Big Big Train

Speaking, as we were last post, about toys of yesteryear, I was put in mind of Triang's 'Big Big Train'.  As can be seen from the video above, this was a large scale model railway system, built to O gauge, which is around twice the size of Triang's regular OO gauge model railway range.  Unlike the OO gauge range, 'Big Big Train' was far more toy-orientated, with plastic track and battery operated locomotives.  These features meant that it was entirely suitable for outdoor use and the lack of any track wiring and electric controllers made it suitable even for quite young children.  The lack of external power was also he range's biggest weakness - it meant that the user had only very limited control of the trains.  Their speed was fixed and hey couldn't be reversed or stopped without physical intervention.  The latter was simplified somewhat by the provision of track-mounted devices which could either flip the locos' side mounted control switches from forward to reverse, or to stop.  This system, while it worked surprisingly well, did result in incredibly abrupt changes of direction and equally dramatic halts, with no deceleration.  The motors used also chewed up batteries at quite a rate.

The other problem that the 'Big Big Train' had was a limited range of locomotives and rolling stock.  That said, the best known loco in the range, the 'Blue Flyer' diesel, was actually a surprisingly accurate model of a British Railways 'Hymek' diesel-hydraulic locomotive.  There was also an 0-6-0 tank loco which was apparently based on the US-built tank engines used at Southampton docks (albeit without the real thing's complex valve gear).  These were later joined by a pair of locos sharing the same 0-4-0 chassis: a diesel shunter and a steam shunter.  The coaches were pretty decent replicas of the prototype BR Mk 2 coaches, (they were also available as 'continental' coaches with corrugated sides).  There was also a small selection of goods stock.  The limited stock was balanced by the availability of a number of operating accessories, most notably the automatic barrel loader.  The range was originally available between 1966 and 1972, when Lines Brothers, the owners of Triang and many other brands, collapsed.  It re-emerged in the mid-seventies, this time under the 'Novo' brand and was produced in this form for a few more years.  Quite a lot of the various components were manufactured under both incarnations and, until a few years, ago were available second hand at relatively low prices.  The 'Blue Flyer' diesel and coaches were popular with O gauge modellers as they could be converted relatively easily for use with conventional model railway systems.  In recent years, however, prices have risen significantly.

My personal experience with the 'Big Big Train' system is limited.  I certainly recall the adverts for the original Triang version when I was young and I have a vague recollection of one of my older brothers having the 'barrel loading set'.  This must have been early in the product's production run, on the very edge of my memories and we certainly didn't have it when we moved house in 1968, (the other brother's OO trains had also vanished by this time, as had the Scalectrix set).  My main encounters with it came at model railway and toy train exhibitions, such as the Alresford Toy Train Fair, although I wasn't at the 2012 event at which the above video was apparently made.  I did, however, see the same exhibitor at the 2019 event.  He has a pretty extensive collection of both the Triang and Novo versions.  His collection also includes an example of the notorious Far Eastern knock off version, the 'Red Rocket', (the red version of the diesel seen in the video is from this set).  While the concept was licensed to both Lima in Italy and AMF in the US, it was apparently never particularly profitable.  Looking back, it was another of those toys I wished that I'd had back in the day, (I had to make do with a clockwork Triang-Hornby OO set that I got for Christmas in the early seventies - the loco was even less controllable than the battery operated 'Big Big Train' locos and it was small enough for the cat to deliberately derail every time I had it set up on the living room floor).  Still, it is fun to look back on and ponder might-have-beens.