Vintage Toy Buses & Coaches

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Have you ever wondered what vintage toy buses might be available in other countries?

This page is devoted to old toy buses & passenger vehicles, if you want to see instant comprehensive listings of vintage & antique toy buses for sale via Ebay in USA, Canada, Europe & Australia.......

Click an image to start your search in the country of your choice.

USA	UK	GERMANY	FRANCE	ITALY	CANADA	AUSTRALIA

Finding the Toy Buses / Passenger Vehicles You Want on Ebay

Whilst there are quite a few individual toy buses & coaches worth a lot of money, serious collectors understand the value in any antique or vintage toy vehicle in mint condition. These toys, especially with original boxes, are limited in number, so finding high quality, rare items on eBay is a matter of regularly checking around the different country locations on our website until you are lucky enough to be there at the right time to make a successful bid.

Influences on Toy Bus Manufacturers

Internationally Recognized Bus Lines & Types

A lot of buses are immediately recognized as being from a specific country & have had an influence on the toy industry with youngsters wanting to have replicas of their favorites like the London Transport red buses, Greyhound buses, the yellow school buses from USA and the Jeepney conceived in The Philippines.

Jeepney Toy

Old US School Bus

1950's Greyhound Bus Model

Vintage Toy Bus Manufacturers

The list is endless with many scale model buses & coaches being produced all over the world. The premier manufacturers are / were mainly based in USA, Europe & Japan. Below are some examples of some of the most popular for collectors.

For a comprehensive history of toy / model vehicles look at this Wikipedia entry.

Matchbox

Founded in the United Kingdom in 1953, Matchbox has become world renowned for creating both realistic die-cast and plastic scaled models of a number of different vehicle types ranging from classic racing cars to army jeeps. Matchbox toy cars are known for their fine detail and are popular with both young children to adult collectors. In spite of introducing other products over the years, they are still known mainly for their precise replicas of cars through the ages.

Old Matchbox Bus

Dinky Toys

Another famous company who first started their die cast miniature vehicles in 1934 from the Meccano factory located in Liverpool, England. The first vehicles were made from lead and included a racing car, tractor, delivery van, truck, sports car & a tank. Initially the vehicles were not particularly accurate representations of their subects, but did always have rubber tires. Dinky toy vehicles soon caught the attention of young people & the company went from strength to strength over the next three decades, but finally succumbed to intense competition & closed its doors in 1979.

Leyland Atlantean Bus by Dinky

Solido

Solido is a French manufacturer of die cast model vehicles based in Oulins, Anet, France. Although Solido was founded in the early 1930's it wasn't until the 60's that trucks & buses were produced in any quantity. As well as French they also manufactured German & Italian marques, more or less leaving the British variants out of their product lineup. It was the 1970's before Solido became recognised as one of the leading manufacturers of 1:43 scale die cast toys due to the quality & detail in their products.

Solido Toy Renault Bus

Marklin

The Marklin company was founded in 1859 In Goppingen, Germany. These days Marklin are best known for their train products, but they did manufacture a number of good quality tinplate and die cast vehicles including the sought after Volkswagen bus range. They included a print run number on almost all their printed material, including the boxes in which their products were packed. These print run numbers indicate the month and year of printing which is very useful for dating the relevant toy.

Marklin Die Cast Toy VW Buses

Corgi

Mettoy Playcraft Ltd introduced the Corgi Toys range of vehicles in 1956, they were soon to become the largest manufacturer of die cast vehicles in the world. Great detail & innovations such as clear plastic windows proved to be a great hit & in the first year alone 2.75 million toy vehicles were sold. This robbed Dinky of a great deal of the market, but Corgi Toys fortunes were to temporarily held up due to a massive fire which destroyed their Swansea factory. Revival of the company was greatly helped by the James Bond Aston Martin DB5 & the 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' models.

Click image for more information & current range of models