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 Posted - December 11 2007 : 10:52:43 PM
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Is there any interest in a guide to Tyco boxes...?
It may seem like a silly topic at first, but in the course of putting a near-complete fregith car collection together, I have noticed many different things about the boxes.
For instance: there are FOUR different colors of brown box end flap (make that 5 if you count the rare, very early all-brown edition - which was actually made before Tyco was bought by Sara Lee / Consolidated Foods)! Fonts and label styles change over the years...
..and you can decipher them chronologically, based on what cars were available when a style was in use.
This is helpful to make sure a particular car is indeed in the correct box...
...and can also help date rare, odd, uncataloged and promo stuff....
...and the appearance (and availability) of variations. (Provided you have reasonable confidence, all these years later, that a car really was 'never removed from box" or at least stored very carefully).
For instance: I know the Alaska car was made in 1973 or 1974. The White CP Rail was very early; possibly even before the blue one. The white boxes were copyrighted (odd in itself) 1975 and 1977 but by 1978 they went back to brown flaps (and printing in Hong Kong).
Things like that....
...the only trouble is, it will take me some time to gather notes and make presentable sense of all of this, for public consumption. If not enough people care, I'm not going to waste my time.
And the funny thing is, this could vault Tyco into Lionel-like obsession where boxes are concerned... which is a sword that could cut both ways.
Edited by - GoingInCirclez on December 11 2007 10:57:29 PM
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 Posted - December 11 2007 : 11:11:29 PM
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| Hi Tony--I posted some pics in an earlier post of Tyco boxes and variations. I would say there is an interest to some here. I believe it is under forum topic Tyco accessories
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Posted - December 11 2007 : 11:40:07 PM
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Wait a minute. While I recognize you're probably sleep deprived! [:D] [:D] [:D]
I remember an offer to do a "Broad" evaluation of F-3/7 Nose Shape/Lights etc comparison. I even offered a comparison F-7 to aid in the process. Think what fun it would be GIC, if F-3/7's came from all over so you could compare profiles, pilots. headlights etc!!!
Yowser!
-G
PS: I could flatten a few Tyco boxses and send them to aid in the cause of, er Science? Historocity? OK, Dumb ass FUN!!!! [^] [^] [^] [^] [^] [^] [^]
Edited by - romcat on December 11 2007 11:41:39 PM
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Posted - December 11 2007 : 11:40:24 PM
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| [Oops!] I remember that now. I'll have to compare notes if I decide to pursue it. Thanks!
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Posted - December 11 2007 : 11:41:04 PM
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And the funny thing is, this could vault Tyco into Lionel-like obsession where boxes are concerned... which is a sword that could cut both ways.
GIC
Your above statement is very true...but with the limited amount of info out there on TYCO trains ....your guides are priceless to a new collector like myself.
Besides Tonys resource pages (which are great) and what you bring here to this forum...there is really nothing else out there !
Myself being a postwar Lionel collector for all of my adult life,I have seen the box obsession come full circle in the early 80s I would go to pick up layaways at the place I was dealing with at the time and the trains would be packed in old set boxes that are bringing big dollars on ebay now. I pretty much treated the boxes like any other box because I didnt have the trains that went in that particular box and didnt real care
either to try to fill them.
Fast foward about ten years later to 1995 or so and Im at train auctions watching empty set boxes fetch hundreds of dollars and Im trying to remember what I did with those boxes from 10 or 12 years earlier.
I once was witness to a set box from 1956 (empty no trains ) go for 3200.00 about 5 years ago and the guy thought he got a great deal !
it was at that point I had to ask myself what am doing in this hobby ?
Will TYCO boxes ever command that kind of money ?(or even a percent of that)
I cant say....but I still would like a "guide" on them,and if you do it Im sure it will be a good one.
Bob Taylor
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Posted - December 11 2007 : 11:42:24 PM
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quote:| Think what fun it would be GIC, if F-3/7's came from all over so you could compare profiles, pilots. headlights etc!!! Originally posted by romcat - December 11 2007 : 10:40:07 PM
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Aye, and therein lies the rub: I'm broke & stupid enough just chasing Tyco junk, let alone all those other ones I probably don't even know of yet. So they would certainly have to fall from the sky for sure... [:o]
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Posted - December 11 2007 : 11:57:55 PM
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Well I'm up for volunteering some stuff. The F7 I'll want back eventually but I'll cover shipping. You should start a list here on the forums and lets see how many F7's people suggest there are in HO scale!
I have I think I said Athearn HI-F's, Revell, Tyco, I was going to say a Varney 4 wheel F3 But I know a little munchkin in your house that may loan you one for the comparo!?
Also I can contribute some Tyco boxses. A 0-6-0 Shifter for sure, have to look at what else.
-G
PS: Some of this maybe should become part of a Wikipedia Page on Tyco model trains and collecting them???
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sbenny
Switcher
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Posted - December 12 2007 : 12:07:56 AM
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| I would be interested. I am not a big collector of Tyco, but it would be nice to know what came when. And if you don't do it here, can you direct us to the older topic on boxes that was referred to above?
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Posted - December 12 2007 : 05:45:12 AM
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A guide to box variations would be great. This is a topic that has been hardly discussed and is very over looked to the collecting community as they offer so much information. I would be more than happy to provide any examples if needed but you already have most of what I have.
A lone amature built the ark! A large group of professionals built the titanic!
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Posted - December 12 2007 : 07:33:49 AM
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I also agree that a guide to TYCO brown boxes would be valuable info on this forum. Tony, it sounds like that book is in order at some time. -Bob
Bob the Slot Car Guy
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Posted - December 12 2007 : 12:28:25 PM
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| I have no great interest in Tyco boxes. But I do want to encourage the guide idea. Why? Because something cool and completely off topic usually pops up in your guides! Something goes for the F-unit guide!
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Posted - December 12 2007 : 9:59:32 PM
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Hi GIC,
By all means. Please do both of the guides.
Thanks
Mike
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 Posted - December 12 2007 : 10:26:34 PM
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Well these responses are encouraging...
I will see what I can do, probably get to it around Christmas, maybe hopefully kinda sortsa.
Like everything else I do... it all makes sense in my head, I just need to get the translator circuit working again [:p]
Edited by - GoingInCirclez on December 12 2007 10:28:00 PM
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Posted - December 12 2007 : 11:11:04 PM
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GIC:
This box guide will be cars and engines, yes!?
G
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Posted - December 12 2007 : 11:30:17 PM
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Nope, just boxes.
I honestly don't have nearly enough "different" F-units on hand. And just the Tyco ones themselves were a project... who knows what variants the other guys made over the years. Something like what you want would be spawned from a collection far greater than mine (*looks at Vintage HO, LOLs*)... and I have a long LONNNG way to consider ever getting there.
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Posted - December 12 2007 : 11:37:59 PM
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OK, that was Wry wit or I wasn't clear? I meant boxses for both engines and rolling stock?
-G
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Posted - December 12 2007 : 11:59:36 PM
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OH. I thought you meant engines, as in the F7's you've been after me to compare.
Engine boxes might merit comparison but in truth I don't have very many of those.
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Posted - December 13 2007 : 12:05:46 AM
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GIC:
Did you see the City of New Orleans-Johnny Cash Video???
-G
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Posted - December 14 2007 : 7:31:56 PM
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Hmm. On second thought I may not do this very soon after all.
The box diffs would be one thing... but the whole aspect of "what does it matter if you have a BN boxcar in a labeled box, how is there a 'correct' one", entails much more.
There are also differences in car tooling, paint quality, and chassis/truck revisions that have to be timelined and converged for this to make sense.
It all makes sense in front of me, but detailing all of that, photographing, translating my notes and headspeak, etc is just too much to do right now.
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Posted - December 14 2007 : 9:07:22 PM
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Hey GIC:
In categorizing, you have to establish a baseline. So look at the boxses as "pure" initially. Example I have a brown box labelled:
Box car
50 Foot Plug Door
Burlington Northern
339E
It appears to be done by stamping and it's center justified.
Top Side panel has 5 Locomotive line drawings...
Forget what was in them initially in terms of a label and box was used for 3-5 different variations of the that car...
I hope you undestand what I mean???
-G
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Posted - December 14 2007 : 10:41:48 PM
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No, it's not that cut and dry.
Anybody can look at boxes and tell that they're different. I mean come on - nobody needs to me to tell them that "this one has a white flap and this one has an orange sticker and this one has typewritten text" when they can see for themselves.
But WHY is that potentially important? Because the cars themselves were not always the same. filled/open steps, metal or plastic trucks / axles / wheels and combos thereof; paint variants; quality improvements.... these all happen in parallel with box changes.
Otherwise, sure... take any old loose BN boxcar or whatever and stick it in the first box with a BN label you see.
But there are cues to which of those 3 / 6/ 9 /12 kinds of boxes might "match" that car, based on cues in the car itself. None of that has been discussed. And it's more than I want to work on right now.
Otherwise, who cares which boxes came first... and dating the "unknown" cars won't be possible without knowing the other traits.
I realized this when I started inventorying boxes and noted over a dozen variants. Too much to make a good presentation with reasonable confidence... I just don't have the time for that now.
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Posted - December 14 2007 : 11:15:18 PM
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Hey GIC:
Seems like pretty lucid reasoning to me.
-G
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 Posted - December 16 2007 : 01:17:35 AM
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Arrgh. Before I packed everything up, I poked around and had a bit of a Eureka! discovery: Seems that Tyco (or rather, the Diamond Paper Box Co. of Phila., PA) dated most of these for us!
I say *most*, as it ends after the white-flap era, when boxes are all from Hong-Kong. So it becomes slightly less clear after that.
In the following picture are TWENTY different boxes. The open one shows a bug on its flap that is the "decoder ring" for dating the boxes so equipped.
Going from bottom-to-top, left-to-right, they are absolutely chronological with the possible exception of the right column.
The White CP Rail Boxcar is from June 1971.... and has a misrpinted label to boot. The funky brown box underneath appears to have been made that way for just ONE month.
I STILL need to illustrate and timeline the relavant changes to cars, again so you would know "what version of a given car dates to which box style".
Not going to promise when/if I expound on that. It is a lot to cover. If I get bored at the in-laws' over Chistmas, maybe I'll type some stuff out.
So for now, ya'll can chew on the picture...
Edited by - GoingInCirclez on December 16 2007 01:21:26 AM
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Posted - December 16 2007 : 01:51:02 AM
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| What is sposed to show the date??? The inside of one of my box flaps has the same symbols yours has....but how do i tell wat the date is? Its just a circle with "923457" inside.
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Posted - December 16 2007 : 02:50:59 AM
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Eric,
Here's a few clues... you'll have more fun if you figure it out.
1) The boxes were still Red in 1970,
2) They used a slightly different symbol in 1971,
3) So what could the remaining numbers mean, and why was one omitted?
4) How many "teeth" are in that gear shape... Hmm... why would that be?
That symbol is also very similar to the dating codes you will find embossed into all sorts of plastic parts used on everything from electronics casings to car parts...
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Posted - December 16 2007 : 1:21:01 PM
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So I'm guessing the teeth are the months (since there are 12) and the little dot shows which month. And then the number that has been left out would be...the year??? So one of my boxes has the numbers "2345679", and there is a gap between the 7 and 9. The little dot is on the tooth near the 7...so it would be...December 1978??? ...am i close??[B)]
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Posted - December 16 2007 : 2:21:31 PM
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Bingo. The missing number is the year. Read the teeth like a clock, and there's your month.
1978 was the last year for the Diamond boxes.
In 1971, the year "71" was printed inside the gear, but the month was indicated as described.
Prior to 1971 (redbox), a different symbol was used that indicated the month... but the year is still a mystery.
Boxes from Hong Kong have no discernable date code, and start appearing in about 1974 (by comparing the labels used).
For some reason, White-flap boxes have copyright dates of 1975 and 1977. The Tru-Steel track box finally gets different pictures on the sides and is copyrighted 1978.
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Posted - December 16 2007 : 3:12:40 PM
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| So by "read the teeth like a clock" does that mean the tooth at the top is January, or the tooth by the missing number is january?
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Posted - December 16 2007 : 3:18:52 PM
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ON a clock the 12 is at the top. December is the 12th month. So January would be at the 1-o'clock position, and so on.
Admittedly, they could very well have started somewhere else. But I am going by the hopeful assumption that for simplicity's sake, they didn't reinvent the wheel... er, gear... er clock... oh forget it!
Also, it's possible that a car may have been made/inserted into the box, some time after the box was printed.... but given how many of these things they cranked out near non-stop, I am also assuming that any lag time would have been mostly negligible.
Edited by - GoingInCirclez on December 16 2007 3:21:22 PM
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Posted - February 01 2011 : 1:47:45 PM
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Here is the missing picture. I've been meaning to polish the draft of the next GIC Guide for my site, maybe now is the time to do that. More has come to light since I this topic was broached in.... 2007, wow.
But I've noticed this trick also works on the Red Boxes printed by Diamond Paper Box Co. As well as boxes for other products even today. So I was definitely on to something.
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