Marx thrived for years selling low budget electric trains with an inexpensive locomotive pulling 4-wheel cars made of plastic. The Cannonball train set, part of its Great American Railroads series, carried catalog number 4362 and was the last of that breed.
The Marx Cannonball train, set number 4362, was part of the Great American Railroads series. It had two variants sold by discount retailers, but only in 1974.
The Great American Railroads series
It was 1974. Marx Toys had merged with Quaker Oats 2 years before. Quaker brought in some new hires including Spike Fitzpatrick, a former sales manager for A.C. Gilbert’s American Flyer trains in the 1950s and 1960s, and toy designer Bill Felege. They didn’t have much budget to work with, but they did what they could to refresh a 20-year-old product line and reinvigorate sales.
Hallmarks of Felege’s designs include a large photograph of the train set in a realistic looking setting, and improved the paint schemes, modernizing them, and accentuating the detail that the initial design frequently obscured. Putting a white stripe and road number on the low end 490 steam engine and painting the fake plastic trucks black increased the production cost, but it also made the set look less like a cheap toy. They dubbed this new, improved line the Great American Railroads series.
The Marx Cannonball set, catalog# 4362
The Cannonball set #4362 was a 5-unit train, a slight upgrade from the similar Rambler set, which was a 4-unit train. Unlike the Rambler, the Cannonball was lettered for an old standby, the Santa Fe. But other than a different railroad, the major difference was the addition of a box car.
Marx’s Cannonball set consisted of a 25 watt transformer, a 490 steam locomotive, an oval of track, and a compliment of rolling stock, rolling on four wheels with fake truck sides to make them look like eight wheels, with fixed plastic knuckle couplers.
Here’s what came in the box:
- Marx 490 locomotive with white stripe and chug-chug unit
- 1951 Santa Fe tender
- 715100 New York Central gondola
- 467110 Baltimore & Ohio box car, orange
- 1977 ATSF caboose, red
- 8 O27 curves, 2 O27 straight, billed as 98 inches of track
- 329 transformer, 25 watt
Entry level sets like The Cannonball always sold well for Marx, because of the low price.
The problem for Marx was that entry-level sets like The Cannonball were supposed to drive sales for add-ons or better sets in future years, creating a pipeline. And in 1974, that pipeline wasn’t gushing the way it had in previous decades.
In its original box and in reasonable condition, a Marx Cannonball set is worth around $50 today.
What was the ATSF railroad?
The ATSF, or Santa Fe, was a Class 1 railroad in the western half of the United States. Founded in 1859, many of its tracks were laid directly over the wagon ruts of the Santa Fe trail. It reached the states of California, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Illinois, eventually operating 13,115 miles of track.
In 1983, the Santa Fe attempted unsuccessfully to merge with the Southern Pacific, but the Interstate Commerce Commission denied it on the basis it would create too many duplicate routes. The Santa Fe ended up merging with the Burlington Northern Railroad in 1995, forming what we now call the BNSF Railway.
Marx produced a lot of sets lettered for the Santa Fe besides the Cannonball, including 26259 for Montgomery Ward, 55950 for Spiegel and W.T. Grant, the treasured 25760 Allegheny, and, of course, anything featuring the big tin litho #21 diesels like set #45225 or 9640.
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.