Last Updated on June 6, 2024 by Dave Farquhar
Marx thrived for years selling low budget electric trains with an inexpensive locomotive pulling 4-wheel cars made of plastic. The Rambler train set, part of its Great American Railroads series, carried catalog number 4336 and was the last of that breed.
The Marx Rambler train, set number 4336, was part of the Great American Railroads series. It had two variants sold by discount retailers, but only in 1974.
It was 1974. Marx Toys had merged with Quaker Oats 2 years before, and Quaker brought some new perspectives. One of their hires was Spike Fitzpatrick, a former sales manager for A.C. Gilbert’s American Flyer trains in the 1950s and 1960s. Another was toy designer Bill Felege. They didn’t give them much budget to work with, but they asked them to do what he could to refresh a 20-year-old product line and reinvigorate sales.
Felege redesigned the packaging to 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. He dubbed his new, improved line the Great American Railroads series.
The Marx Rambler set, catalog# 4336
The Rambler set #4336 was a 4-unit train similar to what they sold at discount stores for $10 to $15 for about a decade, like the 9725 set Sears once sold, or the 4338 set W.T. Grant sold. Marx was betting that a new, more up to date paint scheme on an old toy would increase sales, a formula they’d used successfully since the early 1920s.
Marx’s Rambler 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. The tender and caboose were lettered for the Bessemer & Lake Erie railroad, both of which are uncommon today.
Here’s what came in the box:
- Marx 490 locomotive with white stripe and chug-chug unit
- 1951 Bessemer & Lake Erie tender
- 715100 New York Central gondola
- 1988 B&LE caboose, orange
- 8 O27 curves, 2 O27 straight, billed as 98 inches of track
- 329 transformer, 25 watt
Entry level sets like The Rambler always sold well for Marx, because of the low price. The $15 price wasn’t the impulse buy in 1974 that it is today. Adjusted for inflation, the Rambler sold for more like $94 in today’s dollars. But it was still the least expensive electric train set on the market. And if the Rambler wasn’t quite enough train for you, Marx offered the 4362 Cannonball, with one more car.
The problem for Marx was that entry-level sets like The Rambler 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.
The Bessemer and Lake Erie railroad
The Rambler commemorated the Bessemer and Lake Erie railroad. It wasn’t the first time Marx commemorated them, having created colorful 6-inch tin boxcars with the B&LE roadname in decades past. The B&LE was smaller than many of the other railroads in the Great American Railroads series, but would have had strong appeal in the midwest, particularly in Pittsburgh and Cleveland, which were the 10th and 24th largest cities in the United States at the time, respectively. Detroit, Indianapolis, and Columbus were also nearby, and they were the 5th, 11th, and 21st largest cities. Incidentally, the B&LE also serves Girard, Pennsylvania, home of Marx’s train factory.
Unlike many of the railroads Marx commemorated in the series, the B&LE still exists as a Class II railroad operating in northwestern Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio. At the time of The Rambler set commemorating it, it had already existed more than 100 years, primarily hauling freight related to the steel industry.
In 2004, the Canadian National Railway acquired the B&LE, and continues to operate it today as a subsidiary.
The W.T. Grant version of Marx set 4336
Marx also sold the Rambler train through W.T. Grant, but without the Rambler name. Marx offered W.T. Grant its own exclusive packaging and consist. The W.T. Grant version bore the same catalog number, 4336. But the Grant version came in simpler packaging billing it as a Grant exclusive, and it included a 34-piece paper village. Grant sold the set for $19.97.
Marx set 4336 marked the end of the line for the long partnership of Marx and Grant. Both companies were struggling in 1974. Grant filed bankruptcy at the beginning of 1975, becoming the second largest corporate bankruptcy ever, eclipsed only by the Penn Central railroad at the time. Marx made the decision to stop making new trains at the end of 1974, selling off the existing inventory while it lasted. Sadly, neither company survived the 1970s. Quaker Oats spun off Marx in 1976 and it closed soon after. And W.T. Grant’s last store closed in 1976.
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.