Last Updated on March 9, 2024 by Dave Farquhar
The Marx 4351 was a 4-wheel plastic set fronted by a 490 locomotive that came with a figure 8 of track and a set of paper buildings. Marx billed it as a complete train set with nothing more to buy. Depending on how you used it, they may have been right.
Marx electric train set catalog# 4351
The Marx 4351 electric train set was very similar to other 4 wheel plastic sets. It consisted of a 25W transformer, 17 pieces of track, a steam engine and tender, a grain hopper, tank car and caboose to make up a five unit train. It’s the 4-wheel plastic variety. That means it had four plastic wheels with fake truck sides to make them look like eight wheels, with fixed plastic knuckle couplers.
- 490 steam locomotive 0-4-0, black, with chug-chug unit
- 1951 New York Central or Penn Central tender, 4 wheel, black
- Lehigh Valley 4 wheel hopper, #21913
- Rocket Fuel tank car, white, #X-246
- New York Central or Penn Central 4 wheel caboose, orange (matched to tender)
- #309 25w AC transformer
- 34 piece paper village set
- 12 o27 curves, 4 O27 straights, and a 9-degree crossover to make a figure 8, billed as 176 inches of track
- 6 plastic telephone poles
- 2 plastic automobiles
- An assortment of plastic figures
Positioning of Marx train set 4351
This wasn’t a bottom-of-the-line set, but it was close. The locomotive and transformer were Marx’s most basic model. But the most basic electric sets came with a simple oval of track and typically one less car. And they omitted the accessories.
I’ve seen complete boxed sets sell for around $50. A nice box can drive the value higher. So can having original paperwork.
Marx made the set for two years, 1966 and 1971. I’ve seen examples lettered for either the New York Central or the Penn Central. The set is in Robert Whitacre’s 1991 Greenberg’s Guide to Marx Trains vol III: Sets. The book noted both New York Central and Penn Central variants existed. The Penn Central came into being in 1968. That means all 1966 sets would have had NYC lettering, and 1971 sets may have been lettered either way.
Significance of the New York Central and Penn Central
The Penn Central Railroad came from the 1968 merger of three struggling former rivals, the Pennsylvania Railroad, the New York Central railroad, and the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroad. The merger didn’t go well. The new company, the sixth-largest corporation in the United States at the time, filed bankruptcy on June 21, 1970. It was the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history at the time and is still the second-largest today, eclipsed only by Enron Corporation’s 2001 bankruptcy.
In 1973, the federal government nationalized Penn Central to save it, and in 1976, parts of Penn Central and several other bankrupt railroads merged into Conrail.
Although Marx lettered a number of steam sets with the Penn Central name, the Penn Central never ran steam locomotives. The New York Central retired its last steam locomotive in 1953. That means parents who bought Marx train set 4351 were buying them for kids who probably never had seen steam engines in operation.
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.