Vintage Toy Truck Manufacturers

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

For a comprehensive history of toy / model cars & trucks look at this Wikipedia entry.

The Moline Pressed Steel Company was founded in 1910 by Fred Lundahl to manufacture body parts mainly for the automotive and agricultural machinery markets. It wasn't until 1921 that Fred Lundahl started manufacturing metal toys after he built a toy dumper truck for his young son - Buddy. In 1976 the brand 'Buddy L' was sold to Richard Keats, a toy designer who was an employee of Buddy L from 1948. From 1990 the company was owned by Empire Industries who subsequently filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

Originally started by Mound Metalcraft, Tonka Toys was founded in 1955 with their main product line being tin trucks. The business did extremely well & with the acquisition of some other companies diversified into other metal products like barbeque grills & components. In 1991 Tonka Toys was sold to Hasbro as a result of debt incurred by interest from the  massive loans it took in 1987 to purchase a group of companies which included Palitoys.

Tomica is the brand name of Takara Tomy Co. of Japan and have been manufacturing a range of die cast toy vehicles since 1970. For the first four years they produced exclusively Japanese vehicles, but then progressed to 'foreign' makes in competition with Matchbox. There was a range of 110 vehicles commonly known as 'Tomy Pocket Cars' constantly available, the less popular models being dropped to make way for new ones. In the early 1980's the company faced a financial crisis & were forced to limit production of this range to eighty models.

A German company who produced traditional tinplate mechanical toys since before WW1. With war looming in Germany in the late 1930's they produced many military vehicles including tanks. It wasn't until the 60's that they included plastic injection for making their products, this allowed them to put a lot more detail into the finished product. In the 1970's they brought out a range of die cast vehicles branded as Mini-Mods which are now very collectible.

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.