Toys And Trains,

the trains came first,

but closely followed by toys if this ones anything to go by, it was thought to have been made in the late 1820s or early 1830s, so that is nearly as old as trains themselves, on the Antiques Roadshow to be broadcast this Sunday, expert Paul Atterbury described it as 'extraordinary', he said: ‘it's incredibly crude and it's made of re-used components', he added that the toy is clearly based on a locomotive of this time, 'so if this is actually recording those very early years of railway history, it is an extraordinary document,’ he said, it was stated that the original owners, an unnamed family, lived in a cottage that backed onto the Stockton and Darlington Railway in County Durham - the world's first public railway that The Rocket ran along (it did not) and are thought to have copied it,








it was bought by the current owner Tom Robson in the 1960s, the retired schoolteacher has cherished it ever since and took it along to the BBC's Antiques Roadshow where it was identified as probably the oldest toy train in the world, expert Paul Atterbury said it could be worth as much as £5,000, the article states that it is a copy of the Rocket,

but I think it is more likely a copy of this one, a woodcut of the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway on 27 September 1825, the Rocket was built 4 years later, I wonder how many other toy trains are waiting to be found again?