Hello everyone, I am new to the site. I am a 18 year veteran of the local volunteer fire department and recently purchased the Lionel American Fire and Rescue train for my18month old son. I am interested in setting up a fire scene on our 4x8 platform. Any suggestions as to which figures and structures are the best available to purchase. I want to make it as authentic as possible with police directing traffic, bystanders, etc…Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Gary
Wecome to the forums.
Thank you for your service. I spent 8 years as a volunteer fire fighter, before a job change made it impossible to continue.
Now, since you are talking Lionel, I am going to tell you to go to the Classic Toy Trains section of the forums. The folks here are mostly in HO and N scale. The folks over at CTT are more O scalers and would have a better idea of what is available to you.
There is a structure on fire in HO scale by Faller (I think), maybe there will be something in O scale for you.
Good luck,
Richard
Well, regardless of scale, I can tell you one thing that doesn’t work very well, and that is the smoke generator sold by Micro-Mark as their catalog number 82602. Even though this is a fan-driven generator, the results have been very disappointing on our HO scale club layout where it is inside the IRS office building that is on fire. No matter what type or brand of fluid we have used, it produces only a very light, wispy white smoke.
Stage and movie prop people use fans blowing across a shallow pan of water with a chunk of dry ice floating in it, but dry ice is rather hazardous to handle and hard to find and store.
No matter what type of brand of fluid we have used, it produces only a very light, wispy white smoke.
Check with your local fire department. If they have a smoke machine that they use for training, they may give you some of their fluid to try. With the smoke generators for the fire service, for training purposes, these machines are pretty effective. They can “smoke up” an entire room or building.
There are Ho scale “smoking” steam locomotives, and large scale “smoking” steam locos. and as mentioned, smoke generators. They usually burn an oil, sometimes mineral oil to create the “smoke”. There are differnet oils available that simulate different scents.
For those with breathing problems, and even for those who do not have such problems the smoke from the smoke generator is rather hazardous and hard to breathe.
I am not so sure I would subject my 18 month old son or anyone else in the room for that matter to the burning oil of a smoke generator too often.
Now if you just want to simulate a charred house or building with ladders, and firetrucks and cops and firefighters only, Classic Toy Train forum members can help direct you to where you can buy the proper scale sized people and equipment.
Back about 1963 or so I had the HO scale Renwal House On Fire. While it was somewhat dificult to get it to work, it never really looked that good, with a small smoke generator, a red 12 V GOW light bulb in a rotating perforated cylinder, and a pump. The water splashed all over the place, the red light never really looked like an active fire, and the smoke generator looked more like a fire had been extinguished and was just smoking enbers.
Maybe there are better fire simulators and smoke generators available today?
BTW, I think I paid a whole $10 for it then. Sometime in the 1990s, there was a re-issue of it for something around a hundred. I still have my original, so I didn’t buy the re-issue. Of cours, back then all I had to assemble it was the tube type cement, so it is now in sub-assemblies, and the GOW bulb is broken, bu everything else is still there, albeit with a collapsed plastic water hose.
Guess I should try putting it back together with a fire simulator using red and yellow LEDs for better fire simulation.