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| Aurora Sets - A wide variety |
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| By Bob Beers |
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Aurora made literally hundreds of slot car sets from the 60's to the 80's. The ones that are fully documented are ones that are found in the color catalogs put out each year. For decades, there has been, and still is, a trade show in New York called the New York Toy Fair. It is a show open only to the trades where toy companies wine and dine store buyers to get them to stock their products for the coming holiday season. Aurora had a permanent showroom on the third floor of the Toy Building in NY. It was room 317 to be exact. In there, Aurora's sales department and their engineers would demonstrate new products featured in their just printed catalogs, with the hopes of landing sales orders that would then justify them producing the item. Aurora was pretty good in marketing and manufacturing most everything pictured in their catalogs. With regard to sets, I can only recall the #1319 Thunderbike Racing Set in 1967 as one never produced. This was probably due to low orders based on performance of the cycles. In the last year, 1983, the most memorable unmade sets are the #30006 MASH Military Set and the #30066 AFX Fire Engine Play Set. |
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The Road Rail and Race Set
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Some of the more popular and desireable sets are the Vibrator sets in white colored boxes with plastic kits included. These are called the Scenic Sets and #1498 has a rare Gas Station kit and a trees kit while #1508 has trees and a ranch house kit. The Road Race and Rail Set #1511 is very hard to find and is highly priced. It was actually marketed by Parkway Industries and contained an Aurora Slot Car Set and a Tyco Train Set. Another popular and unique set was the High Sierra foam molded set pictured in the 1970 color catalog . This answered a long standing request for a set that required no setup. I don't think it sold well based on what is still around, and the limitation of a figure eight. |
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I have included in my book several sets called UNCATALOGED sets which we can only determine have been produced based on existing examples. There are more being discovered every month. I cataloged all I knew about at the time of my book printing but several continue to surface. There were many made exclusively for department store chains such as Sears, Montgomery Wards, and JC Penneys. There were also sets made for Polaroid, Simoniz, and General Electric employees. My official documentation of these sets is a part number, box to ID the set, and the instruction sheet. These together help document unique and uncataloged sets.
What sets other than the ones in my book have you seen and are able to substantiate?.......
I'd like to know................................ |
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