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Since we started with this Tri-ang web site we get lots of Tri-ang related information.

For example the reason that the Belgian toy maker SWAN made trucks who were very similar to

the ones Tri-ang made and what the relation was between Tri-ang and Buddy L.

Between 1900 and 1950 the Belgian village Deinze was the center of toy makers in Belgium.

Most of them were almost neighbours and they produced mainly prams. Around 1920 some manufacturers introduced a trade mark instead of the family name they used for their toys One of them is SWAN.

Mr. Emmeric Seeuws was a Deinze toy maker, who in 1910 took over another toy factory: Puls-Bovie. Together with his sons Nestor and Hector they started the "E.Seeuw et Fils" company, later on named as SWAN.

Unfortunately they probably never had any catalogue or brochure. Non of the surviving  relatives, as the granddaughter of Mr. Seeuws, have anything that could be related to the SWAN factory.The toy sale in those days were for mainly the English stockman a great success.

Therefore the Deinze toy factories were due to the competition with the English, obliged to expand the assortment.

The reason that the Tri-ang and SWAN trucks had a great resemblance had nothing to do with moulds, that Tri-ang might have sold to SWAN. The reason is quite simple:

the just copied their models! When Tri-ang successful introduced a new model, they were, without any shame, copied by SWAN. It is not unthinkable that even Tri-ang did this same plagiarism with successfully SWAN toys!

Because there are no catalogues of SWAN we will never

know who had the original design.

In a French Tri-ang catalog we found this model which has

the same rare grill as Swan has on their trucks.

Thanks to Belgian Katrien and Peter we could give you this information.

They are both serious collectors of another important Deinze toy factory : Torck. Torck mainly produced pedal cars. As Katrien wrote us, the same phenomenon of copying there toys, occurred with the pedal cars. There are samples that successfully Torck pedal cars were simply copied by Tri-ang and visa versa. See the similarities of the pedal cars shown at the right photo's .Copied or just by coincidence?

The pedal car at the bottom of this section is pretty similar to a Mercedes pedal car Tri-ang built around 1950.

As an old proverb says: better a good copied idea than a bad new idea.

Take a look at Katrien's and Peter's Torck web site:

                           click here

This photo is the first visual proof that SWAN made similar trucks to the Tri-ang ones.  Thanks to a Belgian collector ,Mr. Bernard FEUILLEN, who provided this picture.

December 2007 a tipper with trailer appears on Ebay.

Tri-ang never produced neither in the 200 or 300

series a trailer. This proves that Swan provided its

own models.

Like the Soviet trucks this tipper has a number plate

which might indicate this model was made in 1964(?)

Thanks to an Australian collector , Andrew Dowling , we can add another chapter to the

Tri-ang story. Although they were big rivals on the toy market Tri-ang and Buddy L found

each other. In the 60's of the last century Tri-ang in New Zealand manufactured Buddy L toys for the           

commonwealth nations. So it could happen that a typical Tri-ang decal was transformed to

a Buddy L one. The below photo's tells the rest of this co-production between the two rivals.