Sunday, December 11 , 2022 Overcast -3 Celsius 26.6 Fahrenheit
A Reader Finds the Answer to His Very Old Train Set
One of my most favourite and memorable movies is Forest Gump with the star actor Tom Hanks. At the beginning of the movie, the lead character, Forest Gump is seated on a bench and is talking to a lady. While talking, he says to the women "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get". In other words or what that means is "Life is full of surprises; you never know what will happen next". And so it was with with Mr. Viktor Skarka from the fine country go the Czech Republic, also known as Czechia.
Viktor wrote to me and asked if I could identify his very old train set. He thought that it might be a Johan Meier tin train set. I wrote back and said that I would search for an answer, and of course, asked if I may write a blog post about him and his fine set. We communicated back and forth, and in that time, Viktor was able to find an answer to his own question. He discovered that the set was made by C.K.O. Kellerman Nürnberg circa 1920. Wow - a 100 year-old toy!
The company, known by the initials C.K.O. was founded by Georg Kellerman in 1910, in Nuremberg, Germany. Georg Kellerman was the owner of the company until he passed away in 1931, whereupon, his son Willy took over. Originally, the toys were made of tin, and wound up with a coiled spring (clockwork). Most of the toys then were exceptional motorcycles, which were very popular at the time. Sadly, the company closed in 1954. In the 1990's a Chinese manufacturer had reissued some of the old toys. I obtained the history of the C.K.O. company from Fabtintoys.com - an excellent resource for information about toys.
