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

For example the reason why 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.

The grand-grand son of the founder of the Swan factory was so kind to write me this history (Patrick thank you!):

The first Swan company was created by Eugène Seeuws.

He had 2 sons, Emeric and Nestor. The first one leaved the company before World W ar II. Nestor had a son, Jacques.

The company stopped in 1958, because of theft of big part of the working capital by one of the employees who wet out to south America with the money!

My father Jacques died without giving us more explanation.

I don't know who and why Triang, Swan and Torck made copies one of each other, but what i'm sure is that there where very much friendly contacts

between Torck, Seeuws and Beeusaert families. Hoping this little text can help you...

Patrick Seeuws

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.

The mechanism to lift the tipper is the same mechanism Tri-ang used on the 300 tipper.

The quality of the grill is very poor.

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

December 2007 a tipper with trailer appears on Ebay. Tri-ang never produced neither in the 200 or 300series 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.