The Mamod company is a British toy manufacturer specializing in building live steam

Live steam

Live steam is steam under pressure, obtained by heating water in a boiler. The steam is used to operate stationary or moving equipment.A live steam machine or device is one powered by steam, but the term is usually reserved for those that are replicas, scale models, toys, or otherwise used for...

 models. The company was founded in 1937 in Birmingham

Birmingham

Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...

 in the British midlands by Geoffrey Malins. The name is a contraction of 'Malins Models'. The first models produced were of stationary steam engines, the company later also creating models of road rollers, traction engines and steam cars. These models were aimed at the toy market, so were simple to operate and ran at low boiler pressures for safety but were not accurate scale model

Scale model

A scale model is a physical model, a representation or copy of an object that is larger or smaller than the actual size of the object, which seeks to maintain the relative proportions of the physical size of the original object. Very often the scale model is used as a guide to making the object in...

s.

The TE1/TE1a traction engine remains the most popular model Mamod ever produced, selling no fewer than 486 thousand models up to 1996.