Thursday 4 April 2013

The making of our plastic trains and slot cars

I just stumbled across a couple of interesting YouTube clips about the manufacturing process for model trains and slot cars. Both clips look like they come from a YouTube set of similar clips about how things are made. There is all manner of manufactured products featured, including how prototype steel rails are made and how mass-produced hot dogs are made.

I am interested in some of the manufacturing processes to find out if they might be industries useful for the model railroad. I therefore want to understand the production process and what are the inputs into the manufacturing process. While the transport in or out of the factory would also be of interest, it's not critical. I can either do further research on particular manufacturing companies or just make it up for the model railroad if it all sounds plausible.

Anyway, here are the two clips. The first is on model train production. I am not sure the clip is complete because it sort of just ends but there is still enough of interest there. It would be interesting to get a comment from one of our local Australian manufacturers to see if what's shown in the clip is the same as what goes on in the Chinese factories they use.


The slot car clip says it's about Scalextric slot cars but they look like Carrera products to me!