What ever happened to this?
With all the home-made and recent issue cam cars out there it made me wonder.
I know it ate batteries and was only B/W, But you would think it would have been improved aponed by now.
Has anyone ever kitbashed one to run off track power and in color?
HI Pat,
I believe the K-Line car runs off track power and is in Color. I don’t have one, but was playing with one at the hobby store.
tom
I made my own cam car by placing a cam into a engine.
I was just wondering why Lionel hasn’t improved upon this.
It seems to me that a cam in an engine opposed to one on a flatbed would be a much better sell.
Has anyone seen an original for sale lately?
What are they going for?
Well, Lionel has this nasty habit of just letting things fade away, not improving them. Then, just like the M-10000, they’ll re-issue it some years later for a fortune rather than do improvements all along and sell it for a decent price. I can see it in the 2010 catalog now: “RAILSCOPE!!! You remember it!!! YES!! NOW IN FULL-COLOR!! Now, it’s even in an F-3 for better looking video! ONLY $2,200!!!”
And that is why LIONEL wont reissue railscope anytime soon.
At the time when railscope was made it was difficult to find miniature cameras at a resonable price. that was why railscope was unique.
Now with x10 and others and the manufacture by KLine, Lionel will not do it again.
Alan
I think that the electronics were pretty unreliable, too. A couple of years ago, my local shop wanted to set one up as a display. He got it working, and it worked great for about 10 minutes, and then just quit. He wasn’t able to get it to work again.
The camera did run off of battery power.
Lionel also made a Railscope upgrade kit, which contained a camera and a receiver. These can be had today for about $50 still sealed. A couple of years ago, Stout auctions sold 400 for a little over $500, a lot which the same dealer mentioned earlier regrets not bidding on.
Railscope used he tracks for carrying the video signal instead of broadcasting the way X-10 does. Liontech did demo an updated version of RailScope now called LionVision on the Horde layout that was dragged around on the Horde tour. The system appears to have been a variant of X-10 with the addiiton of stereo mic pickups as well as the color camera. The system was discussed by Gary Moreau during the original run of Trains Unlimited episode “Toy Trains”. System was never released as a Lionel product and the widespread availability of X-10 technology allowed for people to achieve some of the same goals.
Technologicly speaking the RailScope is a “dead dog”. There is a good chance that the signal on the rails would conflict with TMCC. RailScope may actually have helped lead to TMCC. With airborne signal color cameras with sound available for under $50, it doesn’t strike me as a very marketable product, as anyone can now go out and buy a camera and mount it on a car or engine themselves fairly easily. How well did the
K-line cars sell at the $250 price level?
Elliot, that why I played with the one at the hobby shop, $250.00 for a camera car is not where I would put my money. And it’s still there.
tom
Here’s a picture of my Railscope locomotive:
http://home.surewest.net/rlplionel/Photo15.htm
The red boxcar behind the locomotive carries a battery pack that holds 6 AA alkaline batteries that power the Railscope camera. The two wires running out the top of the boxcar lead to the camera hook up beneath the locomotive. I’ve found the key to getting a clear Railscope picture is to keep the track clean. Dirty track causes “squiggles” in the TV picture, making it hard on the eyes to look at. And Big Boy is correct, TMCC messes up the Railscope picture. I run my Railscope locomotive on a dedicated non-TMCC loop of track.
Robert,
Thanks for the info on TMCC. I have been considering buying a Railscope engine, and have been concerned about this very thing.
I know that my command base is almost always plugged into the same circuit as my T.V., and usually sitting within a foot of the cable line. If I have my T.V. on when I turn on the command base, there is a slight drop in T.V. reception. I understand that the same thing happens if you are listening to an A.M. radio and running TMCC. I would also guess that the effect would be more pronounced if the signal were travelling through the same lines as the T.V. signal, and not just in close vicinity to it.
Book says the thing is worth $250, but I’m not sure that too many people would be willing to pay that much. I wouldn’t these days, but back when they were new and all the rage I did. As I recall, the process of “tuning” the track was a real pain, and even then the picture was often fuzzy.
lionel just relesed a cabbose with cameras in there 2018 cataloge