Breyer Trakehner: The mystery bay

It's been a good month for model horses.

Breyer used to make models for long stretches.  Some of the older models were produced for fifteen or twenty years.  Misty of Chincoteague has been in production, with several variants, since 1972.  Unsurprisingly, it's common for paint colors and styles to vary a little bit over time within a single run of any given model, and collectors will often collect duplicates of a model if the variations are obvious enough.

I got Halifax in early 2013.  He's an old #54 (two digits so you know it's an older mold) regular-run Trakehner.  This was one of Breyer's shorter runs, from 1979 through 1984, and he came with his original box, a 1979 catalog, and the previous owner's notes on the breed, written in pencil on the back of a school permission slip.


Note his paint: Very dark brown with red underpainting.  This is a slightly unusual color variant and I think must have been an early-in-the-run thing

Another common variant of #54 can be seen here at Identify Your Breyer (this site rocks, by the way).  He's more committedly bay, with obvious black points, but he's still a brownish shade of bay.  I don't have one like this, but Adios models from the same time period are similar in color.  I have two Adioses--one like the reddish one in the IDYB link and one that's brown-er.

So . . . an eBay listing came up for a Breyer Trakehner.  I was looking for one of the pinto models but this one caught my eye because he was a regular run but so completely different from the one I already had.  And he was a good price and in great condition.


I mean . . . so completely different.  That's his actual color.  His paint style is nothing at all like Halifax's--he's definitely bay and his body color isn't brown at all.

So, what gives?

Apparently the Breyer produced a run of between 80 and 200 bay Trakehners for the Trakehner Society in 1983.  These were the early days of special run models so the sketchy record-keeping and the fact that the color isn't very imaginative are not surprising.

The SR model looks like this.

That's a lot closer to the new Trakehner.

I can't prove that he's the Trakehner Society special run, and the seller wasn't currently involved in the hobby and didn't have a clue, but . . . I'm really suspicious.  It kind of doesn't matter since I would have wanted even a regular-run bay Trakehner that was so different from my first one, and I have no intention of reselling him, but it would be fun if he were.

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