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Lionel Corporation: Difference between revisions

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→‎The Post-War Era: sales in the 1950s
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Lionel resumed production of toy trains in late [[1945]], replacing their product line with less-colorful but more realistic-looking trains and concentrating on O gauge exclusively. Many of Lionel's models contained a new feature: smoke, produced by dropping a small tablet into the locomotive's smokestack.
 
Buoyed by post-war sales, by the early [[1950s]] Lionel was the largest toy company in the world. During the 1950s, Lionel outsold its closest competitor, American Flyer, nearly 2 to 1, peaking in [[1953]]. But Lionel started to decline in the late 1950s when hobbyists started switching to the smaller but more realistic [[HO]] scale trains and kids' interest shifted from trains to toy cars. Lionel brought out a line of HO scale trains in [[1957]] and followed with a line of [[slot car]]s as well. Neither approached the popularity its O gauge trains had enjoyed.
 
In [[1959]], Cowen and his son sold out their interest in the company and retired. The purchaser was Cowen's grand nephew [[Roy Cohn]], a businessman and attorney who had become infamous during the [[Joe McCarthy|McCarthy]] [[Anti-communist]] hearings. Cohn replaced much of Cowen's management with his own. The direction of the company changed, and a small number of Lionel fans consider 1959 the end of the "true" Lionel. Cohn's tenure with Lionel was not successful and the company lost over [[US$]]13 million in the four years he ran the company.
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