Did General Electric ever actually manufacture any model trains? No, I don’t mean models of GE trains like Lionel’s 44-tonner or U36B, I mean ones made by GE. A coworker remembered having an O Gauge GE model train–a model of a steam loco, apparently–and I had never heard of such a thing. My research didn’t bring anything up. Has anyone here heard of that? I did poke around and look into other possibilities, in case he misremembered the name. There’s General Mills, which as we know owned Lionel (really, the Lionel trademark and tooling) during the MPC era, there’s General Models, which I’ve heard brought up sometimes, and there’s also the possibility that he was thinking of the locomotive itself, in which case it could be one of Lionel’s General steam locomotives. What does everyone here think?
I doubt it. I did a little research at the TCA Western Divisions website Index of Manufacturers and they’ve only got two toy train outfits with “general” in their names, General Models Corp. (In business from 1943 to 1950) and General Trains (1933 to1939) but nothing concerning General Electric.
This is a pretty good site for researching the obscure!
The only thing I can recall that GE did for the model railroad market was the ASTRAC control system.
GE seemed to be big on developing technology then quickly selling off the rights to other companies.
Good Luck, Ed
Flintlock76, I checked the TCA Western site already. Definitely one of my favorite sites for research!
gmpullman, I did recall reading about that in a book, but I couldn’t remember which one and couldn’t find the darn thing. I spent at least an hour digging through my book boxes!
Yeah, I recall a rather large, hard-bound book with a white (mostly) dust jacket and the book itself was green color. I think it had a page or two about the Astrac system.
This one?
Cheers, Ed
I remember being awed by this as a kid!
No, I finally found the book I was looking for. 34 New Electronic Projects for Model Railroaders by Peter J. Thorne. It mentions ASTRAC in the section on command control, but doesn’t go into it in any detail.
See the reference page I linked. It has PDFs and transcriptions of the discussion of the technology used.
Any idea of the age and/or family financial capabilities of the coworker? Knowing if his ancestors may have been well to do in the early part of the last century could shed some light on the subject.
One manufacturer I can think of that could be possibly confused with General Electric simply because of their name is Voltamp. It’s easy to imagine a game of telephone scenario where things get confused over time.
Also, could Edison himself be the manufacturer in question? I seem to recall Edison Electric showing a model electric train at a fair or industrial exposition. Unfortunately it wasn’t a mass production item and it’s extremely doubtful he would have a valuable demonstration item in his family’s possession. Unless he has an ancestor who worked at Edison. It would at least be a complicated scenario to research and prove.
I had similar memories. One in particular was an article about how ASTRAC allowed for on-the-fly helper decoupling. I was also puzzled by the Sutton’s book where he indicated that ASTRAC had a bright future after reading in MR that ASTRAC had been discontinued.
Thanks for posting the link! I had been wondering how ASTRAC worked, guessing that tone bursts were sent with timing based on the phase of the AC voltage which would be rectified and fed into the gate of an SCR. That’s pretty much what the documentation said.
Woke_Hoagland, there’s a lot of info in that page. Thanks for posting it; I’ll have myself a good deal of reading material now.
pennytrains, while I don’t know anything about the history of his family, I doubt that the train in question is of that age based upon a number of factors. Plus, if I recall correctly, Voltamp used 2 rail and this is definitely 3 rail. Edison does sound like a less-likely possibility, but who knows?
I wonder if ASTRAC technology wound up at QSI because they sound very similar.
I don’t think they are much related, technically. If you look at the GE discussion, they were treating the model-railroad application as an early – and highly low-cost – introductory market for their midget SCRs. They used the AC ‘accessories’ terminals on a powerpack as their ‘track power’ and (rather cleverly, for cheapness) used the positive half-waves for one direction and the ‘negative’ half waves for the other… and charmingly noted in those carefree pre-polarized-plug days that if the direction didn’t match the switch, just turn the plug over rather than change the connections to the track!
All they did for ‘pulse width modulation’ was apply a higher-frequency carrier-current signal as a tuned ‘trigger’ for the SCR in the going direction. You will note that they do not carefully describe (other than circumstantially) how the SCR output waveform was filtered to produce a more ‘average’ DC-like voltage at the motor, and it’s a bit sad that they did not recognize at first that motor ‘impedance’ would affect their circuit behavior.
I was also chuckling sadly at the comment in the letter from the early Seventies, about how they were rediscovering the by-then-moribund ASTRAC tech… but had no idea about Linn Westcott’s transistor-throttle approach when taking it up.
That would be a good guess. People not “in to” trains, especially kids, will tend to remember things incorrectly on such things. When we see something new, our minds tend to try to relate it to something we’re familiar with. “General Mills” or “General Models” could easily have been mis-remembered as “General Electric”.
You know, I just thought of something. Could General Electric have had a promotional set during the MPC era? K-Line had a ton of promotional sets in the 80’s most notably the Conrail employee awards cars and sets. Maybe General Electric gave away special train sets to employees or could possibly even have sold them through a company store. Knowing who made the set would still be #1 on the clue list. 
My first HO set was a promotional item from Lipton Soup. It was, I think, an AHM Soo Line center cab(?) shunter. Obviously I remember the Lipton Soup boxcar and I know there was a caboose but if there were other cars in the set I don’t remember.
What ASTRAC used is referred to as ‘AC Phase Control’ in the GE SCR Manual. It is a form of PWM, with the distinction of varying the amount of an AC half cycle versus the width of a constant voltage pulse. The circuit controlling the timing of the high frequency bursts is not much different from the circuits used for dimmers. I was a little surprised as well with the designers overlooking the inductance of the DC motors as it is a crucial feature with SCR control of larger DC motors.
ASTRAC came out when integrated circuits were expensive novelties, although the Minuteman missile project was then prompting ways of vastly reducing the cost of making IC’s. This required use of much simpler circuitry than what would be used now.
A very interesting point! One of the trains running at our club open house was an Allstate marked freight set made by Marx. Locomotive tender and the freight cars plus the caboose were all labeled “Allstate” instead of railroad names.
Maybe one of our resident “Marxists” knows the story behind it?
I was referring to the method of triggering the SCR (with the superposed carrier-current ‘square’ wave), The interesting thing is that they recognized how to get extremely short effective pulse duration out of this type of SCR… they don’t turn it on until well on the falling side of the half-wave AC. At some point no sensible amount of LC filtering is going to give ‘constant’ DC voltage, even ripply… it will be the kind of pulsed PWM excitation that overcomes motor ‘stiction’ for brief duration, but well off the non-RMS voltage peak of the half-wave AC which would be ‘better’ if it could be cheaply switched.
I was very familiar with SCR control of exercise treadmills (where you do full-wave rectification at 120pps and trigger relatively late at slow speed, but with ginormous filter caps the size of beer cans. What I found interesting was that the original generation of control board was set up for ‘hard following’ of speed control. Turns out that induces shin splints or worse as the motor slams into high torque at footplant…
Well, there was the 1950 More Power to America train…
PA-2 GE More Power to America by Edmund, on Flickr
Regards, Ed
wjstix, I’ve sure made similar mental tangents like that–lots!
pennytrains, while it wouldn’t be unlikely that a GE promotional set may exist, this is likely not the case here as the locomotive was apparently a steamer. Pretty much the second question I asked was, “was the locomotive a diesel?” That doesn’t rule out the promotional option, but it does decrease the likelihood thereof–GE would probably like a train set with one of their own locomotives, don’t you think?
Flintlock76, Allstate does not, to my knowledge, refer to an insurance company or any other company other than Marx in this context–though the insurance company is involved! Marx actually had several brand names; Allstate was one of them as a Sears exclusive. Here’s an interesting article on the subject. Allstate electric train sets by Marx for Sears - Silicon Underground