Toying With the Past

Lately I've found myself looking at some old toys that, when I was a kid I wanted (or thought that I wanted), but never had.  Thanks to You Tube, I can now enjoy videos of some of these and get a clearer idea of what I was missing out on.  Like most small boys, I was an avid collector of Matchbox toy cars and lorries - there was a shop in Salisbury, primarily a newsagents but, like many small shops in the sixties and seventies carried a wide range of goods - from which most of mine were bought.  They had a fantastic window display, showcasing the range in stock and highlighting the new releases.  It became a ritual for me that, every few weeks, I stood at that window with my parents and chose my next acquisition.  While I had great fum with those little vehicles, playing with them to destruction, it didn't escape my notice that Matchbox also started producing a range of accessories, including a 'motorway' system on which you could see your favourite vehicles moving, apparently under their own power.  I knew very little about it - it never appeared in that shop window and none of my friends had one, but I did see TV ads for it and I had seen some of the cars adapted for use on it in the shop window.  This adaptation involved the fixing of a spike to the bottom of the car (at the time I assumed it was metal, but they were actually plastic and fixed in place with an adhesive pad), which fitted into a slot in the miniature roadway.  

While I realised that such small models wouldn't be motorised, like the Scalectrix slot cars my older brothers had, I still had no idea how they were made to move.  As I grew older, still thinking that spike was metal, I assumed it involved some kind of electromagnetic system in the slots themselves.  As it turns out, it was actually far cruder than that.  As each layout was assembled, you had to feed a long, continuous spring into each slot.  When the layout was complete, a an electric motor in a 'road house' on each side of one of the track sections drove a train of gears, with the teeth of the final cog meshing with each spring and moving it along.  The spikes on the undersides of the cars then slotted into the coils of the spring as they were dropped into the slot, the spring pulling them along the roadway as it circulated inside the slot.  Hence, you could have multiple vehicles running in each direction, just like real traffic queues.  A hand throttle for each lane allowed the speed of each queue of vehicles to be varied.  Alternatively, you could have both springs running in the same direction and have only one vehicle in each lane, turning the circuit into a race track.  The drawbacks of the system are clear - threading those springs through the trackpieces every time you set it up and then removing them when you packed it away was laborious.  Moreover, the springs inevitably became tangled when stored, meaning more time wasted untangling them before each set up.  Consequently, I'm rather glad that I never had this particular toy - it would inevitably have caused the young me much frustration as adult help would have been needed to set it all up.

Matchbox produced another toy which allowed you to use your cars more realistically: the 'Steer and Go'.  This was a good deal more sophisticated than the motorway system and allowed you actually to take control of one of your cars and drive it on a roadway system.  For many years this was available through the Marshall Ward catalogue my parents subscribed to and, although at the time it wasn't entirely clear exactly how it worked, I knew that I wanted one.  But, for some reason, I never had the nerve to ask for it for either a birthday or Christmas present.  It was a deceptively simple system - you placed a magnet under one of your Matchbox cars and placed it on a rotating circular road system.  In effect, the car stayed stationary while the road moved.  The car was steered via a steering wheel mounted in a dashboard - this controlled the movement of an arm with a magnet on the end which ran under the rotating road system and which, in turn, controlled the movement of the magnetised car on the top of the road.  Turning the wheel in the appropriate direction allowed you to navigate the vehicle around the rotating roads.  The dashboard also had a gear shifter, with the forward gears varying the speed at which the road rotated, giving the illusion of acceleration and deceleration, a reverse gear allowed you back the car up, by changing the direction of the road's rotation.  Having now seen one in action in a You Tube video, I really wish that I'd had one of these - I'm sure that I would be a much better driver now if I'd had all that practice!

Finally, I also watched some videos about something I actually did have - Airfix's 'Flight Deck'.  This involved landing a Phantom jet on the flight deck of a Royal navy aircraft carrier.  Which sounds impressive.  In reality, it involved a plastic Phantom model on a length of nylon line, which stretched between a 'control stick' and a clamp which you had to situate as far away and as elevated as possible.  Both clamp and stick had wheel on them over which the nylon cord looped, to form what, in effect, was a pulley system.  You used the pulley to get the plane to the highest point, near the clamp, keeping the line taught, then released it by dipping the control stick slightly and guiding it in its descent to try and land on a cardboard flight deck.  You knew if you had been successful as the plane's arrestor hook would catch on a line the deck, pulling up a pair of flags.  The problem was finding somewhere with enough room to set up a decent length of cord - the only place inside where I could really do that was the hallway, using the kitchen door to fix the clamp on.  Of course, whenever the kitchen door was opened, the line went slack and the plane crashed, while I was effectively blocking the front door as I sat at the controls.  The whole set up made it difficult for anybody to get past me  to use the stairs.  In the better weather, though, I was able to set it up in the garden, allowing a long flight path and natural hazards like cross winds.  With a long run like this, it was possible to put the plane through some manouevres before landing.  There was a later version of the toy called 'Super Flight Deck', whereby a catapult on the deck was used to launch the plane up the wire, with it turning around when it reached the top, ready for its descent and landing.  I never had this version, but I had a lot of fun with my original version on those days it was fine enough to set it up outside.

I know that 'Flight Deck' and the other things I've described here nowadays seem incredibly crude, but back in the seventies they were the height of sophistication.  I miss their simplicity, which had a certain elegance, not to mention making them child proof.  (For the same reason, I retain a huge affection for the older Triang, Hornby Dublo and Trix model railway locomotives of the same era, which still form the basis of my model railway activities.  Their relative simplicity and robust construction makes them incredibly reliable and easy to maintain - which is why they still run forty or fifty years after leaving the factory).