Your PopCulteer is back from a trip that included a day at the Marx Toy and Train Collector’s Show , which is held each year at The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum in Wheeling. Your humble blogger and his wife had a great time at the show, and I brought you a small batch of photos yesterday, but today we’ve got a couple dozen more, and you can probably expect even more pictures, plus video, later in the week.

I want to take a moment to thank the folks at The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum for putting on such a cool toy show each year. Mel and I are planning to return there next month for an exciting new addition to the museum that ought to bring more folks to this gem of a toy and pop culture mecca, tucked away in Northern West Virginia.

I do have to confess to something that I was keeping quiet at the show: I was not at 100% for this year’s show. It’s been hotter than usual over the past week, and that heat instigated one of the worst Myasthenia Gravis flare-ups that I’ve had in some time. I had to miss most of a really amazing Show and Tell at the hotel Friday night because the extra meds I had to take made me fade pretty fast. Next year I plan to try to videotape that meeting, if they have one.

On top of that, a couple of months ago my left knee got into a serious disagreement with gravity and a car door, and as such, was pretty much held together by Salonpas and Kinesiology tape. I’m fine if I can stay off my feet…which isn’t going to happen at such a cool toy show.

Despite that, I had a great time catching up with old friends, meeting new ones and buying really cool toys that I don’t have room for in the house. In a few day’s I’ll show off what I got (with one preview below) but today we’re going to look at some of the people I saw and a few of the cool toys for sale.

On Saturday we bypassed the second day of the show to do a little retail adventuring around Canton, Ohio.  I will tell you about this later in the week, but I don’t have a lot of photos to share from that part of the trip. I decided to do most of it as a civilian. However, I made a discovery there that will likely neccessiate a return trip with cameras rolling later in the year.

For now, while I’m still recovering from the trip, here’s a batch of photos from last Friday at The Marx Toy & Train Show, devided into two catagores…

PEOPLE

Super-Johnny West Collector, Terry Ryder, shooting me her “If you take my picture I will kill you” glance, at the table behind some of her awesome “bronzed” Johnny West figures.

Mark Hegeman, who always has tons of cool vintage toys for sale…more than we could fit in our car.

It was great to see Grayson and Lee Bowling back at the show this year, seen here trading something with Professor Jim Fuller.

A legend in the world of custom action figures (and Captain Action accessories), I finally got to meet Wes McCue, after being online friends for close to twenty years.

We even took a selfie (this is the one Wes took, my selfies tend to suck).

The man behind the much-missed Marx Toy Museum (which you can still visit online) Francis Turner, with Lee Bowling and Dave Roth in the background. I didn’t get to catch up with Dave much this year, but I’ll see him at the Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo next month.

Here’s Dave making a sale.

It’s always cool to catch up with James Wozniak and his astounding assortment of repros and new plastic wonderments. I’ll be telling you about something really cool that I picked up from him later this week.

The admissions table getting ready for another wave of attendees.

We are now in the “random photos of folks whose names I didn’t get” portion of the photo essay.

These folks had great stuff and almost had me ready to stop resisting the urge to collect Shogun Warriors that I’ve been fighting since 1978.

Guys inspecting a playset, while astute readers may notice Mel’s hand hold the video camera in the background.

TOYS

Colorful ways to send in the troops and artillery.

I’m never going to pass up a photo op with a triplane.

Stuff I would’ve bought if I had more room in the house to display it.

Incredible custom Marx/Johnny West critters.

More cool plastic.

These guys were at the table that Wes shared with Bill Nestor (who managed to escape my camera). I really should’ve bought that Green Lantern.

I met Tom Krakovsky, who had these astounding hand-made, playset-sized Civil War warships at very reasonable prices. You can contact Tom at p2jgtomkrakovsky@gmail.com if you’re interested, but he was telling me that these are difficult to ship.

These were museum-quality displays, and if you’re into Civil War or Revolutionary War playset displays, they are simply amazing. You can also find Tom’s 1/6 scale Military work at the private Facebook Group World War Too.

Over in the train room, I don’t know for sure what the hell this was, but I was disappointed that they didn’t have it hooked up to run. Man it looks cool.

More coolness in the train room.

Obligatory Warbonnet picture.

I was able to convince Mel to drag me away from this before I was captured by its siren song.

No such luck with this tub filled with Aurora Model Motoring vintage track, which I happily snapped up from Mark Hegeman without haggling. Slot cars are my weakness.

And today’s last image, just to bring us back to Marx is a stack of primo vintage playsets.