History Of Electronic Toy Trains Part 1

Toy trains started with a very modest start in life. They were created in a loft in New York in the United States of America by a perky chap by the name of Josh Lionel Cowen around the start of 1901. It was a very simple design, nothing more then a motorized half train half car has now taken the world by storm.

Model trains are big business and big fun. It's become especially huge in America, Europe and Australia. The first "electric" trains were not really electric but simply battery powered. This was for the simple fact that at the time not all homes had electricity. They were also considerably larger then the modern indoor trains of today.

The company was called Lionel, the middle name of Joshua Lionel Cowen. At around this time other manufacturers started making model trains with different scales and gauges. Gauge means the distance that is between the rails on the model train tracks. Joshua was a very good business man how ever and he could see that it would benefit him if they all used the same track gauge.

He used his name and his business name to "force" a standard gauge on other companies, called the Lionel Standard. Vain I know. This gauge would be equivalent, roughly to that of the G-scale model train of today. This scale is way to big for any homes to realistically setup properly. In other words it was not practical to have a G-scale model train setup in your home permanently.

The next big thing in model trains was just about to happen in 1915. Electricity was more common in peoples homes now and being able to create model trains that ran on the current from the electricity generated at home was possible. The dawn of the personal model train. This was a big step for all model train manufacturers and sales skyrocketed at the time.