One man owns over 50,000 vehicles. If that sounds like a lot, don’t worry, they’re only miniature Matchbox cars. Since its opening in 1992 in a former three-car garage, the Matchbox Road Museum in New Jersey is probably the world’s largest Matchbox collection. There’s more than just the traditional small cars and trucks but tie-ins with films (“Rocky” and “National Lampoon’s Animal House”), race car sets, a board game, a line of airplanes, and even toys that never made it into production like a 1970s pink limousine for a Cheryl Tiegs doll. The most valuable item is a taxicab from the original line of 75 models. The tires are a different color than all the rest of the toy taxicabs, and that variation earns the model its $6,000 price tag (with that kind of money, I’d say sell it and take a vacation!).
A bit of history: the Matchbox line of miniature die-cast vehicles was unofficially launched in 1953 when British toymaker Lesney Products created a 15 ¾-inch-long replica of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation coach, which was soon followed by a matchbox-compliant cast-brass road roller. The name comes from the fact that each vehicle could fit inside a container roughly the size of a box of matches. By 1960, the line was producing approximately 50-million 1:75-scale cars and trucks a year at a relatively cheap price, which came in handy for little kids with pocket change, like museum owner Everett Marshall III who remembers visiting a toy shop on the Ocean City boardwalk once a week in the late 1950s. “I used to get a $1-a-week allowance and had enough to buy two Matchbox vehicles for 49 cents.” Hmmm…in today’s money I don’t think anything costs 49 cents. Even 49 cents.
