Category:Lego Town Plan Sets

EVOLUTION OF LEGO:

Bricks: Original || Transitional || Modern
Town Plan || Cars || Roofs || Windows and Doors || Wheels

~1960: Lego System artwork [image info]

~1960: Lego 200, Town Plan Set board [image info]

1962: Samsonite-produced version, for the US market [image info]

~1964: Lego Town Plan Board 200 [image info]

1968: Lego Complete Town Plan Set [image info]

The Lego Town Plan Set was the centrepiece concept of the new Lego System, as it produced a reason for having multiple small buildings built at the same time, and provided a context for how they worked together ... as a system.

The Town Plan set was part of Lego's strategy of positioning itself as a means of scientific play ... while Frobel had used block play as a means of encouraging children to think about objects and their relationships in three dimensions, and building black sets allowed then to create buildings, Lego went one step further and allowed the creation of a complete town ... perfect for parents who hoped that their children might grow up to be architects, but failing that, to have careers in cvic planning.

Cars

Since the town layout had roads, Lego initially produced a range of small plastic cars to go with it, nominally in HO-scale (1:86), and some of the small buildings were car-related.

As well as a garage (which had a special sloped baseplate to allow a car to run out of the garage when the door as opened, there was also a car showroom, which had each car enclosed by its own special clear plastic showcase brick. asa bonus, this special clear brick made a nice clear interior of a retail box for selling additional cars individually.

Other accessories

The Lego town also included flat-bottomed street signs and trees, which were not especially Lego-ey, and they had no way to interface with studs or other aspects of proper Lego, being intended to simply sit on the carboard baseboard.

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Baseboard

The Lego Town Plan Set baseboard went though at least two major designs. It also originally had patterned grassed areas between the roads, that one could choose to build Lego buildings on ... or not. You could take the board out from its hiding place, stashed behind a sofa or bed, put it on the floor, grab a toy car or two and start playing.

At some point, Lego seem to have decided that this wasn't acceptable, and started putting rectangles onto most of the vacant lots, patterned with shadowed circles to represent Lego studs. This was presumably to make the board look slightly unfinished unless it was populated by at least a couple of Lego buildings ("more Lego buildings need to go here, here, and here"), but it had the side-effect that, if you were a small child, you felt slightly cheated that the board only had printed "pretend" Lego studs on it rather than real Lego studs. The addition of low-profile Lego-studded panels on the "building site" areas would have been great ... but would have increased the manufacturing cost and made it more difficult for the boards to fold flat.