Low budget electric trains and Radio Shack don’t necessarily seem like the most obvious pairing. Here’s why Marx and Radio Shack teamed up for an exclusive train set, and why it didn’t go as well as either of them hoped.
The Marx Hot Shot, set number 4378 and Radio Shack Catalog# 60-2106, was part of the Great American Railroads series. It was a Radio Shack exclusive, sold only in 1974.
It was 1974. Marx Toys had merged with Quaker Oats 2 years before, and Quaker brought in Spike Fitzpatrick, a former sales manager for A.C. Gilbert’s American Flyer trains in the 1950s and 1960s. They didn’t give him much budget to work with, but they asked him to do what he could to refresh a 20-year-old product line and reinvigorate sales.
Fitzpatrick 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.
Catching a rising star
Radio Shack, meanwhile, was an electronics retailer. They made their name selling components to hobbyists, but by the 1970s, they were selling consumer electronics in a big way. Charles Tandy had purchased Radio Shack when it was in bankruptcy in 1962 and turned it around by simplifying its massive catalog. He believed in the 80/20 rule. 20% of the items in the catalog accounted for 80% of revenue and profit. By applying the 80/20 rule to his new acquisition, he was able to turn the chain around, and by 1974, it had 2500 locations nationwide.
This principle gave him some flexibility. It meant he could take a chance on something a little unconventional. If it didn’t deliver, he would blow out the inventory quickly and try something else. But if it worked, he had a new source of revenue. He’d find some other underperforming product to bounce out of the stores.
It was a bit risky for Marx. The upside was tremendous. Radio Shack had 2500 store locations and was growing quickly. The stores were in areas that their other retail partners hadn’t necessarily reached. So if the partnership worked, they had everything to gain. On the other hand, if it didn’t work, they probably weren’t going to get another chance.
The Marx Hot Shot set, catalog# 4378 for Radio Shack
The set that Marx delivered to Radio Shack was similar to what they sold at discount stores for $10 to $15 for about a decade, like the 9725 set Sears once sold. Radio Shack Catalog# 60-2106 consisted of a 25 watt transformer, a 490 locomotive, 14 pieces of track to make a dogbone instead of an oval, some plastic telephone poles to add a bit of visual interest, 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.
Rare items in the Radio Shack set
To a collector, the set is interesting. The 490 locomotive, Santa Fe tender, and 1977 Santa Fe caboose are common. The other half of the set is not. The Gulf Tank Car only came one other set, the 7360 Eagle Express. The red Lehigh Valley hopper only came in sets# 4378 and 4379. And the blue Erie flat car with the two automobiles is uncommon as well.
Most of the sets Marx sold in 1974 have something rare and unusual about them, and The Hot Shot is no exception.
Why the Marx Hot Shot failed
The Hot Shot set didn’t sell well. It was yesterday’s product in an era when real railroads were struggling and Americans weren’t romanticizing trains the way they did two decades before. Marx was hoping Boomer parents would buy electric trains for their kids because they had one or wanted one when they were kids. But whatever combination of consist and price point they needed to reach the Radio Shack audience, this wasn’t it.
I think it was too expensive. Radio Shack priced it at $24.95 in its pre-Thanksgiving ads, and that was too high for a set of this caliber. The discount and toy stores were selling sets with the same engine and two fewer cars and a smaller loop of track for half the price in November and December of the same year. The two additional cars and four track sections didn’t double the value. And if you were willing to pay $25 for train, you could get a Lionel set at Sears with one less car and less track for that price, but the cars had 8 wheels.
Radio Shack pulled the plug on its exclusive, discounted the remaining sets until they sold, and the Quaker Oats management pulled the plug on Marx trains soon after. It was a swan song for a product line that had survived the Great Depression, World War II, and tremendous competition after the war, and might have felt a bit underwhelming.
The legacy for Radio Shack, if not Marx
Then again, it seemed to have something of a legacy. Looking at Radio Shack catalogs from the early 1970s, you don’t see much in the way of toys. But by the end of the decade, Radio Shack carried a pretty extensive line of electronic toys. Some of them were cheap looking knock-offs of national brands, and some of them were unlike anything anyone else was carrying. The Radio Shack fire chiefs helmet is a somewhat notorious passive aggressive gift, and I certainly have fonder memories of it than my mom does.
In that light, it’s clear to see why Radio Shack would take a chance selling a basic electric train set in 1974. It didn’t do so well for them, but it was a calculated risk, and the calculus did work for them throughout the ’70s and ’80s.
For some reason when one of these sets turns up online and sells for the going rate of $65 to $100, it raises questions, partly because 1974 wasn’t a great year for Lionel, so the assumption is nothing Marx made that year will be worth much either. But the comparison isn’t quite right. These sets were only made for a single year. The sets are not worth a fortune, but they are harder to find than a comparable Lionel/MPC set specifically because 1974 was anything but a great year for Marx, and this set was part of a series that marked the end of the line for Marx trains.
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.