In 1974, Marx introduced a diesel freight train set it called The Champion, catalog #52750, that ran on AC electric power and sold through catalog retailers. If you have a Marx 52750 train set today, it’s worth considerably more than its original retail price, even adjusted for inflation.
Marx’s Champion train set was part of the Great American Railroads series. It had catalog number 52750 and was manufactured only in 1974. Today it is one of the most valuable Marx train sets ever made.
The story behind Marx’s 52750 Champion train set
The 1970s weren’t a great time for American railroads. Marx bet that Boomers would be interested in buying electric train sets for their kids, so they brought in some new blood. One of their hires was a former American Flyer manager named Spike Fitzpatrick. Another was a toy designer named Bill Felege.
Marx created a series called The Great American Railroads and gave each set a name and a theme. Felege designed the box art and new paint schemes and designs for some of the cars, whose designs sometimes dated to the early 1950s.
One of the sets in the series, set# 52750, commemorated the Rio Grande railroad, a Class 1 railroad serving the American West.
What came in the box
The Marx Champion train set was intended as a midrange set for 1974 for people who didn’t want to pay top dollar for a Mohawk set. It included a 2-4-2 steam locomotive, two freight cars, and a caboose, running on 8 wheel trucks with automatic tilt couplers.
- 666 2-4-2 diecast steam engine with white stripe, reverse, smoke, and headlight
- Rio Grande tender, unnumbered (catalog# is 1951)
- 51100 Southern auto carrier with 4 plastic autos, blue and yellow
- 28326 Virginian hopper, red
- 01500 Rio Grande caboose in orange
- 14 pieces of O27 track (8 curves, 6 straight)
- Model 1237 20W transformer
The transformer and track are easily replaced, of course. Note that some sources say the transformer was a 50-watt unit, but the markings on the 1237 itself say 20 watts.
If you come across one of these sets today, you have something. It looks unassuming so when one of these sets sells for hundreds of dollars, it tends to get negative attention on train forums. But the Rio Grande tender and caboose are rare. Furthermore, the Virginian hopper is rare in that color, and the Southern auto carrier is rare and exclusive to this set in that color combination. The blue and gray auto carrier is less hard to find.
If you have one of these sets and you’d like to see it running again, I don’t blame you. Here’s some advice on setting up a Marx train set. But run it carefully, please. And consider getting a cheaper Marx set for casual running, just bringing out the 52750 set for special occasions.
What the Marx 52750 Champion train set is worth
Marx’s retail partners didn’t promote the Champion nearly as hard as they pushed Marx’s cheaper sets. So this set sold poorly. Plus, the only thing in its consist that’s common is the 666 locomotive. I’ve only seen these sets priced around $400. That may be a little high, but I don’t think so. Even in 1991, Robert Whitacre estimated its value at $225 on page 100 of Greenberg’s Guide to Marx Trains Vol 3: Sets. To get that kind of money, it needs to be in the original box and still in nice condition.
Marx needed people to buy the cheap sets like The Meteor set, then upgrade over time to the Eagle Express and then the Champion set. But you couldn’t operate the cars from the cheaper sets with the cars from the Champion set. The same was true if you upgraded to Lionel. So if the price was about the same, there wasn’t a lot of reason to stay with Marx.
You don’t see the words “rare” and “Marx” together very often. This set is an exception. It’s rare. That suggests it sold poorly. Marx struggled with train sales in 1974 except for its cheapest battery operated sets. And that’s why the Champion was one of the last of its kind.
It may seem odd that a plastic train set from 1974 is one of the rarest and most valuable Marx trains today. But that was the state of Marx in the mid 1970s. It was a product line on its last legs and management kept it on a very short leash.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.