What is MPC?

Model Products Corporation, which was a division of General Mills back then.

 

Rusty

Good write-up here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel,_LLC

 

The old joke was, real Lionel Postwar collectors called the General Mills stuff "Mostly Plastic Crap"

Model Products Corporation between 1969 to 1986 under General Mills.

The 1969 catalog was put out by the Lionel Corp.
The 1970 catalog was put out by MPC.

 Mobile Pressure Cleaning ...well at least that's the name that MPC stood for here in Ashland,Ky a few years ago.

 

 They pressure washed mining and refining equipment in the Tri-State area.

 

 But yeah,Model Products Corporation ,some of the favorite toys of my youth

 

A recent MPC-related thread that will fill in some blanks:

 

 https://ogrforum.com/t...e-collect-mpc?page=1

Well thanks guys very interesting, just bought them as they were cheap job lot.

Here's one of them it's a lot whiter than shown in the picture. The others are Babe Ruth, Budweiser & Schlitz

  

All nice cars. I started a collection of those billboard reefers, purchasing them as they were released. I quit when Lionel started putting them in sets, not offering them for separate sale.

     MPC brought Lionel and the O Gauge hobby back. I got involved in 1981. It was  great wondering which Lionel classics they would resurrect next- the GG-1, the N&W J, the Warbonnet F-3, and ultimately, the Hudson! Each new catalog revealed more and more Lionel classic accessories, 6464 type boxcars. Lionel was back!

 

John Knapp

Erie, not Eerie

Thank you. I never knew what it stood for either.

 

I tend to prefer to call the era between 1970-1985 as the "General Mills" era (or more specifically "Fundemensions" era since Lionel was put under that division of General Mills right after MPC's stewardship).  It just seems more appropriate given the longer time period Lionel spent its time before Richard Kuhn acquired Lionel in 1986.

In general, those were dark days for Lionel, glad to see them arise from the ashes of the carnage General Mills rained down on the brand.

The true dark days were during the end of the old Lionel Corporation. 

 

Hindsight makes it easy to look down on the MPC era, but the O gauge landscape would be very different today if it wasn't for MPC.

 

Rusty

In general, those were dark days for Lionel, glad to see them arise from the ashes of the carnage General Mills rained down on the brand.

Sorry there was nothing DARK about Lionel MPC. Their bright colors is what brought me in! I am with Rusty on this one!

 

Personally, I'm glad there are affordable trains in this hobby. Less detailed and realistic, yes, but otherwise many (myself included) couldn't afford to get into O gauge.  I pick up MPC whenever I can.  

I never understand all the negative comments about MPC.

If it weren't for MPC and General Mills, I doubt that there would be a Lionel Co. today. Sure, the bean counters got their knives in, but that was going on all through the 60's too.

Most of those reissues helped make Postwar icons affordable to many of us on tight budgets.

Another point: MPC are just as repairable as Postwar. Can you say the same for all those expen$ive computeri$ed wonder$ being made today?

I always look for and buy MPC - it's still a bargain, and possibly more so today than then.

Hello artyoung.........

 

Some LTI trains are bargain as well before the pre-china days.

 

the woman who loves the S.F.5011,2678,2003,200

Tiffany

That era was known for some real junk (plastic wheels, dummy couplers) but was also a time of some pretty decent equipment as well. If nothing else it kept the brand alive.

 

Jim McC

While there was still many nice products made and more to come, by the mid fifties there was an ever expanding cheapening of the Lionel product line overall. By the sixties things really got bad. I would put any MPC product up against most of the later day Lionel Corporation stuff.

It should really be called General Mills era.  General Mills grouped their new purchase of Lionel under the MPC banner mainly because MPC had a large plastic molding facility used to manufacture the MPC model car kits. General Mills did the same thing when they bought Craft Master craft line. They grouped that under MPC.....kind of a hobby umbrella for General Mills.

 

I don't hate the MPC era......General Mills more than likely did save Lionel......but as I entered the O 3r hobby from HO I learned the hard way General Mills did cheapen much of the locomotives of their era.....none run really well or pull. But to each his own.....just collecting they are fine. 

Hello Jim McC...........

 

Lionel STILL makes junk trains and good trains today sometimes with junk electronics in them.  Its the same with MTH's PS-3 system.

 

the woman who loves the S.F.5011,2678,2003,200

Tiffany

Just to follow-up on AMC Dave's comments,  MPC made model car kits.  They were very popular. This was one of my favorites

 

 

 

The tooling for their kits are still around, so they do get reissued from time to time. 

billboard box cars, my wife collects a lot of them.

Not to wonder to far off topic but MPC history is Lionel history too.......

MPC is still around....and like Lionel most of their tooling is too. MPC has changed hands twice since the Lionel era.....currently owned by Round2.  Most of the tooling is in China now....but some low number runs are done stateside. Not much different that our model trains. I did get to do some work with the previous MPC owners.....so by the rule of 'six degrees of separation' I worked for Lionel too!!!! (I wish!!)

Yes, a lot of us think fondly of the MPC products Many of their innovations make the old Lionel Corp. seem like they were asleep at the wheel during the 60s.

 

Precisely.  Look no further than Lionel's attempts to produce trains as cheaply as possible during the waning years; many times at the expense of operational/cosmetic quality.

 

Two prime pre-MPC examples are the NW2 switcher and the 0-27 Alco FA units.  Both of which started out as top-end products with 3-position e-units, die-cast chassis, fuel tanks & trucks, operating couplers, decent amount of separately applied detail, and decent pullers.  Over time, they were cheapened radically to where they ended up with sheet steel frames making them extremely lightweight and compromising pulling power; operating couplers were replaced with dummy couplers (the Santa Fe 633 NW2 switcher didn't even have a front coupler); plastic simulated fuel tanks and trucks (sometimes even sans fuel tanks), no headlight benzels or windshield glazing, 2-position e-units or in some cases no e-units at all, and some only having one powered single axle (like the aforementioned 633 and and the 634 as another example).

 

While under MPC and Fundemenions for the first several years were not exactly prime years, and a degree of further cheapening did happen in some cases, the worst of the General Mills period was pretty equivalent to the worst that came out during the autumn years of the postwar period, but also the pendulum began swinging back during the later half of the General Mills era and quality began to rise.

 

One other thing that some of the General Mills/MPC detractors seem to overlook is that when MPC took over Lionel train production beginning in 1970, toy train sales were still in the toilet, and as a newcomer to the O gauge market and needing to learn the ropes, MPC & General Mills were being conservative and exercising caution with production, something that one can hardly fault them with doing.  You don't want to take on a new product line and suddenly do a 100% about face overnight and invest enormous amounts of capital in new or updated products in such an environment as they were facing at the time.   

Rome wasn't built in a day as the old saying goes, and similarly bringing a product from the brink of obscurity back into full (albeit smaller) glory, doesn't happen overnight either.  

 

Indeed, as Rusty alluded to above, if MPC/General Mills hadn't stepped in, things would be very different than what we see today.  I would speculate that if General Mills didn't step up to the plate, the Lionel Corporation would have not have been able to find another suitor with the same foresight and willingness to take the risk as MPC/General Mills had shown in taking over their toy train production,  and likely would have shut it down completely, performed a fire sale of all remaining inventory, and their tooling sold for scrap.

 

For us vets that served overseas MPC meant Military Payment Currency.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic...2cTjI3bWpk1UQLP277IP

 

MPC was a regular topic in Gramps discussions when I was a boy. First it was looked forward to, Lionel might survive and product quality may get better again. Some improvements were made, but overall it was downhill till about 1976 when one preordered engine looked so bad and ran so bad that he tool the day off(sacrilege) and drove to Lionel HQ (about 45min drive) to return it in person. He spent that evening crying. His beloved Lionel was now Lionel in name only, and so he stopped all preorders, and stopped buying Lionel. In fact I don't think he bought another new engine for his remaining 7 years. Only cars. A collector since before WWII, this was a man missing less than 5 normal production engine versions to complete his die-cast collection. Plastic wheels and dummy couplers (some starter sets have 100% dummy couplers)  seen on cars in dept. stores kept me from returning to trains for years. The returns at our local Sears(a major Lionel dealer here) went up to like 70% of train sales, and they downsized. Then eliminated stocking them 2 years later when Atari hit the shelves. Now Im sure he would have loved where Lionel ended up, and I own many MPCs. The chrome RI&P General set is my favorite,(3rd favorite overall too) and I do buy them. But no one from this family "loved" the MPC era as a whole. They did much harm to the brand names reputation, despite the names survival. 

I like some of the MPC/General Mills era stuff, still have the 1977 General set and still run it from time to time. Love those old reliable pul-mor motors, they just keep on runnin'. Like others have mentioned, Lionel wasn't exactly putting out great stuff in the late 60's before MPC acquired the trains, anybody who got one of those "scout sets" from that era can tell you that. Besides, I believe it was MPC/Lionel that introduced "The Electronic Mighty Sound of Steam" in their steam locomotives, a real breakthrough in the 3-rail model train industry.

Another reason for the bad rep. in my eyes was the introduction of DC only locos. How many Lionel lovers were lost to fried motors on their new engines from running on older AC tracks and transformers? Upon re-entering the hobby, I fried one forgetting they were even made like that  With a new $7 motor, $2 bridge rectifier, corgi plow and a bucks worth of sinkers, it is a fun little AC/DC yard brute now. Big deal right. Well before the internet, and after the dropping of major train displays in most retail outlets, support dried up too (Sears had service techs). LHShops now wouldn't touch a train they hadn't sold, so the people were much less likely to have a repair done. Sending something back to the maker for repair was not a common retail practice. The common choice was to return it, and I bet most took a refund over exchange after witnessing the quality first hand. I think consumers in America once had higher expectation of quality and durability out of most things, and its been downhill for over 50 years . I have many quality plastic household items. Many that are much older than I am, but not much from mid sixties or after. That all that stuff broke much easier and is all gone. MPC plastic also seems to break easier than my PW equals...so MPC...My Plastic Cracked? 

Wow, some very interesting information here. I wasn't in the hobby then but I do remember MPC mode cars.

hello guys and gals...........

 

One thing I liked about the MPC era was their bright colorful boxcars and even then you could put on postwar trucks on them. Diesels ,well that's another story.  I had a MPC #8206 Hudson of 1972 and that thing waddles on the track like a duck!!!! Those were the days I guess..........

 

the woman who loves the S.F.5011,2678,2003,200

Tiffany

Oh we'll. it was pretty much the only new 3 rail available at the time. Some of the reproductions, like the gg1 and congressionals we're nice. I also remember some of the yellow box sets fondly, like the rdg Quaker city limited. At the time it was impressive, but today's lower and mid end products, like railking or Williams can easily surpass them.

I don't have any new stuff from either manufacturer so I can't attest to how good or bad it might be. The newest MPC era piece is a LV GP9 and, like Tiffany's Hudson, waddles down the track. Traction tires maybe?

 

 

Jim McClenin

 

"The old joke was, real Lionel Postwar collectors called the General Mills stuff "Mostly Plastic Crap" saved Lionel. I think you had to live through that period of three rail trains to really understand. Don

Have a different angle here. Over the years when the subject of MPC trains comes up, there are always some folks who cherry-pick the cheapest beginning sets with things like plastic wheels and make the determination that all MPC era trains were junk. Out goes the baby with the bathwater. 

 

At different times I probably owned over half of all the trains Lionel made in the 70s and 80s, and I never saw a single car with plastic wheels, for example. Only a tiny fraction of rolling stock had those, only the cheapest of the cheapest starter sets. And people who complain about the engines always neglect to mention the many fine MPC diecast steamers that were virtual copies of Postwar engines, and ran great, and engines like GG1s, Trainmasters, dual motored F-3s, and many of the Geeps and U-Boats etc. that ran just fine as well. Of course, these engines didn't come in the cheapo starter sets. 

 

And there also have been many discussions on the Forum over the years about all the groundbreaking technical innovations MPC-era Lionel made, and the outstanding graphics and other contributions to the O gauge world we have today. Some only focus on perceived reduction in quality of certain items. Indeed, there were some items that were not made as well as some made in earlier times. But many were made just as well, and often in more interesting ways.

 

The economic times of that era have to be recognized, too; it was a job keeping Lionel afloat during those years (not to mention that there was a serious recession going on in the US in the 1970s), and it was necessary to produce items within a strict budget in order to keep the doors open. Some folks seem to infer that the management at MPC just decided to make things cheap and cut corners because they didn't care. Nope. If some less expensive production was made in some items, it was done because economics of the time demanded it. And as a result, we still have Lionel today.

       

In that particular case is most likely part of a known issue with early- up to mid - General Mills production.   A huge batch of diesel engine wheels were made with the center hole that the axles are attached to slightly off - centered,  resulting in the wobbling  you're experiencing.   In Tiffany's case probably either due to a traction tire or an axle slightly bent.

Well, I tells ya...

 

We'll never convince the nay-Sayers, but the MPC and early Khun eras were fun:

 

 

Rusty

 

I have no doubt that amongst that group that there are those who would have had disparaging things to say regardless of who took over Lionel train production.  There are those that think that the Lionel Corporation as a name and company is just as endearing as Lionel trains themselves and are synonymous, and as such wouldn't give anything beyond the postwar era the time of day anyway.

 

In a way I kind of understand; after all General Mills, LTI, and Lionel LLC were/are entirely separate companies, so from some collector/enthusiasts' perspectives, Lionel trains after the postwar period are Lionel in name only, since the Lionel Corporation that started it all was now out of the picture.