I was just browsing through HOseeker.net, and found this in the 1974 Tyco catalog:
Tyco made a 2-10-4? It’s too detailed to be a Mantua product; it had to be brass. Has anyone ever seen or owned one of these?
They did make the molds for it, and were going to sell it, but they decided not to because it wouldn’t fit on a tight radius. You can read more about it at http://tycotrain.tripod.com/steamengines/id11.html . It looks like it’s made of plastic in the photo, so it’s possible they were going to put a Power-Torque drive in the tender, and then it would’ve ended up like the Chattanooga Choo-Choo, with most people hating them in the end.
Neat pic. And only $35. It looks like it has the same driver connecting rods as the Mantua kit. Lot more detail than my Mike though.
Interesting. Obviously the photo is of a prototype (as is the 0-8-0 below it – note the wire piping), because I haven’t seen a tender without a molded coal load outside of the brass market. It’s a shame it was never produced, it was definitely an improvement over the standard Tycos and Mantuas, as long as they kept that Powertorque out of the tender.
[EDIT] Yes loathar, if it were diecast it would have had a lot of add-on detail that Mantuas didn’t have. Those side rods look more like Bowser. They should have tightened up the loose eccentric crank before snapping the photo, though.
Its just as well they didn’t make it. Their steamers had the motor in the tender and ran terribly.
Actually, only the Tyco 0-8-0 and Consolidation (both the same engine) were built this way, and Mantua offered both in kit form with motors in the locomotive. Tyco used the poor tender drive to make room for the smoke unit in their Chattanooga series.
It was never made - just the photo prototype. The word was that they could not figure out how to get it around 18" radius without loosing too much of the detailing, and it was dropped as a project.
It was vaporware before the term existed.
I remember seeing that Pennsy J class in the Tyco/Manuta catalog for a few years and man, did I ever want one. It seems a pity that the failure to engineer it to 18" radius standards is what doomed it.
Another factor which was not mentioned is that about that same time, AHM (yes the people who imported plastic Rivarossi and Rivarossi knockoffs) brought in a brass 2-10-4 about that same time that was reasonably priced but rather bluntly detailed. That might have taken away from the market for Tyco’s engine.
The whole incident reminds me of a famous cartoon in a very old issue of Model Railroader. A man in a suit sits at a desk piled high with letters and is talking to a guy in greasy shop clothes. On the wall are two charts. Locomotives announced (with maybe 10 steam locomotives) and Locomotives in Production (one is shown). The guy at the desk is saying something like (I am relying on my memory here) “Sam that 4-8-2 we have been advertising for three years seems to be popular with modelers. Maybe it is time we thought about putting it into production.”
Dave Nelson