From the Archives: the UAW Express

In the latest installment of From the Archives, Gavin Strassel, UAW Archivist at the Walter P. Reuther Library, unboxes a toy train set made by UAW workers in Mount Clemons, Michigan.

“The UAW Express was built by Lionel, whose employees in Michigan were represented by the UAW,” Strassel explains in the video. “UAW members at Lionel factories at their peak were making 250,000 train sets a year. If you lined those train sets up, front to back, they would nearly stretch across the entire state of Michigan.”

Various iterations of the Lionel brand have been producing toy trains since 1900.