TYCO - 327F:300 - New York Central - 93724

Road/Company Information: The New York Central Railroad (reporting mark NYC), known simply as the New York Central in its publicity, was a railroad operating in the Northeastern United States. Headquartered in New York City, the railroad served most of the Northeast, including extensive trackage in the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Massachusetts, plus additional trackage in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec.

The railroad primarily connected greater New York and Boston in the east with Chicago and St.Louis in the midwest along with the intermediate cities of Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Detroit. NYC's Grand Central Terminal in New York City is one of its best known extant landmarks.

1853 company formation: Albany industrialist and Mohawk Valley Railroad owner Erastus Corning managed to unite ten railroads together into one system, and on March 17, 1853 executives and stockholders of each company agreed to merge. The merger was approved by the state legislature on April 2, and by May 17, 1853 the New York Central Railroad was formed.

In 1867 Vanderbilt acquired control of the Albany to Buffalo running NYC. On November 1, 1869 he merged the NYC with his Hudson River Railroad into the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad. Vanderbilt's other lines were operated as part of the NYC.

In 1914, the operations of eleven subsidiaries were merged with the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad, re-forming the New York Central Railroad. From the beginning of the merge, the railroad was publicly referred to as the New York Central Lines. In the summer of 1935, the identification was changed to the New York Central System.

In 1968 the NYC merged with its former rival, the Pennsylvania Railroad, to form Penn Central (the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad joined in 1969). That company went bankrupt in 1970 and was taken over by the federal government and merged into Conrail in 1976. Conrail was broken up in 1998, and portions of its system was transferred to the newly formed New York Central Lines LLC, a subsidiary leased to and eventually absorbed by CSX and Norfolk Southern. Those companies' lines included the original New York Central main line, but outside that area it included lines that were never part of the New York Central system. CSX was able to take one of the most important main lines in the nation, which runs from New York City and Boston to Cleveland, Ohio, as part of the Water Level Route, while Norfolk Southern gained the Cleveland, Ohio to Chicago, Illinois portion of the line called the Chicago line.

At the end of 1925, the New York Central System operated 11,584 miles (18,643 km) of road and 26,395 miles (42,479 km) of track; at the end of 1967 the mileages were 9,696 miles (15,604 km) and 18,454 miles (29,699 km).

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Brand/Importer Information: The history of TYCO trains can be traced back to John Tyler, a pioneer in HO scale who helped found the Mantua Toy & Metal Products Company in 1926 with other members of his family. They began selling trains under the Mantua name in the 1930s. Early offerings included the powerful Midjet Motor as well as a variety of rolling stock and steam locomotive kits. The shift towards “ready-to-run” (RTR) train sets after World War II led to the creation of the Tyler Manufacturing Company in 1952, better known as TYCO .
Consolidated Foods purchased TYCO in 1970, and manufacturing was shifted from New Jersey to Hong Kong. Consolidated Foods would later change its name to Sara Lee, though Norman Tyler remained as an executive with the new company. This change in ownership ushers in the “brown-box” period for collectors. Prior to 1970, TYCO offered models that reflected fairly accurate prototypes. After 1970, TYCO’s offerings wander into a fantasy world of unprototypical models.
The TYCO model railroad business was bought back by the Tyler family in 1977, who revived them under the Mantua Industries brand. Model train production by TYCO ended in the 1990s, with the final catalog appearance in 1993. The TYCO name continues as a line of radio-controlled cars produced by Mattel.
Many of the TYCO model train products were subsequently manufactured by Mantua and by International Hobby Corporation (IHC). In 2001, Mantua stopped producing its model railroad lines and sold the business to the Model Power company, which continued to sell a few items such as steam engines and freight cars under its Mantua Classics brand. In early 2014, Model Power was acquired by Model Rectifier Corporation (MRC). The company continued to make the Mantua Classics line.

Read more on HO Scale Train Resources and TYCO Brown-Box Era websites.