my wife records them when they’re on and yesterday’s was all about MRR history, although, most of the show was about the Lionel company and founder it was still pretty interesting and touched briefly on American flyer(personal favorite) and HO. Sorry micro scalers, no N or Z on the show. [:-^]
Can someone answer a question for me. What’s with the Lionel trains moving at the speed of light? Almost every layout they showed whether it was a childs toy or a giant layout at the museum in Strausburg (sp?) all of the “O” trains were just flying at full speed it looked like; then when they stopped or changed direction it was very abrupt. I couldn’t understand why this was.
I use to help a guy with his layout and trains that thought model railroading was “slot cars”… In fact it got to the point that I complained about him so much here on the forum that other members started getting onto me about it because they were sick of hearing it. He would run his trains as fast as they would go until they either flew off the track on a curve or he literally burned the motor up in his locos. Not only that but had no respect for fine details such as telephone lines, sign posts or anything else that was delicate that you had to be careful with that took hours or days to assemble or install. I finally gave up and stopped having anything to do with him because it reached a point that it was just stupid!. If he had been a kid I could understand but this guy was in his early 40s…
I thought that was the point. Mooooooooooooove fast. No wonder my cars keep falling to the floor, derailing, and burning up loco motors. [:-^]
I do believe they also look good at a normal speed. I have always seen trains in real life about 40mph to a almost stand still. I know the train show I went to had some on display, and they were going rather slow. I guess its up the operator I guess.
Well one factor (especially seeing trains in person) is the size of O scale. An O scale train going 60 MPH is covering 110 real feet per minute; it’s HO counterpart is only covering 60.6 real feet in that time. So the larger O train has to go almost twice as many real miles per hour to achieve the same scale miles per hour…and about three times as fast compared to N scale!!
Also, the e-unit that Lionel trains traditionally use…the ‘forward-neutral-reverse-neutral-forward’ deal…affects the minimum train speed. If you drop below a certain speed, the e-unit kicks in and the train goes into neutral. This means you have to keep up a certain speed to keep going, and affects your ability to do smooth starts and stops. When I was in three-rail AC I found a Lionel diesel switcher needed to be kept going at about 35 MPH to keep the e-unit from going on (just a guess as to speed). When I converted it to DC using a bridge rectifier, it would crawl along very nicely.
I’ve noticed that at train shows, too. All the O-gauge stuff is run at high speed. I can understand it when looking at the layouts which are intentionally “toy train” displays, but those layouts which otherwise look more prototypical also seem to be in NASCAR mode.
Thanks for that explanation stix. No sooner did I think about scale MPH and O compared to HO I saw your post. Wasn’t thinking about that when I was posting that question.
Your second paragraph explains a lot because I know NO THING about 3 rails systems. Was the E-unit in the controller or part of the locomotive drive system? Regardless, it sounds like a poor design to me.
Ive noticed that too Mr. B. Most of what I’ve seen wasn’t flying quite as fast as some of the things on that TV show, but still moving pretty fast for me. Then again, maybe it’s a scale thing like Stix was saying. Of course to swing the other way, they may look stupid to be going slow too.
I think I’ll stick to my HO and someday my Dad’s old American Flyer.
Tracklayer, did this guy have more money than brains? The last I looked, an O scale freight car was anywhere from $50-$80 and I can’t even tell you what the motive power goes for, so for him to be “Playing”, that might get to be a VERY expensive “toy”. Ugh!!! That would have frustrated me too.
Several years back I visited a large Lionel public display layout in North Carolina where the trains ran at reasonable speed. I thought that was out of respect for the three rail track and streetcorner curves.
Of course, there was somebody’s (estimated) 8-year-old kid, who kept asking, “Why don’t they run fast like mine, Daddy?” at the top of his lungs…
For Lionel guys, and toy train enthusiasts in general, scale speed don’t enter into the equation. The joy of those big old things is the flashing siderods, the flying sparks and cacophanous noise as they gleefully run their trains as fast as their trackwork will permit.
There is absolutely no crime in that!! If you’ve ever taken your kids to a firehouse Christmas Garden in Baltimore, you’ll know what I mean!
Believe me, I love my scale models and my detailed scenery, and yes, my slow speed motors… But I still get a lift going to a big Lionel display where the trains are whizzing by, there’s skiers flying down a hill on a conveyor belt, and there’s Superman flying around the Daily Planet building.
With AC you can’t reverse direction by changing polarity like with DC, AC works differently. Early toy trains either just went forward or had a manual switch to change directions. The e-unit came out I think in the thirties and was a pretty big improvement over that.
The e-unit is a solenoid, kinda like a switch machine. A spring holds it in one position, when power is applied to the track the solenoid gets pulled the other direction (you can hear it buzz and then kind of ‘snap’ into place) allowing power to go
If you’re running 3-rail, O-27 track, you probably aren’t as concerned with realism as much as guys who do scale model railroading. Lionel has an appeal all its own. I’m sure nostalgia plays a large part of it. Even as a small boy, the 3-rail track seemed odd to me but obviously, others aren’t too concerned about it. It just illustrates the diverse interests in this hobby we call model railroading.
Most of the layouts featured on RFDTV’s I Love Toy Trains are tinplate and are frequently operated at hellbentforjake speeds; occasionally, however, one will encounter a brass hat who operates his pike at reasonable (read: prototypical) speed. I prefer those.
One of the problems lies less with the operator and more with the perception of trackside bystanders. When one is sitting in their car at a grade crossing watching the myriad of freight cars pass they appear to be moving at breakneck speed forgetting that this perception is orientated from a low angle. A tinplate/scale railroad is usually seen from a higher angle yet we expect our ground level perception to remain true. Some years back I was operating a train on an NTrak layout. I had been very careful to set my train speed at about 50 MPH but I had an observer come up behind me and inquire why I was operating my train so slowly. Again, this was a matter of our eyeball-to-track relationship.
This “problem” can be ameliorated with high level benchwork. It has always been advocated that, since our trains are the actors on our stage, we should avoid obstructing a view of the track with forground scenery - buildings, foliage, topography, etc. However, a passing train viewed form a low angle between a couple of buildings gives the same impression of speed as we perceive from the front seat of our automobile.
Old Lionel isn’t ‘‘scale model railroading’’…it’s toy trains, nothing Lionel made was to scale back in the day. The object was to run trains, not a ‘‘real railroad’’.
I asked the same question about speed to my LHS guy and he said they ran them fast because they used AC instead of DC and the motors don’t operate worth a d**n at low voltage. So you have to keep the power up to prevent stalls. I have an old American Flyer S scale 4-6-2 that doesn’t like low voltage to start, but once it gets going and warmed up I can drop the power off to a more acceptable speed…could be the operators of those Lionel layouts didn’t want to keep fussing with the controls and just set them at a mid range speed.
Well, a couple things on that…first, when model railroading started in the US in the 1920’s-30’s often the only way most people could get into the hobby was by using Lionel, AF, Ives etc. equipment and modifying them to be more realistic. This involved repainting the items and relettering them (usually by hand) and moving the center rail to the outside.
Perhaps in response to this, Lionel began to make scale-sized products in the 30’s, including the Hiawatha 4-4-2 (scale sized but not fully detailed (particularly the tender) but many scale hobbyists used it anyway) and UP M-10000 passenger train. In 1937 Lionel came out with the 700E Scale Hudson and scale Pennsy B-6 0-6-0 switcher, along with several scale freight cars and more realistic “T” rail three-rail track. At $75 the Hudson was expensive for a toy train, but much cheaper than a custom-built scale engine, and much easier than the kits that were then available which usually required a decent-sized machine shop to complete.
Unfortunately, none of those products were made after the war (at least not until reissued in recent years) but many of Lionel’s post-war diesels, including the F3, Trainmaster, GP and EMD switcher were full scale sized, but had some alterations from being fully detailed scale models to allow them to go around tight Lionel curves.
I’m pretty sure it’s on History Channel. And it must be on during the day time because my wife always sees it and records it for me. If you have Tivo or a DVR just find it on Hist and record the series. They have some really great shows on trains pretty regularly.
