Holy smokes! That is a lot of birds and dogs. Is the 73 yo one carved from wood?
nope.
as my parents told, it was part of the first set of “soft” plastic animals, that were sold in germany after WW2.
i still got some pigs, sheep, horses, cows and wild animals from that series.
today the plastic is still flexible, not as brittle, as the plastic toys from the '60ies.
but Todd got nicer dogs. in the bigger scales (1:22.5 and 1:24) there are more detailed animals and figures available.
They were just dogs collected over the years (started in 1997) and taken off the railroad (actually out of boxes in the garage) just for this event. We have a few more, but they were glued down to various vingettes too well to pull up without breaking or are part of other figures (e.g., LeMax girl washing a dalmasion in a tub).
I have to bring in all the buildings, figures, details every Sept and put them back out at the end of May to avoid the Santa Ana winds. I actually live in the Santa Ana Canyon that the winds are named for.
As promised…,
Note the three motors work in a linear longitudinal, transverse, and rotory fashions.
