I have an old RailRoad Thomas Edison batteries luggage pulling tug and I really don’t know to much about it. It has a wonderful lantern light, seat with steering bar and batteries are in the back. It is extremely rustic and heavy steel. The tires are would with rubber fashioned to it. I would like to know more about it, if you have info are want pictures…email me seagleconst@aol.com Thanks, kim
Welcome to the forums.
If I am reading your question correctly, you have a real piece of equipment, not a model of one.
If you go to the prototype section of these forums I think you would get a better answer. The folks here are mostly into N and HO scale modeling.
Good luck,
Richard
I vaguely recall seeing baggage tugs many years ago, pulling strings of those old high-platform baggage carts from the baggage/express room to the head end cars or vice-versa at a couple of major terminal stations (Grand Central, Pennsylvania Station when it still had the central blimp hangar concourse…)
A loaded baggage cart could be HEAVY! Moving one by hand might require several people. A baggage tug could pull a half-dozen or more at faster than walking speed.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Edison Batteries are Nickel-Iron as opposed to the more common Lead Acid. They were used in early electric cars as well as for railroad signaling and powering fork lifts and other material movers like your baggage cart. They were very tolerant of abuse - extreme discharge, overcharging, etc. They also stored more energy per size of the battery than lead-acid. And they are generally good for 20-50 years.
In one of the 30’s issues of MR, it was recommended that model railroaders visit junkyards to see if there were any Edison batteries available from junked electric cars, as these would be cheaper than buying new lead-acid batteries to run the layout (most layouts back then ran from batteries with a trickle charger or else used a motor-generator to get low voltages).
–Randy
Randy,
That’s darned interesting! Thanks for that tidbit of history
John