Adriatic posted:Oh, I guess Kusan using KMT pre-dates Kris's using it.
The fact that there had been two different companies making O gauge trains with the initials KMT, although at different times, causes confusion to this day.
The Kusan Corporation was a maker of plastic toys in Nashville, Tennessee which had purchased the AMT train line in 1954. Kusan made O gauge trains under the name Kusan Model Trains, often referred to as KMT, until 1961. The Kusan Corporation continued making other toys but the Kusan Model Trains line and the tooling to make the trains remained dormant until 1967 when Andy Kriswalus purchased the first portion of the Kusan tooling (including the dies to make the O gauge freight cars originally produced by American Model Toys).
When Kriswalus was naming his company, he wanted to keep the KMT initials in the marketplace so he used the first syllable of his last name as the “K” and called his company Kris Model Trains. Kris made box cars, stock cars, refrigerator cars and gondola cars from that original AMT tooling until the early 1980’s. Although he had also purchased the tooling for the F7 diesel locomotives and the aluminum passenger cars first produced by AMT and eventually the Kusan-developed near-scale tank cars and the K-series cars and locomotives, Kris Model Trains never produced any cars using those parts of tooling.
Re boxes, Kris initially used the somewhat familiar red, black and white boxes which are still seen at larger train shows. It had the words Kris Model Trains spelled out and also had large KMT initials. BTW I bought some of those empty boxes from you a few years ago off this forum. A later version of that box substituted blue for the black. OTOH Kusan used several different style boxes for its individual cars. Ebay auction ID #172984691209 shows an example of one of the Kusan boxes. A different type box was used for freight cars sold as kits and there is an example of one in eBay auction id #182750029319. They both have the KMT logo prominently displayed.
For more info on AMT, Kusan and Kris see this Forum member’s website:
http://www.robertstrains.com/index.html
HTH,
Bill
