If you walked into a toy store in 1983 and saw this, how could you not fall in love with LEGO trains? The following illustration comes from a set of photographs of dealer displays distributed to toy stores in Germany. This display designed to promote LEGO trains is absolutely gorgeous and features an operating signal light. Other themes covered in the packet include Town, Classic Space, Fabuland, etc. However, only the train-themed display featured functional lighting! Were any of our German readers fortunate enough to see this display in stores?
Wow, that display looks great and it transports the good old charm of the 12 Volt system very well.
I cannot remember seeing this display in person when I was a kid back in the 80’s. But luckily I was able to find some nice advertising from Mickey Mouse comic magazines from that era on eBay’s … I should scan them properly an upload them soon!
Hi Holger. We would love to see the scanned advertisements sometime. I also collect magazine/comic book advertisements, and Europe always had the best advertisements throughout the 1980s. Some products were available across multiple years, and it’s always interesting to see how they were advertised in different ways for different years.
Hi Matthew,
I have added some scans from 1980’s LEGO train advertising to Flickr:
https://flickr.com/photos/29881479@N02/sets/72157678685037500
And don’t miss this brickshelf gallery showing further LEGO advertising from various themes including trains (I like the 7750 on a real rail)
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=464250
Holger
Hi Holger,
Thank you for sharing these great ads. I have seen some of the more common ones, but it seems you have a lot of unusual/rare ones, like the train on a real track rail. Are those ads toy industry trade journals (toy dealer magazines)? Thank you for sharing them with us!