Still (model railroad)
| NOCH GmbH & Co. KG
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| legal form | GmbH & Co. KG |
| founding | 1911 |
| Seat | Wangen im Allgäu , Germany |
| management | Rainer Noch, managing director |
| Number of employees | 113 |
| Branch | Toys |
| Website | www.noch.de |
The Still GmbH & Co. KG , based in Wangen im Allgäu is a manufacturer and importer of model railway accessories, especially for landscaping. It manufactures products for all common sizes.
Company history
The Leipzig master plumber Oswald Noch moved with his family after the birth of their first son Oswald Erich Noch in 1909 to Glauchau (Saxony), where he took over and enlarged a plumbing shop on January 19, 1911, from which the model construction company Noch developed in the following decades. When the son Erich, after successfully studying electrical engineering, opened a small subsidiary of plumbing and sold electrical goods, the real history of model making at Noch began.
At first, before Christmas, inquiries whether the electrician might not be able to repair some model trains, whereupon he started selling Märklin locomotives in his shop. When Erich met the master carpenter Ernst Hecker in 1936, who built small houses for model railways, the company Noch became a model railroad manufacturer.
Before the company could start bringing its own products onto the market, however, the Second World War interrupted the plans. While Erich was still fighting in France, business in Glauchau was idle. After the end of the war, the company began to produce individual model landscapes from plaster of paris and wood for wealthy customers. From 1949 the first own products were presented - tunnels, buildings, but also tracks and even wagons. But in the young GDR the company was threatened with nationalization, and so in 1956 Erich Noch and his family gave up the company in Glauchau and fled to the West.
In Maisach near Munich, the family then began to rebuild the company. The range was largely retained; only wagons were dispensed with. The main sales items continued to be prefabricated terrain and custom-made products. Noch appeared with his products at the Nuremberg Toy Fair and was successful again after a few years. In 1961 the company moved to Wangen im Allgäu , where it is still based today. With the move to the new company building, a new chapter in model construction began: Erich Noch introduced deep-drawing technology for model construction; he was the first to produce tunnel models using this process.
After years of moving and starting over, the company found itself in calmer waters. The landscape range became more diverse over the years and soon also served customers who wanted to build their own model railroad layouts. In addition to grass mats, trees and decoration scenes, the Terraform system was introduced for the individual design of tunnels and mountains in the 1970s. When the demand for prefabricated land decreased in the 1980s, the company was able to rely on the simultaneously increasing popularity of the Terraform elements.
In 1982, the Autorail system introduced a method of using magnets to move model cars on the street through underground electric trains. Four years later, the company introduced a new, high-precision production method for tunnels and models, rigid foam. Other branches of industry also discovered the diverse possibilities of rigid foam and commissioned displays or decorations made of this material from Noch.
After Erich Noch and his son Peter died a few years later, Dr. Rainer Noch, the great-grandson of the company's founder Oswald Noch, took over the management of the company and had it rebuilt and expanded.
Noch has been offering LaserCut plants since 2008, and in 2010 the first LaserCut buildings were presented at the Toy Fair.
Today Noch is the German distributor for Athearn and KATO . In addition to a wide range of materials for landscaping, prefabricated plastic sites are the company's best-known product.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Annual financial statements as of June 30, 2019 in the electronic Federal Gazette
- ↑ Reinold, D .; Rückert, H. (Hrsg.): Manual for model railway collectors, GDR H0 edition; Hilden; 2006
- ↑ Jens Riesner: 100 Years of NOCH , Wangen, Nuremberg 2011, Chapter II
- ↑ Jens Riesner: 100 Years of NOCH , Wangen, Nuremberg 2011, Chapter III
- ↑ Jens Riesner: 100 Years of NOCH , Wangen, Nuremberg 2011, Chapter IV
- ↑ History of the company OR from 1911 to today ( Memento of 17 June 2012 at the Internet Archive ) called on January 25, 2014
Coordinates: 47 ° 40 ′ 58.5 " N , 9 ° 49 ′ 34.2" E