Makin' Trains Purty - Part 2 - A Streamlined Tale (Literally)
about 3 years ago – Sun, Apr 11, 2021 at 03:23:11 AM

Most esteemed backers,

For this update, we had written a short essay about the history of streamliner trains and train advertising in the 1930s, including a brief history of the Mercury. We had researched it for a long time. It was interspersed with photos and everything.

We think it was so beautiful it might have made you cry.

We typed it, as we always type our updates, directly into Kickstarter.

When it was done, we proofread it (really well this time!) and decided that we needed to add just one more photo.

Our mouse navigated up to our browser tabs and we clicked.

But instead of opening the tab we wanted, our current tab closed. The one in which we had been writing our Great American Work of Nonfiction.

No big, right? We'd been saving our progress as we went along, right?

Right?

No, Dear Reader, we had not.

We love you and we love trains. But not enough to rewrite the whole thing.

So instead,  we present to you a short summary of what we had written with the photos that we thankfully had saved.

Streamliner trains of the 1930s

In the 1930s, designers started covering up their locomotives with metal casings. They did this to make their trains more aerodynamic and look hella cool. This was called streamlining. Like what we're doing now to the story we had written before.

Art Deco Streamliner Train Ads

In this section, we talked about Art Deco and how its futuristic look paired perfectly with the new streamlined trains. It was Hemingwayesque. There were sentences. The sentences were short. And they were good.

The Mercury

Here we talked about the history of the Mercury and our love for it, which we knew from the beginning we wanted as the blue train for our set. The Mercury, designed by legendary designer Henry Dreyfuss, was actually a series of three trains that ran in the northern U.S. from 1936 to 1959. Sadly, they were all eventually scrapped.

Our love for the Mercury is like the Old Man's love for fishing and Joe DiMaggio. But just as the Old Man's marlin was eaten by sharks, so too was our Mercury section eaten by Kickstarter's lack of an autosave feature.

The Mercury's Ads

Here we talked about the Mercury's ads. Despite being one of the most beautiful streamlined trains in history, the Mercury's ads weren't the most attractive examples of Art Deco train ads we had seen. Could they be improved upon? Careful readers would have noted subtle references to "À la recherche du temps perdu."

Our Reimagined Mercury Ad

In this section, we talked about how our amazing artist, Julianne Griepp, used to neither drawing streamlined trains nor in Art Deco style, produced the Mercury cover we'd eventually use as her first draft. 

Conclusion

Here we sort of just wrapped everything up and teased the next update. We had a killer last line that we cannot recall at the moment. So we substitute this one:

"And so we chug on, trains against the track, switched back ceaselessly into the past."

We promise to regularly save next time, y'all.

Have a good rest of the weekend,

The Little Plastic Train Company

Makin' Trains Purty - Part 1 of a Short Series on Train Art
about 3 years ago – Fri, Apr 09, 2021 at 05:33:19 PM

When we first started this project, we didn't just want our trains to look special. We wanted our artwork to look special too.

If you've been board gaming as long as we have, you've seen a lot of train board game covers. 

Seriously, y'all, sooooo many.

They all tend to look the same: a 19th century steam engine, drawn in a realistic style, traveling at an angle towards the viewer.

Sometimes you're lucky and you get a different type of engine, drawn realistically, traveling at an angle towards the viewer.

We get it. The publisher needs to tell the customer that this is a train game and it takes place at a certain period in history. It's hard not to slap a realistically drawn train on the cover and call it a day. There's nothing wrong with that. None of these are "bad" covers.

But are any of them memorable?

We've always been most impressed by covers that take a great degree of artistic license with how they depict their off-center trains. For example:

Just look at that red train! The severe sans serif font! The billows of steam blowing out of the bottom of that train! An RRR logo that ever so subtly calls to mind "CCCP." With just a few small artistic choices, this cover immediately evokes a particular time and place in history. You want to turn this cover box over to find more about this game.

Railroad Ink is a relaxing roll and write game. The calming blues and simple hand-drawn train and track tell you exactly what kind of game is inside the box. And it makes the game stand out from all the others on the shelf.

Yardmaster is a simple, fast-playing, minimalist card game. This freighter, moving quickly and drawn in a simple and bold style, clearly communicates what type of gaming experience you're in for.

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We wanted to have beautiful, evocative cover art like this.

There was just one problem.

We weren't going to be selling games that would give players a particular experience. We were going to be selling miniature trains. 

Realistic miniature trains.

On the one hand, we needed to let people know what the trains in our tins looked like. 

On the other hand, we didn't want to bore you with just realistically drawn trains coming at you from 45 degree angles.

What to do?

Well, it turns out that advertisers going back over 100 years had already solved this problem.

But that's a topic for our next update.

The Little Plastic Train Company

P.S. It's Friday! If you're in North America, just keep on "chugging" for a few more hours--then you'll finally be able to "blow off some steam."

P.P.S. Yes, we are committed to the bad train puns. You could say we have a "one track" mind.

P.P.P.S. Thanks to all of you who have voted in our poll! If you're a new backer, please go HERE to vote on what kinds of train-related minis you'd like us to make next. Please just vote once. We'll leave the poll open for a few more days so more people can participate.

$100,000 in pledges and 1,500 backers! Plus a poll for you to choose were we go next! Is this subject line too long? It's probably too long. We'll stop it here.
about 3 years ago – Fri, Apr 09, 2021 at 02:35:42 PM

Wow. We are astonished by all of your support. Thank you!

Over $100,000 in pledges and 1,500 backers. That's a lot!

As we did in our last update, here are some facts to put those numbers in perspective:

• In 1500, the Battle of Novara was fought between the armies of King Louis XII of France and Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, as part of the Second Italian War, a conflict over Louis XII's claims over Milan and Naples. You would not have wanted to be there. Renaissance-era warfare was not pretty. We had no theory of disease. And there were no plastic trains anywhere for you to play with.

• 100,000 years ago humans were in the Middle Paleolithic Period of the Stone Age. We co-existed with Neanderthals. We lived in hunter gatherer societies. There is some evidence that humans began to engage in long distance trade during this time period. So far, no evidence has been found to suggest that humans traded little plastic trains.

• Humans place arbitrary significance on numbers ending in 0 because we use a base 10 counting system. Mathematically, numbers ending in 0 really aren't that special. Apart from cultural practice, there's really no reason to make a big deal about a number ending in 0. Particularly if you're about to turn 40 years old. It's just a number! Everything is going to be fine. It's all going to be fine. You still have plenty of time to do all the other things you want to do in life.

Anyway, thank you for helping us reach this arbitrary milestone.

We've been reading through all your suggestions in the comments about what products you'd like us to make in future Kickstarters. We want to make what our backers want, so now's your chance to decide!

We've taken the top five suggestions and put them in a poll. 

Click HERE to vote for what you'd like to see us make next!

That's all for now, folks. Thanks again for supporting our project!

The Little Plastic Train Company

1,000 backers!
about 3 years ago – Thu, Apr 08, 2021 at 03:15:24 PM

1,000 of you have trusted us to make and send you some cool plastic trains!

We are humbled.

Here are some statistics to put this incredible number into perspective:

• If each of you were to book a ticket on the modern Orient Express, we'd need 5.7 Orient Expresses (Orients Express?) to fit everyone!

• All 1,000 of you would fill up only a bit more than half of the largest passenger train in the world, the Japanese E4 Shinkansen, which can hold up to 1,634 passengers.

• If each of you represented a car on Snowpiercer, we'd still be 34 cars short!

• If all 1,000 of you were the size of an average adult human and stood on each others' shoulders, we would not get close to reaching the moon. We'd be, like, way short. I don't know by how much exactly, but it's a lot.

Anyway, thank you so much! Y'all are the best!

And now, time for just a few of the awful train puns we promised:

• Thanks for getting this project on "track"!
• Out of all the projects you can "choo"se from on Kickstarter, we're glad you chose us!
• We never could have "gauged" how enthusiastic everyone has been!
• We love all of our backers, even those of you who are "eccentric cranks"!

More updates coming soon!

The Little Plastic Train Company

We have a winner!
about 3 years ago – Thu, Apr 08, 2021 at 03:15:17 PM

If you signed up for our mailing list on our website before the Kickstarter launched, we promised that you'd be entered in a drawing to win a complete set of all five trains (or what we're now calling the "Conductor" pledge).

Over 7,000 of you signed up. We put everyone in a spreadsheet and had google give us a random number to determine our winner. It spat out 2,370.

Congratulations to Tony Vecchio of Geebung, Australia!

You can let him know in the comments how jealous you are! I mean, how happy we all are for him!

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As we approach the end of the day, we wanted to thank all of you again for backing our project. 

We can't believe that after working on this project for almost a year we're actually going to be making these trains! 

And that we're going to be shipping them to you! 

And that you're going to take them out of their tins and move them around on your kitchen table and make "choo choo" noises with them and pretend that your salt and pepper shakers are the walls of a giant canyon as you "woosh" the trains between them!

Look out, train! It's a pepper rock slide! Nooooooo!

OK. Maybe we confused what we are going to do with the trains with what you're going to do with them. 

The salt and pepper shakers don't have to be the sides of a canyon. They could be skyscrapers. 

You do you.

Anyway, it's been a long, exciting day and we need to get some rest. Please be patient if we can't respond to your comments and messages for a while. We'll get to them, we promise.

See you tomorrow!

The Little Plastic Train Company