And That Factory
It was a huge Yugislavian toy factory; and yes, Mehanotehnika made the equivalent of Meccano. Can you tell the difference?
Easy as the name is different.
UK Meccano was never the same when it went blue and yellow - disgaceful.
Mehanotehnika made oodles of toys, a bit like Triang in its heyday. How about a typewriter?
At the other end of the scale were cheap and nasty plastic trains ...
... for the little kiddies.
As is de rigueur these days, Mehano model railway production has moved to China but fbb has no knowledge if what became of the Izola factory.
Maybe you could catch a bus and go to find out.
fbb has made a feeble effort at researching buses in Izola but the language problem plus an internet inadequacy challenge means that only general information has been gleaned.
There are timetables showing all stops ...
... with occasional panels like this.
This leads to this sort of thing.
Thankfully an awful lot of the on-line stuff is in English! Also very much in pseudo English is the operator name.
fbb could not find a route map, but Izola does feature on various pages.
Generally the buses are in better condition than in the UK.
And so to the tank wagon.
It was made in pre Slovenia days, so sometimes before 1991 and probably before the company's renaming as Mehano in 1990.
The model is "basic" made entirely in plastic ...
... with no printing on the main information panel. The chassis ...
... had a nominal but inadequate underside. The brake shoes, if applied to slow the train, would be totally ineffective as they are nowhere near the wheels!
fbb cannot identify an equivalent full size tank wagon. This VTG tanker has a passing likeness but ...
... isn't alike.
There is no sign of fbb's wagon on any present Mehano sales list, but illustrations exist if an old boxed train set ...
... with fbb's model in the upper window.
What the company is noted for today is its swish high speed train sets.
Here we have Eurostar ...
... TGV (France) ...
... Ouigo (France) ...
... ICE (Germany) ...
... and Thalys ...
... now merged commercially with Eurostar.
All models are to HO scale, so technically too small for UK layouts but, shhh, as the real things are much bigger (height and width) compared with the UK loading gauge, nobody will notice!
Next HST blog : Weds 26th November
