Last Updated on March 9, 2024 by Dave Farquhar
The Marx 4965 train set spent its life a bit of an awkward place in Marx’s lineup. It was a low end 4-wheel plastic set but had a 490 locomotive with a chug chug unit, reverse, and a headlight, raising the price beyond what may have seemed competitive. Marx sold it in 1970 and 1971 and it may have had two variations.
Marx electric train set catalog# 4965
The Marx 4965 electric train set was very similar to other 4 wheel plastic sets they sold at discount stores a decade before. It consisted of a 25W transformer, 10 pieces of track, a steam engine and tender, a grain hopper, box car and caboose to make up a four 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, reverse, and headlight
- 1951 Penn Central or New York Central tender, 4 wheel, black
- Lehigh Valley 4 wheel hopper, #21913
- Baltimore & Ohio boxcar, #467110
- Penn Central or New York Central 4 wheel caboose, orange (matched to tender)
- #309 25w AC transformer
- 8 o27 curves and 2 O27 straights to make a 102″ oval
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, 1970 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, but he only listed one variant, the Penn Central. He also listed specific colors but I’ve seen the colors of the freight cars vary.
What the set originally cost
This set probably sold for around $20 in 1970 and 1971 but I can’t find any ads featuring it. Retailers liked to push the smaller, cheaper 4 wheel sets that came with a cheaper engine, perhaps just a circle of track, and one less car. Those cut down sets sold for around $15 and they’d put them on sale for around $10 to get people in the door in December. There was little on the packaging to distinguish why this set was better than the other sets, and once you were willing to spend $20, Marx had sets in that range with 8 wheel trucks and sometimes even with automatic couplers.
What was the Penn Central Railroad?
The Penn Central Railroad was the result of three struggling former rivals, the Pennsylvania Railroad, the New York Central railroad, and the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroads merging in 1968. The merger didn’t turn things around for them. 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 and is still the second-largest today. Only Enron Corporation’s 2001 bankruptcy eclipsed it.
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, such as the 4351 and 9725, the Penn Central never ran steam locomotives. The Pennsylvania was the last of its predecessor companies to retire its steam engines, having done so in 1957. That means parents who bought the 4965 Marx train set were buying them for kids who probably never saw steam engines in operation. The very late Marx 41850 set was a more accurate depiction of what Penn Central ran.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.