Do you remember when.......

Prices back then would have been written as £7/8/8 or £7 8s 8d. A "p" is a new penny (2.4d), introduced in 1971.

Was a sunday paper boy then, remember it well, shiny 10p peices for a 2 bob coin.
Cheers, Simon

I got one of those sets for Xmas in 1950.
EDG7 is listed in the 1952 Meccano catalogue at 161/2 or $8 1s 2d, including controller and rails.
The 1959 Hornby Dublo 3-rail catalogue has the equivalent G16 set with plastic-bodied wagons at only £4 16s 0d with rails but excluding power supply and controller.

The two-shilling piece, or florin, was introduced in 1849 as the first step towards a decimal currency. The final steps weren't taken until 122 years later, although 10p coins were issued in 1968 and and 50p in 1969.

In message , Manxcat writes And (IIRC) he usually was smoking next to the inflammable Mek Pak.
Adrian

The big remaining questions are: will you order something and will you get it!

Or thrupence farthing ...

And, of course, we were inhaling all sorts of other toxic stuff. Which might well explain the present state of the world ...

3¼d.

"Don't forget the Fruit Gums, Chum! thruppence and sixpence!"

"MartinS" wrote
Snipped
Power supplies and controllers were almost always sold separately from the models as Purchase Tax (the predecessor of VAT) was then either not applied or was levied at an advantageous rate. I forget which, and please don't ask me the rate!
Riddles

Why is your mum all bandaged up like that? She forgot the fruit gums!

I wouldn't say "only", it's about $150 pounds in today's money.
Yes, and they cost a mint. That's why battery power was often preferred, =
esp. for set that were used only at Christmas. Not that batteries were=20 cheap, either, long term they cost far more than controllers. But the=20 short term hit was less painful.
cheers, wolf k.

I had (still have ) a Hammant and Morgan for my Tri-ang set so was spared the anguish of flat battery's some friends suffered. Some places in 1959 still had pockets of DC mains and ISTR that the Tri-ang instruction book issued warnings not to use such a supply even if a method to reduce it to 12v was used so many used battery power in that situation. Not that my father was any safer as our lone socket was a 2 pin one,to gain an earth installed another 2 pin socket wired to a water pipe. The H and M cable had two plugs both 2 pin one for the current one for the earth. The sole difference was the painted on M for mains on one and painted E for earth on the other. I was not allowed to plug this in myself. When that Dad Died with the Big C I was fortunate to quickly get another, only snag was he had a farm with a Generator and using it in Daylight was a no no. As my Bedtime was before Sunset for a few months of the year I had to buy a Clockwork engine for those months. Cost Half a Crown from a school mate. Recently I have started to use it again. It does the circuit of my garden line to check there is no large debris like sycamore seeds before the main track cleaning train* is sent out. * 1x rotary US style snowplow to flick bits out of the way 1 Lux Model Brau track scrubber 1 x Dapol track cleaner with abrasive disc 1 x Lux model brau vacuum car and a CMX clean machine . Needs a heavy engine to shove that lot so a UP challenger does the job.
G.Harman

Better than Railway Modeller. It died suddenly in the middle of a series about Black Dog - a private, un-timetabled station on Lord LAnsdowne's estate. This was built as a condition for the GWR building the Chippenhap - Calne line across his land. He had a compartment permanently reserved for his use on the local train.
This series was by the then editor and there was warning. And carriages. they were CKD (Completely knocked down) - because they were self-assembly kits it was an attempt to get around purchase tax.
Even then.
Yep.
Yep.
Nope.
I had a Hammant and Morgan Safety Minor that I had bought in the 1960s, which was a variable transformer. By then the Powermaster worked the same way.
Aaah, those were the days.
But there were also the Peco Wondereful Wagons with sprung buffers, sprung axle bearings and embossed card overlays for a heavy cast body.
For a while I used the Realroad system - PC expansion cards with voltage regulator driven by an analog to digital converter. This was the best DC throttle made: the software generated the optimum ccontrol signal for each motor. From pure regulated DC to traditionL pulsed to time division spikes, depending on the kind of motor, and tuned to each individual engine. For pure DC it would go from zero volts to a smidgin less than starting voltage as soon as you opened the throttle.
It also came with variable inertia and braking depending on the "weight" of the train.
Unfortunately it could not compete with DCC.

Wasn't that why the Lotus was manufactured, or is that legend?

Chris Leigh's Black Dog Halt? It has featured a few times in Model Rail. ISTR he's disposed of ot or is selling it.
MBQ

"John Nuttall" wrote
Not quite - Tri-ang had two distinct styles of tension-lock coupler; the early ones were open at one end. Peco had their own Neata tension-lock coupling which was much smaller and similar in size to the Tri-ang TT-gauge coupler.
Hornby Dublo, of course, never used the tension-lock, much preferring their own coupling (developed during WW2 by Sydney Pritchard) and Trix had a modified version of same, so during the 50s, 60s & very early 70s there was just as much of a mish-mash of couplings as there is today.
John.

Wish everyone had stuck with the Hornby-style couplings. Less obtrusive and easier to separate by hand. Same priciple as Kadee, but with mechanical uncoupling rather than magnetic.