RLH posted:Just a rant of sorts. I can't believe Lionel made a mistake by calling this the North Carolina and St. Louis on the box and thereby perpetuating the error on places like ebay. That shows why many manufacturers such as Marx and Lionel ignored many of the famous southern railroads in the postwar and modern era. I guess that is because those companies were primarily Northern based. Try modeling a L&N line or Nashville Chattanooga and St. Louis line and you will figure it out real fast. Ironically, K-Line had an observation car in their Golden State set that was shaped like the City of Memphis Observation car. Rant over.
Tell you what - try liking the Nickel Plate Road (NKP). I've seen it spelled Nickle, Nikle, Nichol, or abbreviated NP. The NKP reached up well north into Buffalo, NY at its endpoint - it's misspelled or misidentified more than any other railroad I can think of, sort of the Rodney Dangerfield of mangled names.
As far as regional favoritism - population density was greatest in the northeastern states into at least the 70s, and railroads serving the northeastern region that the Lionel's factory (New Jersey) and Marx's factory (Pennsylvania) were located in or were hours away from are the ones that show up frequently: Pennsylvania, New York Central, Erie, Lehigh Valley, Lehigh New England, Boston and Maine, New Haven, Central of New Jersey, Nickel Plate Road, Wabash, Lackawanna, and later Penn Central all were well represented. New York State, Pennsylvania and New Jersey accounted for almost 30,000,000 people in the 1950 census: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...United_States_Census That amounted to almost 20% of the population right there, and they were all strong sellers of toy trains as evidenced by the number of authorized dealers appearing in Lionel's service station flyers. The number of dealers based in the south were far fewer in number.
The states in the midwest, northwest, southwest and west didn't snag nearly as much model action compared to the northeastern states when it came to toy trains, either. If you broaden the manufacturer base, AMT/Auburn/KMT/Kusan came up with Texas Special, Southern and B&O F units with matching passenger trains composed of 8 different body styles for the O gauge crowd, as well as a Southern RDC car. You also got B&O (2 different paint schemes), Central of Georgia, Missouri Pacific and Southern boxcars, a L&N gondola, an ACL and MKT stock car, matching cabooses for the B&O and Southern F units, as well as a C&O caboose (which used a C&O design for the model). Not a bad representation of railroads serving the south from AMT/KMT. As the population has spread away from the northeast, the range of roadnames has broadened as well.
