[Important] The Very TRUE Origin of Plarail 70 Years Ago, Not 61 Years Ago

Here is another lot on eBay with the fire truck. Is it worth 20 dollars to own a piece of Plarail prehistory?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/124295861900


This lot has a different type of rail that "snaps" together, seemingly with snap type clothing fasteners.

Thanks, it gives me an insight on how they are packed together. Need to find the original box first.

Turns out Borel is Ben Orel, the man behind Jack Built toys who acquired the patent for Snap Train in 1958. B Orel is stamped under pieces which seems to be where Borel comes from.


It looks similar to the stamps under the highway set vehicles. More info on Jack Built here: https://magicref.net/trains/trainhistory.htm

I still don't see a direct Highway set from them, but we already know they use different track. Seems the vehicles and track came from different places, vehicles from Jack Built/Ben Orel and track from Playskool/Keystone

I did spot this set with a few vehicles from the Highway set



They also have a bumper piece with the two raised cylinders.

The Playskool/Skaneateles vehicles seem to never have headlights, which the Jack Built and Plarail Highway set ones do have.

Wow, extremely interesting Vio. Interesting that the history goes that far back. Thanks for sharing!

Snap train set unfortunately has no vehicles of the Highway Set so it is impossible to say that there is resemblance. I’m pretty sure that the wooden tracks also come from another set like this with the highway vehicles. The bumper seems to have made its way from Keystone to the Snap train set, so there is some amount of resemblance that way.

Aha, the missing vehicle from the Highway set not in the Vehicle set, the Ambulance.


But, http://www.oldwoodtoys.com/jack_built.htm claims it is from 1961! Maybe the ambulance is reused?

I also remembered this line from the link above that struck me when reading it

Any chance at all Tomiyama was producing these vehicles, and the Jack Built actually imported them to the US?

The ambulance might have been reused from the Highway Set or could have been from another set we don’t know about. If the vehicles were made in Japan, it might have been exported to the USA.

By the way, there are 2 types of ambulance similar to Highway Set: Red and Black cross.
It seems that the black cross came after the red cross.

[Super]

Wonder how many of these sets made it to a campfire or fireplace through all these years?

The full summary of events were summarised here: http://nayuho.hatenablog.jp/entry/2020/08/13/171333

And the full discussion table is found here: https://togetter.com/li/1575570