fall inside a hole
Holgate "New" Tot Railroad (1960-1961)
First written April 15, 2024Reformatted June 2026
In 1960 Playskool redesigned the Tot Railroad system with new plastic trains, softer black plastic rails, and more plastic accessories. This system was sold as a "Teach-a-Tot Toy" under the Holgate Toy Company name, which Playskool had acquired in 1958.This range was somewhat short-lived, with Playskool selling all-wooden Skaneateles train sets throughout much of the rest of the 1960s.
This system used a range of differently-colored plastic locomotives and cars with roofs and other clipped-in details that are often missing. Cars included a box car, hopper car, and caboose. The coupling system involves a poking-out prong that can be twisted into cavities in the following car. This system is somewhat fragile and a similar system was used on Child Guidance Railroad.
New track is molded from a softer black plastic with sleepers in the tooling. Molding slot mark are present on the bottom of most pieces.
The Holgate standard includes the previous Tot Railroad switches. There is an odd variant of the branch rail that is slightly longer and has strain relief in the coupling and the split occurring deeper in the switch - the branch rails do seem prone to warping, so it seems the tooling was changed later on to help this, which is surprising for a relatively short-lived system.
New for this iteration of Tot Railroad is this oddly asymmetrical crossover - one of the convex connectors is flush with the perpendicular rail and the other has a short straight extension. The play in the soft rail joints is enough that it can still be fit into desired configurations.
New ascending tracks work with a new series of plastic risers. It seems the tooling for these was adjusted a few times.
In addition to the rails, New Tot Railroad also had many plastic accessories like light poles, crossing gates, and telegraph poles, some of which even ended up being adapted for both Plarail and Child Guidance Railroad in the early 1960s. Some wooden accessories like the older Tot Railroads also carried over in nice painted forms.
Actually, Tomy produced their own versions of the telegraph poles, X-style crossing signs, and upwards semaphore signal for Plarail early on. These were used in the earlier 1960s before Tomy produced their own accessories and reappeared in the later 1970s briefly as shown here.
I don't have one, but there was also a roundhouse and turntable developed for this system as well as a girder bridge type rail. The roundhouse had a red roof and is marked Tot Railroad.
New Tot Railroad Sets
These are the "New" Tot Railroad sets that I am aware of. Early boxes were marked "New!" in a thin line font, but this was changed to a thicker "New!" and later dropped entirely. If you have information about other sets, please get in touch through the guestbook below.
| Sold |
Set
number |
Description |
Photo |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1960 | Beginner Railroad Set | Basic set with three straights, eight cures, two bridge sections, one switch, bumper, and ramp | |
| 1960 | T4300 Advance Railroad Set | Intermediate set with three straights, 15 curves, four bridge sections, ramps, bumpers, and train |
Earlier "New" box Later "New" box Later box |
| 1960 | Deluxe Railroad Set | Large 78 piece set with 25 feet of track and 20 piece accessory set | Later "New" box |
| Tot Railroad with Roundhouse and Turntable | Large set with 18 feet of track, roundhouse, and turntable | Can be seen here |