Just read a bit in a 1951 issue where a reader suggest a way to make small scale live steam, with an electric heating element to generate the steam. If this sounds vaguely familiar, consider the Hornby live steam HO locos from a few years ago. Pretty much exactly how they worked, track power rna a heating element to make the steam, and other electrical signals controlled the throttle and reversing.
–Randy
Just gotta love this hobby !! The old saying “what goes around comes around”.[:D]
Indeed, there was mention in the 40’s of people experimenting with RF control of the trains. I can only imagine what the equipment was like with all tube equipment.
ANd around 1950 there are also some articles and even commercial products for high frequency lighting. This was revisted in the late 60’s/early 70’s with transistors instead of tubes, as a way to keep headlights and passenger car lights on steady while the track power vaired, by superimposing high frequency AC on the rails with capacitor blocks on the lights to keep out the DC and preventing overvoltage and choke coils on the throttles to keep the AC from feeding back.
What’s old is new - never more evident than when reading these old magazines. I started at Vol 1 #1 and am up to 1951 now, from the DVD collection. Just hitting some selective shortages of parts and kits caused by the entry into the Korean War.
–Randy
Wait until you find the articles on cold steam using dry ice in the tender and motors to open the valve and operate the reverse gear.
Passed that one already, that was back in '48 or '49. The tidbit I mentioned referenced that, saying a similar control system could be used for throttle and direction.
An ad from General Models mentioned they were looking into offering it commercially, but they went bankrupt shortly aftwerwards and All-Nation bought their assets. Several letters and Worksop items mentioned others experimenting witht he cold steam idea.
The big thing in '51 seems to be fluid coupling drives. Hydrostatic transmission for your loco. At least one was produced commercially, multiple people built their own as well.
–Randy
Lionel came out with its Electronic Train set in 1949. Used individual frequencies to remotely operate cars, blow the whistle, uncouple the locomotive, and change locomotive direction. Unfortunately, keeping things properly in tune required an electronics technician, and the set was discontinued after one year. A set is worth serious money now.
I love the part of remotely opening the locomotive coupler - quite a feat that still isn’t common place.
Fred W
Still not really practical tody for the smae reason it was then - too expensive to equip every piece of rollign stock with a DCC decoder and operating coupler - at least one, but then it wold matter which way a car was turned.
Somewhere the schematicws for the Lionel system were published, like many of their items, lots of shortcuts were taken to keep the cost down. Not so good when precision frequencies were required. Like the special operatign track for the accessories - Bill Walthers submitted a item to MR around 1950 showing a simple modification that would stop the annoying habit it had of uncouplign cars that had the electromagnetic couplers when you operated the accessory (ie cattle car or the milkman). Really simple change to not have all the solenoids in series so you could push one button to toss a milk can and the other button if you wanted to uncouple, but for whatever reason, Lionel didn;t build it that way. They just changed the couplers to the magnetic ones and added the big electromagnet in the middle of the operating track - fine if you swapped all your cars for the magnetic ones, but if you ran a mix, some would uncouple and some wouldn’t when operating the accessory item. There wa lots of tinplate and hirail coverage in MR around that time because Lionel discontinued their magazine and replaced unexpired subscriptions with MR< so MR started printing articles of more interest to tinplaters, like track plans and simple to build freight cars that used Lionel trucks and couplers.
–Randy
And another one, letter from a reader in Nov 1951: I’m looking forward to the day when television can be developed to the point where a TV camera can be installed in the cab of my HO loco.
Wonder if the writer was around for the Railscope and the far better options we now have.
–Randy
Some of the very earliest “toy” trains were indeed live steam. The combination of open flames, fuel, and sectional track on a living room floor is interesting to think about. Then again that was an era that put actual live candles on Christmas trees. I am speaking here of pre 1900 toy trains. When i was a boy in the 1950s there were several steam engine (not locomotive) toys available that plugged into an outlet. They would turn a wheel and some of the more sophisticated ones would turn simple little powered tools such as a saw. My friend had one with a high pitched whistle that sounded a bit like British trains, or the famous Pennsy “banshee” whistle. How his mother kept her sanity while we ran that thing I will never know.
One old idea you rarely hear about any more, but in a sense is being revived and being talked about very seriously, is the notion of sophisticated wind-up clockwork mechanisms for trains that would be regulated as to speed and last a long time for each winding. The English actually do, or at least did, quite a bit of this for their O scale garden railways. Sometime in the 1960s Model Railroader put such an engine on the cover. Some of us of a – ahem-- certain age remember that before you got your Lionel (or American Flyer, or Marx) electric trains at age 6 or 7, you very likely had a windup train, perhaps from Marx. They ran like the Dickens when first wound up and rather quickly slowed and stopped. But they were loads of fun and I wish I still had mine (a black 0-4-0 steam locomotive with a shroud rather like the Milwaukee Road Hiawatha in shape).
The modern revival of that idea that I referred to is the notion of equipping locomotives not with clockwork mechanisms, but rather with the newer generation of very strong and long lasting batteries that can be recharged. Combined with radio or wireless control over speed and direction this would entirely remove layout wiring from the eq