This was my first engine as a kid. Over the years, I have picked up a number of these used for good prices. None of them have ever run well. I eventually found a new old stock engine which was cosmetically perfect, but it also didn’t run well.
I know that Mantua/Tyco got cheaper as the years progressed. How much did the guts of these engines change over the years? Would I do well to get an older Mantua model and Frankenstein it together with outer shell of the newer engine?
Does anyone have one of these that runs reasonably well at a medium pace? Or do they only get so good?
I had one of those, probably from the early 70’s. It wasn’t one of our better runners. They were around a long time - I had an 0-6-0 from the early 60’s that was a bit on the noisy side, but it ran pretty well. Very heavy as it was all metal. An older version of the Shifter, before it had a made in Hing Kong motor, would probably be the better running loco.
All of them require some power pickup help, or powered frogs - the 0-6-0 was a tank loco, center drivers blind, so it only picked up from 4 wheels, 2 per side. The Shifter I had, picked up from 4 wheels on one side of the tender, and just 2 wheels ont he other side of the loco. They would frequently stall on Snap Track turnouts.
Later Mantua engines - the decade or so before Model Power took them over - used Sagami can motors instead of the open-frame motors. They made retro-fit kits for replacing the motors on older engines, my guess would be those are still available on Ebay or somewhere.
The Mantua steaners (later sold under the Tyco name as well) have been around since the late 1940’s. Mantuas always ran pretty well out of the box, or off the train show table. I have two larger ones, both run fine.
This is a Mantua Mikado I picked up at a trainshow. It needs a lot of work, but it runs fine just as it came to me.
This is the Mantua Pacific. It also came from a trainshow and I did quite a bit of superdetailing and mechanical work on it. It ran fine as it came to me, and it runs even better after I put a can motor conversion kit into it.
Starting out to make a Mantua run better I would convert to a can motor if I could. I got a conversion kit, new motor and motor bracket from the Mantua parts department many years ago. Mantua parts dept is dead and gone. A place called Yardbird trains carried on for many years, offering most of the Mantua soup up parts. They might still be around. Google is your friend. Google for something like Mantua steamer parts and something ought to turn up.
Or, replace the Alnico motor magnet with the new neodynium supermagnets. I have done this and the result is nearly as good as a can motor convertion, and easier to do. Take care to get the North pole South pole orientation the same as the old magnet, otherwise the model will run backward under power. While you are there, clean the commutator with Goo-Gone on a q-tip. Give the motor bearings just one drop of light oil. I use 3 in 1. Mantua may have put a gear box into some versions of that steamer. It’s worth looking at your entire fleet and if one of them has a gear box, go with that one. Probably they all have the simple and cheap worm-pres
The 4 Mantua switcher kits - the Booster 0-4-0T, the Shifter 0-4-0, the Little Six 0-6-0T, and Bix Six 0-6-0, were 1) extremely popular 2) reasonably priced (and even cheaper from AHC), and 3) easy to assemble. Indeed for a time Mantua called these kits “pre-crafted” to differentiate them from the more challenging Mikado and Pacific kits, not to mention a much older generation of metal steam kits where the metal was not always clean, some holes had to be redrilled because the tooling was off and never corrected, and flash abounded.
However this also means that a fair number of them that you see at swap meets were assembled by kids, often a first ever kit, and it can pay to disassemble them and start over, paying more attention than [most of us] kids did to the two finicky aspects and those were the mounting angle of the motor which in turn controlled the meshing of worm and nylon gear and the tight setting of the brass bushing bearings into the slots in the frame. Mantua engineered a bit of “slop” into the motor mount so it could be adjusted. The old trick: put a thin piece of bond paper between worm and gear, tighten the motor screw, and then carefully turn the motor to extract the piece of paper. Then re-lubricate.
I’m sure that over time Mantua/Tyco cheapened the motors as they did most stuff. My locos are from the 1950s and early 1960s and the motors are not bad at all, quiet and smooth.
Slightly OT but for years Mantua sold an after market valve gear set No. 754 for these locomotives.
I too built the Mantua/Tyco kit 0-4-0. That was about 53 years ago. Riveting the valve gear was a challenge but it ran great and still does. It is still in its original condition. The kit was a Christmas present from my wife. We’ve been married 55 years and she still lets me mess with trains. Right after that 0-4-0, I moved on to building the Pacific and Mikado kits. I have accumulated additional Pacifics and Mikados at train shows and the auction site over the years. All needed rework - be it details, motors, and such. These locos are still widely available in various conditions but the go-to places for parts like Mantua, Mellor, Yardbird, and Allentown/Alliance are gone. Here are some links on my web site that might be of interest regarding Mantua/Tyco steamers.
This one is on remotoring of my Pacific and Mikado locos:
Back in those days, Mantua were the kits and Tyco were the RTR versions. We had both the 0-4-0T and 0-6-0T, but the 0-4-0 got lost after I had them in a display in elementary school.
Unlike some of the others, these came lettered simply as TYCO, rather than any real railroad. Same with the little bobber caboose.
Pretty sure when my parents first bought these, they all came with Mantual couplers - I had a bottle full of old ones that were removed, all of our stuff has X2f couplers. Not sure what date they changed over - the 60’s Tyco catalog I had, everything came with X2f.
I have the all-metal Tyco 0-6-0 tank engine, but it was never a good runner.
Over 40 years ago, I built this Mikado from a Tyco kit and an MDC tender, along with a bunch of detail parts from Cal-Scale and Precision Scale. It was a decent runner, but was sold some years ago…
This one was done some time ago, too, but has a can motor and NWSL gearbox. It’s a very good runner and a great puller, too…
…and is now owned by a friend.
I have a bunch of parts from a Tyco 2-8-0 with a tender drive, including the locomotive’s frame and drivers, which I plan to gear and motorise to build a model of one of the Consolidations which ran in my hometown - the Tyco’s most useful contribution to the project is the 55" drivers - dead-on for its prototype. The cab and tender will be scratchbuilt, while the boiler from a Bachmann Consolidation might work, with some modifications.
I find big differences between the large and small Mantua steamers. The Mikados, Pacifics, Berks, articulated loggers that I own are all good runners and are fun to detail. They are relatively easy to re-motor, although this is not absolutely necessary. The upgrade kits are difficult to find. I’ve had a few switchers and 2-6-2s. Only one 2-6-2 is in regular service on the layout. It runs “OK”, with a new can motor. The only reason I keep it is that the model is very close to a Baldwin that was owned by a local logging company here in Eastern Canada in the 1930s. Otherwise, it would have ended up in my junk box a long time ago. It’s just no match to the Bachmann Spectrum steamers.
Thanks all for the replies. The supermagnets sound like they may be a good place to start. I’ll have to take apart the ones I have to see if I can determine their age/quality.
My first loco was also a Mantua 0-4-0 that I have owned it since my late childhood in 2010.
If it has a plastic shell I 100% suggest buying an older metal one off ebay also if you want a smooth runner buy an MC-94 motor for the locomotive, there has been a surge of new MC-94 motors and I recently got one for mine off ebay.
If you do go the get an old metal boiler, and are concered about a lack of detail you can always drill and put on brass parts if you are up to the job.
Here are questions for the Mantua/Tyco experts regarding the 0-4-0 and its 0-6-0 cousin:
When did they transition from the metal boiler to the plastic boiler? Were all the ready-to-run models plastic? Would any of the metal engines have been in the earlier Tyco sets?
One of the things we had was an early 60’s Tyco catalog. The metal versions of those locos did come with the train sets sold at the time. HOSEEKER has a lot of the old catalogs. My Early 70’s Shifter with tender was the plastic one, that came in train sets at that time as well. The changeover was sometime in the 60’s or possibly only came with the Consolidated Foods takeover, as the Pacific and Mike kits being sold at the same time as my all plastic Shifter had metal boilers and plastic cabs.
