Category:Tri-ang Minic Narrowgauge Railway (TRMN)

Toy Brands and Manufacturers
Tri-ang Minic Narrowgauge Railway (TRMN)
1963 - 1966

1963: Brochure front cover [image info]

The Tri-ang Minic Narrowgauge Railway (TMNR) was a ten-and-a-quarter-inch gauge "garden railway" system made at the Minic Canterbury Works and announced in 1963.

The system was designed around a green single-seater battery-powered "Golden Arrow" locomotive with two sprung four-wheel bogies, a steel floor and plastic bodywork (TMNR1) and a matching two-seater Pullman coach (TMNR11).

Both pieces were carefully designed to be child-friendly, with smooth curves to give the plastic shells maximum strength, and also to eliminate sharp corners which might encourage impact damage or potentially give bystanders a nasty knock.

The 1963 leaflet also shows a roughed-out design for a second locomotive, the Shunting Engine TMNR2, which was designed to look more like a traditional steam-powered tank locomotive.

The system was available with track and al required accessories, and seems to have been pretty well designed, to industrial standards. The company sold a pair of locomotives to Butlins, and hoped to sell more to visitor attractions and to people wanting simple low-maintenance ride-on garden railways, but having sold an initial clutch of machines, realised that because the systems were so self-contained, opportunities for add-on-sales to existing customers were severely limited, and since there was a limited customer-base it was perhaps sensible to "quit while they were ahead" and cease production in 1966 ... despite how good and how fun the product was.