The BRIO World Village theme, with it’s modular, open back designs that include furniture, is not entirely new territory for BRIO: back in the 60’s and 70’s, BRIO made doll houses.

This scan is from a 1970 Scanditoy catalog. Scanditoy is a toy wholesaler in the Nordic market that was under BRIO’s holding company, BRIO AB.

The Shopping Sherpa has some nice close-up photos of her 1960’s and 1970’s BRIO dollhouses and you can find more photos of the furniture and accessories they offered on Annette Jensen’s Pinterest Board.

Of course, the BRIO World Village products are more in the style of Playmobil than true dollhouses, but that’s appropriate for toys that are targeted at young children. Still, it’s a return to some of BRIO’s roots in a way, and it brings something truly new to the Wooden Railway line.

I added some catalog cover images to the Catalog Spotting page: the 1982 catalog, a 1978-79 catalog from France, a 1976 catalog from Sweden, and what looks like an early to mid 1950’s catalog.

In 1994, BRIO released the #33389 Tip Converter accessory for the wooden railway system. It is arguably the most baffling of all the wooden railway products, with a name that does nothing to help people understand what it is or what it’s for.

Here’s how it works: you move a tipping truck into the center of the mechanism, and then turn the knob on the side. This causes the mechanism to lift the tipping truck into the air and flip it over, as if dumping its contents to the ground below. You then turn the knob to lower the car back into place.

Believe it or not, this accessory is modeled after an actual piece of railroad equipment: the rotary car dumper, or wagon tippler as it’s known in the U.K. They do exactly what I just described: rotate the track segment and car together to dump out the car’s contents. In a real railroad, these are used with gondola cars rather than hopper cars (what BRIO calls tipping trucks) as the latter have sloped sides and hatches for unloading.

Image credit: Heyl & Patterson Inc, WikiMedia Commons

For more images of rotarty car dumpers, do a Google image search.

I recently gained access to some old marketing materials from 1999 that BRIO sent out to its U.S. retailers. The most interesting of these was a flyer advertising upcoming releases and it featured an early prototype in the Theodore Tugboat™ lineup for product #32718 called Charlotte the Container Ship:

As you can see from the footnote, the final character and product name was still not known at the time this was printed. The Theodore Tugboat television series, produced by Cochran Entertainment Inc., was in production from 1993 through 2001 so it’s possible that the name wasn’t finalized in the series at the time the prototype was created. Or there may just have been some confusion or miscommunication between BRIO and Cochran, and BRIO needed to get the product announcement out before they could get clarification.

Either way, the final toy would come to market as Chester the Container Ship, and would look quite different from the prototype shown in the flyer.

Major changes between early prototypes and final releases are not uncommon in the toy industry, though having them appear in catalogs is less so. After seeing this flyer, I went back through my catalog collection and noticed that Charlotte shows up in the 1999 wishbook, as well. Though the name is still printed on the side of the boat (or, rather, stuck on with paper…this is an early prototype after all), the official product name is given as just “Container Ship”.

BRIO collector and enthusiast Tyme let me see a copy of an old flyer from 1997 that was sent out to BRIO retailers. This was something of a pre-announcement of upcoming BRIO products in the late 1997 and early1998 timeframe. On the cover of this flyer, which bears the name “Toy Fair 1997”, is a photo of a prototype train in orange:

Inside the booklet is a larger photo with more information, indicating that the train was modeled after the TGV in France (in French, the Train à Grande Vitesse, which translates as “high speed train”), specifically the TGV Sud-Est in its original orange livery. According to Tyme, who had a close relationship with his local BRIO retailer, BRIO was not able to secure the rights from France to sell the train so it never made it to market.

As you can see in the photo (click to enlarge), this prototype is just a mockup. The body is orange, but the graphics are printed on paper which are glued onto the train body. This is probably fairly common in the early stages of train design since, once you have the body color decided, changing the graphics is easy if you are just printing them on paper as opposed to commiting them permanently in ink on the train itself.

Also note the early prototype of the redesigned Shinkansen as well, which bears the name Shinkansen Tokaido. The final product name for this train would be Shinkansen Nozomi when it was finally released in early 1998. In Japan, Tokaido is the name of one of the high-speed rail lines in operation while Nozomi is the name of the fastest service offering on this line (the limited-stop service). So Shinkansens Nozomi is merely a more specific name for the same train. The train itself is modeled after the 300 series which was in operation from 1992 through 2012.

Also note the suggested pricing in US Dollars. BRIO has never been cheap. Accounting for inflation, $43 in 1998 is equivalent to about $62 today.

I received a copy of a 1982-83 catalog from writer and BRIO enthusiast Joshua McMorrow-Hernandez and will be adding it to the catalog archive, with his permission of course, in the coming days. One interesting bit of history jumped out at me in perusing it, however, and that is the origin of the City Park set, #33578. This item first appeared as a wooden railway accessory in the 1984 catalog, but it appears that it began life as an accessory to what BRIO would eventually come to call their role-playing line of toys.

My earliest catalog is from 1980, so what I know of this line is limited to that decade. The 1980-81 catalog shows these four items:

• Garage #1110/31654, a large building with three overhead doors,
• Garage/petrol station #1111/31656, basically the garage plus gas pumps
• Parking Garage #1113/31658, a three-story garage with petrol station, numbered parking spots and adhesive stickers that children could use to customize its appearance
• Farm #1122/31105, a farm house with removable roof, large play yard and a two-room animal shed.

Accessories for this line would appeared in the early 1980’s, debuting in the 1982-83 catalog:

• Farm #1131/6-31131, a four-piece animal shed with animals
• City Park #1132/4-31132, which would later become wooden railway accessory #333578
• Chicken run #1133/2-31133, a two-piece chicken coop with chickens and other figures

The 3-car garage set #1110/31654 would eventually be renumbered to #31109 in the new 5-digit system, and the Farm #1122/31105 would become #31122. Both products would live for several more years and were last seen in catalogs in 1989.

The accessories for the farm, the smaller four-piece farm and the chicken run, were in catalogs through 1986. What’s interesting here is that these items were in the same styling and rough scale as the wooden railway system, even using the same animal and figure cut-outs, but only the City Park would go on to become an official wooden railway accessory. It would also live on an extra year, showing up in catalogs through 1987.

The Town set is one of BRIO’s oldest and most venerable wooden railway accessories. First introduced in the early 1960’s, the Town saw production through 1991 with only modest styling changes, giving it a roughly 30-year history.

The first known catalog appearance was around 1964, and the set originally consisted of three houses, two skyscrapers, a church and a factory. The skyscrapers were wide, and the factory was a single building with two roofs. The factory smokestack was a skinny, smooth dowel 9mm in diameter and 55mm long.

As the catalog pages from this time are all black-and-white drawings, it’s not known what color the roofs were but surviving pieces from this time, and a catalog sheet excerpt from the 1970’s, suggest that the houses and skyscrapers all had red roofs, the church had a green roof and red steeple, and the larger factory roof was green while the smaller roof was red. Curiously, the church and the skyscrapers were also double-sided, meaning the graphics for the windows were printed on both sides.

By the early 1970’s, the Town had lost the double-sided printing, one of the skyscrapers and one of the houses, but gained six trees. These early trees differed from the tree style that would emerge in the 1980’s in that they had a round, brown base.

Sometime around 1980, the Town set underwent a major styling change: the skyscraper was replaced with a much narrower building, the factory was split into two pieces and lost the smaller roof, the smokestack grew to a 12mm diameter and 60mm length, the roof of the church turned red, the roof of one of the houses turned black and the trees were replaced with the newer style. Note that the smokestack was still a smooth dowel.

The Town most people are familiar with emerged around 1983. The styling change was minor: the smokestack was replaced with a 12x60mm wooden dowel pin with spiral fluting.

It would remain in production unchanged through 1991. This latter set is frequently seen on eBay, though missing smokestacks are not uncommon.

If you look at a BRIO catalog from 1980 you will see that each product has two product numbers, one of the form NNNN and one of the form NNNNN-NN. For example, the original Tunnel is listed like so:

3362 31405-12
Tunnel.

Neither of these numbers appears to be related to the another, though the four-digit number 3362 is nearly identical to the modern, five-digit product code for the Tunnel which was 33362. Jump to 1983, and the product codes show yet another variation. While the four-digit product code hasn’t changed, the five-dash-two product code adds a prefix, giving a final form of N-NNNNN-NN. Returning to the Tunnel, the product code was given as:

3362 4-31405-12

Why are there some many product codes, and what do they mean?

To answer this, we have to go back to the original BRIO wooden railway product which was first sold in 1957. Back then, it was called the BRIO Miniature Railway, and it was given the product code 31405. The Miniature Railway was just one of several BRIO products, and it did not have the extensive list of accessories that are present today. It was just a single product, sold under the code 31405.

As the popularity of the wooden railway grew, BRIO began to add accessories. Rather than give each of these items its own product code, they were given a sort of subcode: a two-digit suffix appended to the wooden railway code. The Tunnel, #31405-12, was accessory 12 in the 31405 product line, and thus, the NNNNN-NN code system was born. The catalog sheet from the mid-1960’s shows the accessories that were available for the wooden railway system at the time—it was still called the Miniature Railway at that point—all under the 31405 master code. (Note that back then, the codes were actually given the form NNNNN/NN instead of NNNNN-NN.)

In 1980, and possibly earlier, BRIO began the transition to a unique 4-digit product code for all products. This is more speculative, but it appears that BRIO had a transition period of several years where they used both the new and old product codes in catalogs. Whether this was to give BRIO, retailers, distributors, or all three sufficient time to transition their computer systems and records to the new numbering is unknown. What is really strange, however, is the 1983 catalog sheet that introduced the prefix code while the 4-digit code transition was still in progress.

In 1983, there were two prefix codes: 4- and 7-. The 4- prefix wes used for traditional accessories and wes paired with the 31405 base code, but the 7- prefix wes used for starter sets and was paired with the 31404 base code, and given a unique suffix code. Even the “original” Miniature Railway boxed set, 31405, was renumbered to 7-31404-50. Some of the 7-31404 codes (with descriptions, as the starter sets were not given unique names back then) were:

• 3115 7-31404-20 Circle set
• 3125 7-31404-25 Figure-8/viaductset
• 3145 7-31404-50 Original miniature railway set

In 1984, BRIO completely dropped both the old product numbering scheme and the prefixes, and adopted the 5-digit product code that we see today. The 5-digit code was created simply by taking the 4-digit code and prefixing it with a “3”. So the Tunnel, 3362, became 33362, the Circle set 3115 became 33115, and so on.

While these new 5-digit codes are guaranteed to be unique in a given catalog year, a few of them were recycled over time so product numbers are not unique throughout all time. Code #33379, for example, was used for both the Quay-Berth accessory from the mid-1980’s and the Small Town set from the mid-1990’s.

There are still a lot of unanswered questions, namely why BRIO made so many changes in the early 1980’s, but this should explain how these product codes evolved over time, and where they originated.