Superquick

Superquick Models are a series of printed card kit buildings for the British model railway enthusiast. Manufacturing takes place entirely in the United Kingdom.

There are several ranges of model kit - railway buildings in Series A; houses, farm buildings and industrial buildings in Series B; houses and shops in low relief (to line the backs of layouts) in series C and brick and stone textured paper in series D. Superquick models are equally suitable for the model railway scales of both OO (1:76) and HO (1:87).

The Superquick Model range was launched in 1960 by Donovan Lloyd, who was born in 1914, trained as an artist and illustrator in the late 1930s and died in 2009.

Mostly the buildings are modelled in the architectural vernacular of the 1930s British suburbs and provinces. Although likely prototypes of some of the models can be identified, there is no serious attempt to reproduce particular buildings. It was considered more important to provide full value from the materials of the kit than to model any details exactly. The industrial logic of print requires volume production, which means that the models must appeal to a wide audience rather than to specialist modellers.

The main selling features of printed kits are that they are inexpensive compared to moulded plastic kits and that the plastic kit manufacturers have not yet been able to achieve the exact surface detail to be had from print. Superquick uses specialist print techniques to heighten the models' realism in the context of the model railway layout. In Great Britain in 1960 this special printing and the practices of printing on fine paper, mounting the paper on card and die-cutting the result (to save the modeller from cutting the components himself) gave Superquick a great advantage over other makers of card kits; the other ranges from that time are selling at low volumes or now extinct. From the beginning, through being deliberately printed in volume, Superquick has always been competitively priced.

Many modellers have considerable fondness for the kits, because in the period 1960 to 1995 they were the obvious choice for the first buildings on their layout. That being so and as sales of Superquick rocketed in the late 1960s, there was criticism of the kits by leading modellers for whom “Superquick kits were a particular cliché and the Superquick low-relief buildings eventually came to blight any layout on which they appeared".

When the range was launched, there were several formats and scales. Whereas now the pack is virtually standardised at 320 mm × 200 mm, there were square packs 200 mm × 200 mm and at least one pack 280 mm × 200 mm. There were kits in the British TT scale (1:100) and kits in the MR series to go with the Scalextric slot-car track (1:32).

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Wikipedia