Category:Matchbox Motorway

Matchbox Motorway was an unusual slot-car system that allowed unpowered toy cars (such as those made, coincidentally, by Matchbox) to drive around a road system.

Concept

The Matchbox Motorway system looked superficially like a conventional slot car track system, with curves and straights (with a pair of slots) that could be connected together to produce loops or figure-of-eight track layouts.

Where MM differed from most other systems was that the grooves carried no electrical power – instead, each groove opened into a box-channel, and once the track was assembled, the user would have to thread a long helical metal spring through the channel and hook it up to itself to make a closed loop of spring. The two springs would then be made to circulate around the track by an electric motor.

One could then use sticky-tape to fit a long plastic prong to the underside of a standard Matchbox car (or other toy car), place the car over a slot so that the prong engaged with the spring, and the car would be pulled around the track.

Pros and cons

Advantages of the spring-drive system were that you could use almost any small toy car, and (friction permitting) you could use multiple cars on each spring to recreate the effect of busy circulating two-lane traffic. With enough of the cheap plastic prongs (also available separately in accessory packs) your toy car collection could create slow-moving traffic jams, where the cars were guaranteed to maintain roughly the same spacing.

Disadvantages included the fact that the system wasn't really optimised for racing (which was what most people bought slot-car systems for), and that the track couldn't cross itself – the figure-of-eight layout was achieved by using a bridge.