LEGO® Town Plan Theme, 1/87th HO Scale
Town Plan was effectively LEGO's first theme and the direct precursor to LEGO® City. The first sets arrived in 1954 — just five years after the introduction of the LEGO brick — beginning with an individual house. A cloth street plan followed in 1955, giving builders a surface on which to lay out their towns, though it was soon replaced by a more durable Masonite version.
The theme was built to 1:87 HO scale, the dominant model railroad scale of the era. By comparison, LEGO's modern minifigure scale of 1:42 is roughly twice as large. To populate the towns, LEGO produced Matchbox-style vehicles with plastic bodies and metal bases, all licensed from leading European manufacturers including Volkswagen, Bedford, Ford, Mercedes, Fiat, Opel, Vauxhall, and Jaguar. Each vehicle carried its make and model number on the underside.
Alongside the cars, the line included police figures, cyclists, trees, gas pumps, and streetlights. These fell outside the LEGO System of Play proper, as none had a means of attaching to the bricks.
Town Plan ran until 1966 and spanned a period of significant change in LEGO brick design. The theme introduced framed windows and doors, which eliminated the need for slotted bricks of the kind used with Automatic Binding Bricks and mursten. Early Town Plan sets contained cellulose acetate bricks with neither walls nor tubes on the underside; the LEGO logo did not appear on the studs until 1956, and bottom tubes were not introduced until 1958. LEGO began using ABS plastic in lieu of celluose acetate in 1963.
