Piko

Early Piko, interesting prototypes modelled, motors noisy, plastic and fragile valve gear on steam locos, sometimes rough running, originally quite cheap. I've had some for over ten years, still sound like a volkswagen flat out, some have valve gear gone on one side, but arrange on layout so that only good side is seen. Present day stuff, original interesting prototypes, re-motored with good, quiet motors, silent and smooth running, now much dearer. And nearly as good as Fleish. and Roco. Regards, Bill.

"William Pearce" wrote

All that's fair comment - cheap and cheerful sums it up.

John.

In message , scoot writes

I have quite a few [14] Piko D/E locos but all N-Gauge. Good solid piece of engineering. A little noisy but hard workers. Mine all perform much better in my experience than Farish models of the same age and genre. Piko locos can generally be purchased second hand quite cheaply on Ebay but take care.. Watch the state of the traction tyres if you buy second hand. These might not be so easy to obtain. [I make mine].

The N-Gauge twin bogie N-Gauge jobs are very easy to chip and on my Fleischmann based DCC layout run well. My DE 412 will pull 34 weighted ore hopper trucks up the incline with ease. Most of my locos are Fleischmann and while Piko are not in the same league they aren't in the same price range either. I am about to purchase a couple of OO-Gauge Piko locos for the new layout. These will be 2nd hand off of Ebay.

Cheers.

Piko falls into a variety of periods:

- 1949-1950s: 3 rail AC with 0-4-0 engines and wagons with tinplate chassis and bakelite or tinplate bodies.

- 1965-1990: Communist era. Beautifully detailed wagon mouldings which are still sold today.

Piko did an excellent job with very limited availability of materials. Assembly was atrocious at times but can be put right by dismantling and reassembling, if you're good at such things. Locos suffer badly through the lack of suitable materials - for example the loco wheel treads are made of porous white alloy which attracts gunk like it was a precious commodity. Piko also marketted all the other East German brands; Gutzold, Schicht, Prefo, Permot, etc etc. Generally these come in their own branded boxes.

- 1990 > Hi all,

G'day, We often have Piko Items for sale, on our secondhand hand stall at Train Shows around Australia. We mainly see HO but have had some N. They were available in Australia but were not sold in every Hobby Shop. They are very easy to sell. The name is pronounced as Peco so this is confusing for some. Graeme Hearn Phone: 02 69 203 726 Email: snipped-for-privacy@bigpond.com Webpage: