Roadgeek Toys

[US71]

With Christmas just around the corner, what were some of your favorite roadgeek toys growing up?

One of my favorites was the Buddy-L Stop Light

[formulanone]

Wow, I used to have an all-plastic version of that toy, and it wasn't electric...probably around 1980.

Also had a lot of wooden signs on posts, with a round wooden base in them. My wife's school has a set that's virtually identical.



Sort of like these, but the bases aren't green.

We had Lego streets that connected together, used to make racetracks, city plans, disasters...

Lots of Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars, too.

[triplemultiplex]

My brothers and I would take a cheap, white table cloth and with a bunch of markers, turn it into a city for our Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars.  Some of the later ones had all the utilities located since playing with the construction vehicles was among our favorites.  Then we could model our play on the real construction going on in the community.

[Dr Frankenstein]

My brothers and I would take a cheap, white table cloth and with a bunch of markers, turn it into a city for our Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars.  Some of the later ones had all the utilities located since playing with the construction vehicles was among our favorites.  Then we could model our play on the real construction going on in the community.

Ditto.

[KEK Inc.]

I had a ton of Legos and Hot Wheel road sets.  There were some European road sets that had white lines in the middle, so I just used them for 4-lane Interstates through the city.

[PAHighways]

I have an entry about a roadgeek toy I got 27 Christmases ago at the Pennsylvania Highways Blog.

There is a line of toys from Germany called Playmobil, which is a little larger in scale than LEGO, but has similar themes, one of which is construction.

[formulanone]

There is a line of toys from Germany called Playmobil, which is a little larger in scale than LEGO, but has similar themes, one of which is construction.

I had that one too, although for me it was roughly 30 years ago...wondered for years why we didn't have those red and white triangle signs, until I watched European racing on TV.

[US71]

I had some kind of road building set when I was a kid. Wood bases, square plastic columns and connectors of various sizes, white roadway segments (straight and curved) several cars and an auto transport truck, and green road signs.  MIGHT have been made by Tinkertoy, but I'm not sure. I don't even remember the name. Of course, it's been probably 35-40 years. My Aunt in Chicago bought it for me and I kept it at her house.

[Dr Frankenstein]

I think I had this Playmobil set.

[hobsini2]

I used the make "stoplight" intersections just from legos.  The lego holes were often 3 and 5 on the block and the long thin "sticks" would be the mast arms off of the thin doubles. I still break out my Legos every once and a while.

[US71]

My road building set was Freeway USA Bridge & Turnpike Building Set by Kenner, not TinkerToy



1964? I didn't think it was that old.  

[hobsini2]

My road building set was Freeway USA Bridge & Turnpike Building Set by Kenner, not TinkerToy



1964? I didn't think it was that old.   

I vaguely remember something like that when i was little.

[Henry]

I remember most of the above-mentioned toys from my days in grade school! At home, I loved taking virtual road trips across the country by driving my Hot Wheels cars all over the pages of the family road atlas!

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

My road building set was Freeway USA Bridge & Turnpike Building Set by Kenner, not TinkerToy

http://www.girderpanel.com/GirderPanelImages/set00024Pic01.jpg

1964? I didn't think it was that old.  

I'll take your 1964 and raise you to 1956 from the same website

http://www.girderpanel.com/ListOfAllSets.htm

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

Now this the variation of Girder & Panel that I remember from my youth.

My grandparents had one of these and I remember having to beg and plead with them to let me play with it.
Have to laugh, My mom was going through photos of me and my brothers from our childhood and found a photo of my dad and I putting one of those bridges together. Must of been from 1981 or 1982.

[Truvelo]

I had something called Majo-Kit. It consisted of plastic sections of sidewalk with kerbing that you joined together to form streets. These sections had holes in them to place streetlights, signs and traffic lights. The traffic lights had a rotating cylinder with colored dots stuck to it and you turned it to display the correct aspect. The only problem for me is it was produced by a French company so the signs had foreign symbols.

[vtk]

I once saw a toy in a store that I briefly wanted.  It was a paving machine which unspooled a completed roadway behind it (printed on thin, flexible plastic) and it was about the right scale for matchbox cars.  I lost interest when I noticed where it said on the box that it only makes 24 inches of road.

[kurumi]

I once saw a toy in a store that I briefly wanted.  It was a paving machine which unspooled a completed roadway behind it (printed on thin, flexible plastic) and it was about the right scale for matchbox cars.  I lost interest when I noticed where it said on the box that it only makes 24 inches of road.

I remember this one from Tonka ... same one?

[Tom89t]

What about model mini traffic signals that look like the ones in the real world?

[vtk]

I once saw a toy in a store that I briefly wanted.  It was a paving machine which unspooled a completed roadway behind it (printed on thin, flexible plastic) and it was about the right scale for matchbox cars.  I lost interest when I noticed where it said on the box that it only makes 24 inches of road.

I remember this one from Tonka ... same one?

I don't think that's it.  The one I remember was in the late 90's, and I don't think it had any obvious metal parts.

[Alex]

I have an entry about a roadgeek toy I got 27 Christmases ago at the Pennsylvania Highways Blog.

There is a line of toys from Germany called Playmobil, which is a little larger in scale than LEGO, but has similar themes, one of which is construction.

I had the Highway Construction Set, was definitely one of my favorites. Loved the sign bridges. There was another thing I had for the set that had a construction "barricade" with a yellow beacon that actually illuminated. Maybe that was an add-on, because I don't see it in the original box images at the url. My set is long gone, having been pitched in the 80s (cannot remember if it broke or what).

[Alps]

Wow, I used to have an all-plastic version of that toy, and it wasn't electric...probably around 1980.

Also had a lot of wooden signs on posts, with a round wooden base in them. My wife's school has a set that's virtually identical.



Sort of like these, but the bases aren't green.

We had Lego streets that connected together, used to make racetracks, city plans, disasters...

Lots of Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars, too.

Very similar to you. I still have all 14 (maybe there were originally 16?) wooden signs from my childhood, up on my bookshelf. I also have 700+ model cars (I was really into cars), and I had a bunch of pieces that would turn into a small racecourse. I would "race" my cars along the racecourse, seeing how many pushes I could get the course done in. (I think I once got a car all the way through all the curves in one shot.) I had a Micro Machines (gone), a little motorized thing that would lift cars up and drop them down a pair of slides, and my favorite, a huge plastic play mat with tons of streets all over it. You can imagine how much time I spent driving my then-piteous car collection over all those roads. The final roadgeek toys I had? Pencils and paper. Maps, maps, everywhere.

[signalman]

Oh man!  I remember those signs.  I had those too (or ones similar).  I also still have a ton of Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars.  I made roads out of plywood and other materials I could find and I'd mark lanes with markers.  My dad even built me an interchange out of masonite, it bridged over a highway that I marked out underneath (it was just a simple cloverleaf, but I still played with cars on it for years).  I used model lights to light my highways and lighted signs that I found at a model train show.  They were meant to be used as billboard advertisements, but I used them as exit signs.  It looked cool in the dark.  I also remember finding a set of small cones ad plastic baracades that I'd use to set up  construction zones.  I remember building houses and other buildings (police stations, gas station, town hall, stores) out of Legos so my roads had destinations.

[hm insulators]

I used to draw entire networks of roads on our driveway with chalk and run my Matchbox cars up and down them.

[vtk]

I used to draw entire networks of roads on our driveway with chalk and run my Matchbox cars up and down them.

Me too. I was always running out of white and yellow.