The Boucher Manufacturing Company was an American toy company based in New York that
specialized in toy boats and toy trains. It is best remembered today as the last of the manufacturers
of Standard gauge/Wide gauge trains until the much smaller McCoy Manufacturing
revived the old standard in the mid-1960s. The Boucher Manufacturing Company only made model ships previous
to their 1922 purchase of Voltamp's line of trains.
Voltamp had been a direct competitor to Carlisle & Finch, the inventor of the electric
toy train. They were modified from 2" 2 rail to 2 1/8" 3 rail to be compatible with
Lionel's Standard Gauge line.
Boucher marketed their trains as highly accurate and occupied the high end of the market. Boucher was
the only manufacturer ever to catalog a six-wheel drive standard gauge locomotive.
For the duration of Boucher's life the toy train market was dominated by the so-called "Big Four" of
Lionel, Ives, Dorfan, and
American Flyer. Like all of them, Boucher struggled through the Great Depression, and
while it outlived all but Lionel, by 1940 the 2 1/8-inch Standard gauge had become an orphan standard that was
priced beyond the means of most consumers. Without a smaller, more affordable product to sell,
and with World War II limiting what it could produce, Boucher went out of business in 1943.
