Prewar Dealer Displays?

Nice find. You might want to post this in the tinplate forum. The folks there will know.

The caboose you pictured at very plentiful and not worth tons so paint away. Sometimes at shows it seems like 2 caboose cars were produced for every one of any other tinplate car.

I have scratched the surface of studying Dealer Display Layouts. My answer is there were no factory layouts for pre-war.

The Dealer Display Layout were a "new" marketing idea and approach to increase sales in the retail stores in the '50's.

email forum member jagrick and you could contact Bob Osterhoff at trainpaper.com.

A guess would be that some stores may have set up their own loop in a window.

First paragraph    and this  a few store window photos

You get the idea-the display to sell trains was developing.

"A Collector's Guide and History: Advertising and Art, Volume VI" has some information.  It's been a while since I looked at mine. I think there is quite a bit on Prewar, but it is mostly advertising. There are some store displays, and perhaps a few layouts. I think the layouts were offered for consumer sales, not specifically as store displays.

Here is a link

You might check with your local hobby shop to see if they have anything on early train displays.

Ron M

LOL Ron, there first has to 'be' a hobby shop... This here is South Dakota. Corn, beans, bovines and hogs we got millions of, hobby shops, 2. Neither could be called train havens. We had three but that useless Hobbytown USA thankfully vacated.

The upside is that I found very vague reference to a possible dealer display as early as 1936 but no details... the search continues.

Ted

Hey guys, I changed the title of this thread to reflect that I am looking for Dealer Display information. We have a cat here on the forum that recreates Lionel Dealer Displays but I can't remember who it is. 

Maybe the title change will attract him lol and I can learn even more...

Ron, do you have a reference to anything going back to '23? I can't find anything at all that old..

Ted

You might want to pick up this magazine.

You are probably talking about "Jagrick."  He posts here frequently on Dealer Displays.

Here's a recent thread, but there are several others.

https://ogrforum.ogaugerr.com/t...ealer-display?page=1

table of contents p.36 I mentioned jagrick earlier

I leafed through my copy of the TM book on advertising and art. There is a  reprint of a one page Lionel dealer display layout brochure. It shows two layouts, along with an option to buy just the decorated board (no track) from one of them.
It is in the section titled "1930's". There is no date, but judging by the text and what is shown, it certainly is prewar.

There are a number of other dealer display items, but not with running trains.

There may be more in the book, I only took a quick look.

The CTT magazine looks interesting. I wonder whether it is still available.

Lionel first pictured their Lionel Scenic Railways in the 1922 catalog (page 2). Listed were the 177 and 178 "0" gauge pieces and the 183 (5' x 12') Standard gauge unit.

The 1923 catalog continues with and again promotes the Lionel Scenic Railways to dealers plus has this verbiage "Many Lionel enthusiasts who saw our Scenic Railways in windows and stores last year purchased them after they served the dealer's purpose as display pieces."         

In the 1924 catalog they introduced the 198 "0" gauge and the 199 "Standard" gauge dealer's "Scenic Railways."

Ron M

That magazine is everywhere. I got mine at Books a million.

I spotted this just doing a general search, came from "Toy Trains of Yesteryear".

Prewar displays at first were simple loops of track even in Lionel showrooms. Others were quite grand and Lionel's emphasis was still Standard gauge at this time. Later prerwar started emphasizing O gauge more and then more displays were forthcoming. This is one from the mid 30's and was showing off the )27- When I get home I will see if I can pull up some other examples from my paper files.

Then of course, there were the displays made in the early 30's that were offered commercially as "scenic railroads"

One even was designed to have water under the bridge.