Category:Airfix Trackside Series

Toy Brands and Manufacturers
Airfix Trackside Series
1956 -

The Airfix Trackside construction kits first appeared in 1956 as a small set of "poly-bagged" kits designed to produce accessories of 00-gauge and H0-gauge model railways, and expanded into a popular range of trackside buildings, bridges, and eventually even 00-scale people.

Plastic railway accessory kits

The kits allowed affordable highly intricate layout detailing. Although card models had been quite nice (and affordable), printed detail on flat surfaces created limitations on the amount of customisation that could be applied, as painting (with anything other than washes) tended to obscure the printed detail. Once everyone had the same card models, this tended to result in lots of "lookalike" layouts with the same recognisably distinctive buildings.

The appearance of plastic kits, with their textured detailing allowed constructors to produce their own unique colour schemes and variations, and made it easier to produce weathering effects and dirt that made it easier for sets of buildings to look natural together and fit in with their surroundings. When one painted grubby dirt or moss-green detailing onto a plastic kit, rather than obscuring detail, the paint tended to run into the cracks or and make the detailing appear more pronounced, and allowed a wider range of detailing techniques (e.g. "paint on, wipe off"). The fact that the models were supplied in kit form also encouraged customisation - one could cut up the extra plastic "sprues" that the parts were attached to and glue on extra bits and pieces here and there.

As a result, the Trackside series quickly became very popular.