Siku German police cars
Date: Thursday, March 02, 2006 @ 05:50:48 UTC
Topic: Our Favorite Toys


Ever since my Dad took a business trip to Germany in 1986 and brought back several Siku Polizei die cast cars, I have been interested in collecting them. I had always liked Matchbox and Hot Wheel police cars, and had lately discovered the Tomica Pocket cars. The Siku cars were special. They all had plastic antennas. They were Mercedes Benz sedans, luxury cars here in the United States. One of them was even a Porsche 911. The Autobahn was known to have no speed limit, so of course a Porsche would be needed to patrol and give chase!



Here is the German web site for the Siku toy company:
http://www.Siku.de

Each car was labeled with a set of letters and a number. I have only recently figured out that those letter combinations are on all German license plates. In looking them up, I found that they were:

LS - Lüdenscheid

MK - Märkischer Kreis






The city of Lüdenscheid in Märkischer Kreis is where the Siku factory is located. Märkischer Kreis is essentially a County or District within the Nordrhein-Westfalen (North Rhine – Westphalia) land of Germany. Siku Polizei (Police) cars are known as Streifenwagen (literally Stripe wagons or stripe cars). The police department is known as the Steifendienst (Stripe service). Police cars are also known by the Hamburg slang term Peterwagen (Peter cars), which were in older times, the cars equipped with police radios. All German police cars are a somewhat uniform white and green, much like American police cars are black and white.
A die cast toy police car fan has constructed a very cool collection of police car pictures with dioramas. He has Siku, Matchbox, Tomica, Hot Wheel, Dinky and Corgi collections. The site is in Japanese, with English subtitles.



A German police car fan has constructed a cool site with lots of pictures of German police vehicles of all sorts. It even has a number of Police liveried Unimog vehicles. Way Cool!









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