operated by one or two people, but I'm sure most of the time two people propelled it.

Since the original handcar was designed in a limited production, there were probably few companies that actually manufactured them.  Consequently, there were few differences among them. Eventually, someone figured that if you added an engine you could save people from having to work hard to get from point A to point B.

 With limited differences in the real handcar, the toys  are correspondingly quite similar to each other. Most have 2 characters, except for the "bunny" rabbit, and most are hand wound with a key.

What is very usual with any key wind-up toy is the fact that the key often gets lost. The good news though is that there are plenty of toy parts companies to be able to find a replacement key. 

Walt Disney was extremely;y popular in the 1930's and 1940's and created a lot of interesting characters. As a result, many of his characters were made into toys and dolls. 

Most everyone knows Micky Mouse, and Donald Duck. Below you can see Minnie Mouse, another Disney character.  It's interesting that in several of today's toys, there are slight difference sin the colour scheme. Below you have two versions - the green handcar and the orange one. T I always wonder why a toy manufacture would have the same toy, but change the colour scheme. It would have cost a bit more, and why have extra inventory and costs?

  Here we have the two most famous Walt Disney Characters -  Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.

What just came to mind is which cartoon or fictional character was made into the most numerous amount of toys ever? Sometimes, I think that I think too much, especially being 66 years "young" and coming up with these questions!

Thanks for dropping by and as always,

have a great part of the day or night,

wherever you may be

Stacey Bindman

toysearcher@gmail.com