Woolworths Electric Trains

I remember it. It was a great store.

I can still remember sitting with my Grandmother at the soda fountain in Woolworths eating a cheeseburger.

Growing up in Camden,walking to Woolworths with my Grandmother was an excursion. sat at the counter,ate ,and always came home with something.

rich b

Count me in, Don.  Woolworths at East 131st Street and Miles Road in Cleveland.  Definitely a Marx only store.  I still have a vision of the E units packed in AB sets with the New Haven on top of the pile.  Eleven bucks a set!  

Still have some of the 4 wheel 6 inch tin with the 49c price tag on the bottom.  My first job was right around the corner at Spark's Hobby Shop.  I was 15 and making 75c an hour.

Lou N

Not knowing much about Marx. I lightened the picture a bit and see a Union Pacific streamline train that looks like it's from the 40's. Did they still make that train at the same time the E units were being made? Don

Is the picture a store display, or your personal collection?

It's from a Woolworths store. I don't have any Marx and don't know much about them other than what I saw as a kid. My friend had some and it always ran great and fast. Don

I always wondered why the lithographed Santa Fe F units were so big when Marx didn't make anything else train-wise that big. Then one day I saw one next to a Lionel F3. They were the same size. The lithography is a combination of F3 and FT, while the truck side frames look like six wheel.

Don, the M 10,005 was made postwar and prewar, while the M 10,000 was only prewar. The story I heard was that Marx shipped the M 10,000 dies to England, where they were lost in the blitz.

Interesting that the store display is postwar, while there is one red-framed prewar tank car and one prewar tin colored frame tank car included.

I remember going into Woolworths to get a slice of Pizza and then would Cross the street and go to the Emporium sixth floor to See the Lionel Christmas Layout and then up Market st to Penney'sto see the Flyer displat on the top floor.On another day we would go to Jack Colliers Boys for Men on Church and Market to drool over all of the Lionel past and present,those were the good old Days in San Francisco.TCA 76-9713

Mikey

There used to be a Woolworth's on the main street we would do our shopping, Woodland Ave., in Philadelphia.  I remember the lunch counter where we would sometimes eat, and the one corner had a huge toy area!

The photo of the Marx on the shelves, I think, was actually taken at the National Christmas Center in Paradise, PA (which is now closed).  They had a Woolworth's recreated in there, and that is one spot behind the counter, which had Marx.  That photo isn't from a real Woolworth's.

As a kid my mother would walk us  from Princeton & the Blvd to Frankford Ave in Mayfair, Philly.  I would see the Marx trains on display, in Woolworths and not be impressed.  They only had a handful of Lionel items, like signals.  I don't recall ever seeing Lionel trains in Woolworths.

Looking at Marx trains as an adult and knowing alittle bit more about them, I can see why many of us collect them.  When we were kids, lithographed tin toys seemed to be a step down from other toys.  But looking at the lithography now, that was applied to those toys then, makes them look more impressive, than when I was a boy.  

When my grandfather got his (dairy farm) milk check on the 11th of month, my brother and l  were paroled from school, every month, and we got to spend the day hiking 4th St. , Louisville, KY. shopping street's, Woolworths,  Kresge's, Grant's, Montgomery-Ward's, and Kaufman's and Stewart's Dept. stores.  Before the holidays, we made the longer trek to the freestanding Sears on Broadway.  Woolworth's and Sears had toylands in basement. I bought a pair of those Marx #21 ATSF diesels out of Woolworth's basement, but they severely overhung my O-27 curves, so l eventually crudely bashed the two units into a single double ended/cabbed unit, painted blue.  Nostalgia...those were the days ..

Woolworths and Kresge's sold Marx but I don't remember them having Lionel. Marx made sets for Grants, Sears, Western Auto. I'm sure there were others.

Mikey, I don't remember the dept. store in San Francisco but one Christmas season my parents took me and left me at a Lionel layout because they knew I wouldn't wonder off. It wasn't a Lionel display layout but looked to me like a custom one made for the store. The guy running the trains asked me to "help" and let me run the trains. I was in heaven. A real layout that looked like the ones I saw in magazines. You could get everything from trains to gold fish at Woolworths. Don

When my kids were little we would go to Woolworth's in Butler, Pa. I don't remember any trains but they had a cage of squirrel monkeys(small), Molly the monkey was with us for 8 years. Yes, I took care of it, like raising a baby.

The Emporium was on Market st between 4th and 5th sts on the East Side of the street, Powell intersecting Market on the West Side of Market .

Mikey

  10¢- WOOLWORTHS -10¢

That's what it said till the end.

The food was better there, but Kresge had the best looking diner, and better soda jerk.

My memory almost mirrors yours: A long inspection of a display layout War Bonnet running and the debate over that set or a Lionel, likely not an E.

No shelf display. No Lionel (then at least, ya never know) 

   Kresge only had Marx. K-mart had Lionel and Marx both, plus the Tyco ho. 

Sears kept doing displays a while after the small full time layout was retired (another was for the holidays.) K-mart did one or two years of display after turning its 3x4 off, then it was only stater sets on shelves. Kresge just stopped stocking once Marx was gone.

 It was a mall store but there were monkeys near there too, right outside the doors in the mall. Exotic birds in huge cages, and giant fishtanks, etc. The mall was half zoo back then. It may have belonged to Woolworth, I don't know.

I have a respect for Marx that was highly elevated by digging up a buried one in dirt and bringing it to life pretty easily. biggest issue is the wheels are kinda soft and tarnish fast, yet they are brittle when pulling them.  Given an equal wheelset, it's just as mechanically reliable as an old Lionel. Maybe more so.

Interesting mixture of pre and postwar in the display.

Steve

There was a woolworths near 52nd market in philly and a after Christmas in the mid 50's sale my mom bought a 2344 NYC  F3 B unit for $1.00 new in a box that was dumped on a table at the front of the store. We had no idea what it was. My brother and I used it as a passenger car for years. I still have it and in the 70's I completed the ABA by buying double AA's at a local train show in Gilbertsville, Pa. I will never sell it because it is the only train that was touched by my mother, father, and brother, all who have since have passed. 

Dave

I don't remember the bigger size. But Woolworths out my way. Had a huge N gauge area..which I still have the passenger cars. And the boxes.

Woolworth in Renton, Washington, loved those large ice cream sandwiches. Don't remember any train stuff there but a lot of nickle & dime stuff and the Pet department. Parakeet capitol of the world.

I'm too young to remember any 0 of any manufacturer nor any N scale.  But wait for Christmas and there was always huge amounts of AHM HO from a lowly freight car to the mightiest of articulateds  and everything on between.  Couldn't beat the prices anywhere. 

In my opinion AHM HO steam engines were the best there was in their day for the money, and not counting the too expensive for a school kid or his parents Japanese brass engines of the time the best steam engines period.  Never any experience with AHM diesels.

My train memory is WOOLCO, the discount arm of Woolworth's.  Twice a year they would have a big model train sale. Most of it was HO and N scale but I did pick up a O scale Casey Jones 4-6-0 static kit.  I still have a number of items I bought at these Woolco sales.....Rivisrossi Cab Forwards and UP Big Boys were $20!!! I bought all I could back then on my limited funds, I was a teen working fast food. Only to go back and load up! 

5&10s were where you bought goldfish. I don't remember them selling electric trains.

scale rail posted:

Not knowing much about Marx. I lightened the picture a bit and see a Union Pacific streamline train that looks like it's from the 40's. Did they still make that train at the same time the E units were being made? Don

Sorta.  As I understand things, Marx just kept making the same thing until the tooling wore out.  The little stuff could go in small, cheap sets for those who couldn't afford the bigger, more elaborate trains.  so you could find tin wind-ups, plastic wind-ups and battery-powered all on the shelves next to the later, 4-wheel and 8-wheel plastic.  Only late in the game did they stop making the tin completely as the tooling wore out.

RoyBoy posted:

I always wondered why the lithographed Santa Fe F units were so big when Marx didn't make anything else train-wise that big. Then one day I saw one next to a Lionel F3. They were the same size. The lithography is a combination of F3 and FT, while the truck side frames look like six wheel.

Those engines used metal versions of the same truck frames used on the smaller plastic diesels that looked like E units.

had a woolworths store in downtown watertown NY. had a lunch counter were you could stop for something to eat and I remember the ladies would always follow us to the toy dept to make sure we didn't open any toy boxes.

My Mom walked up to the counter once to pay and there was NO workers to be seen. other customers stood there also, they looked confused that there was no one there to help.

My Mom, said (in a loud voice), "where is all the help". There happen to be a manager just down the isle and he heard my Mom. he went in the back and suddenly about a dozen workers came shooting out. they were all hiding in back room and it hit the fan when the manager went back

Another view of that Woolworth store, I wonder if that Cadillac in your image still exists. Mom worked at Ben Franklin distribution site for a long time. Seem to recall Walgreens having soda fountains though I don't remember trains at any of them by the time I came along. Looking forward to seeing your model Don.

The Woolworth's on 39th Street and 5th Avenue in NYC was huge.  They had everything.  The store in Jamaica, Queens had birds and other small pets.  I remember chicken by the piece, handmade ice cream sandwiches, lemon meringue pie and the banana splits.  I bought loads of 10 cent lead soldiers there.  It was also a wonderful place for a cheap "date".

I was a Lionel guy from the get-go when I was a kid, and in high school sold Lionel and Flyer trains, among other toys, at a large dept. store in downtown Youngstown, Ohio. There was a Woolworth's just a short distance up the street, and I sometimes ate lunch at the counter there. Also bought some Marx accessories and a bunch of Plasticville at that store for use on my Lionel layout at home. Back in those days, toy trains--Lionel, Flyer, and Marx--were sold at countless stores all over town, not including some first-rate hobby shops in the area. Trains were the boys' toys of choice back then.

Fond memories of sitting down with Mom back in the 1960s having a malt and looking at the goldfish and all the toys when we went there.

Eddie Marra posted:

There used to be a Woolworth's on the main street we would do our shopping, Woodland Ave., in Philadelphia.  I remember the lunch counter where we would sometimes eat, and the one corner had a huge toy area!

The photo of the Marx on the shelves, I think, was actually taken at the National Christmas Center in Paradise, PA (which is now closed).  They had a Woolworth's recreated in there, and that is one spot behind the counter, which had Marx.  That photo isn't from a real Woolworth's.

Wow - didn't know this closed. 

BobbyD posted:

Another view of that Woolworth store, I wonder if that Cadillac in your image still exists. Mom worked at Ben Franklin distribution site for a long time. Seem to recall Walgreens having soda fountains though I don't remember trains at any of them by the time I came along. Looking forward to seeing your model Don.

Nice photo. Those folks all appear to be in a queue for something. Makes me curious. 

O-gauger posted:

BobbyD posted:

 

Another view of that Woolworth store, I wonder if that Cadillac in your image still exists. Mom worked at Ben Franklin distribution site for a long time. Seem to recall Walgreens having soda fountains though I don't remember trains at any of them by the time I came along. Looking forward to seeing your model Don.

Nice photo. Those folks all appear to be in a queue for something. Makes me curious. 

 

I believe it is a protest march. A note somewhere says the slide read:

"San Francisco protesters march for peace (1966) The notes on this 35mm Kodachrome slide."

Boy does that ever bring back memories.  My mom used to take me to Woolworths and we would roam all over the store and I'd look thru the toy section at the trains and other toys.  I remember eating there too, their hamburgers were great.  My uncle had Marx trains, he would get them out at Christmas and I remember the F-3's and the rolling stock, we ran the wheels off of those suckers.  As I got older, I don't recall what happened to the trains.  I always thought they were Lionel but my uncle set me straight one day and showed me some of the old pictures he had of us running the trains and he told me he never had any Lionel locomotives but he did have a few Lionel cars.  I remember the playing with them for hours on end.  Sears always had a huge Lionel layout out in the garden section at Christmas and my uncle and I would sit and watch the latest trains running on the layout.  I always hinted to my mom and dad that I'd sure like a Lionel train set for Christmas, never got them but I did get some HO stuff.  I'm fulfilling my early desires from my childhood with todays scale equipment.  Thanks for bringing back some great memories.

I was born in Mount Carmel, PA, where there was a Woolworth's and a Newberry's five-and-ten.  I remember eating at the Woolworth lunch counter with my grandmother when I was a small kid, but I don't think I ever saw any trains at either store.

Very early on, my parents moved to Huntingdon, PA.  No Woolworth's, but there was a GC Murphy and a McCrory 5&10 store in town.  Both of them carried Marx trains and accessories at Christmastime.  A lot of the structures on our Lionel layout came from Murphy's. 

I remember seeing a boxed die-cast Marx 333 with illuminated metal passenger cars at McCrory's one year, and it was the only Marx that ever attracted me.  A couple of years ago, I finally acquired that Marx passenger set.  And I was right -- it is nice.

Trainman52 posted:

The Woolworth's on 39th Street and 5th Avenue in NYC was huge.  They had everything.  The store in Jamaica, Queens had birds and other small pets.  I remember chicken by the piece, handmade ice cream sandwiches, lemon meringue pie and the banana splits.  I bought loads of 10 cent lead soldiers there.  It was also a wonderful place for a cheap "date".

The Woolworth's in Jamaica, Queens, 1950's / 60's, had the most delicious soft vanilla ice cream / custard served in a tall glass. I can still hear my spoon hitting the glass to get every last drop. Been looking to find that taste again to this day with no luck. 

Growing up, we had a Woolworth and a Newberry within driving distance. I remember trays of Marx tin cars on the counter selling for about 50 cents each at Woolworth. My first HO scale equipment was purchased at the Newberry store. The locomotive was the AHM/Rivarossi D&RGW Krauss-Maffei diesel hydraulic unit.

Bob

I can also remember buying HO scale trains at the woolworths in watertown NY. I paid $16.00 for an 4-4-0 Jupiter

and in the mall right down stairs in the same building was  a hobby shop where the same locomotive was priced at $46.95.