Ambroid Wood Craftsman Kits

The Company

The Ambroid Co. Inc was founded in 1910. The model railroad car kits was something the company started making in the late 1940's. Rumor has it that it was to promote their excellent glue to a larger audience. I don't have any information about the kits prior to 1950, when they begun to advertise in the Model Railroader magazine. Ambroid was a frequent advertiser and there is a lot of information to be collected in those ads. The Model Railroader magazine is so far my best resource for information (ads and the Trade Topics column).

The company seems to have been located in Massachusetts during its whole life span. The address on the early instruction sheets is listed as 305 Franklin St., Boston 10. This address is also given in an ad from September 1958, but other addresses in the same city block are 299 Franklin Str. (January 1955), and 99 Broad Str. (November 1971). This building still stands in Boston, but there is nothing left of the company. A pub occupies the ground floor on the corner of Broad and Franklin Streets. When I visited the place in April, 2006, the building was being converted to condominiums.

Addresses on boxes, in ads and in reviews also include Weymouth (both before the ZIP codes and more recently), East Weymouth (January 1965), Taunton (September 1976), Lowell (June 1976), and Brockton (some H boxes).

The only exception to an address in Massachusetts seems to be in the seal on the original drawings in the Heritage series. There the address was given as: Ambroid Models, Inc. Maine.

Acknowledgments

Ambroid is a registered trademark of Graphic Vision, Inc. and is used here with permission.

Model Railroader is a registered trademark of Kalmbach Publishing Co.