I tried asking Mr. Google your question about how much smoke fluid to use, and the answers very widely, so it's not much help. May be a call to the Bachmann Service department would be helpful. They've been pretty helpful to me about other issues in the past.

And there's always the possibility that your smoke unit is defective. If you bought that engine new, and that's the case, they will exchange it for you for one that works. Good luck to you on this. I remember being a kid 150 years ago with a Lionel steam locomotive with smoke and how cool it was.

There are several recordings of that song, made in the late steam era. That one has the best whistle of them all, a Southern Pacific six chime!! My all-time favorite locomotive Whistle!! Really sounds like it Business!

In 1988 I was invited to be part of the staff serving  a tour group aboard three private varnish cars coupled to the rear of the Sunset Limited, riding all the way from New Orleans to Los Angeles and back. It will be the subject of an entire story by itself.  There were many great moments, many exciting moments, and one particularly scary one.

The experienced modelers here will tell you not to use the smoke unit for several reasons. First of all, you can't scale the physics of smoke down from full scale to HO scale. It will always be wispy and look like a cigarette is up inside the locomotive... instead of a real locomotive chuffing hard to pull a train. The second reason is that the smoke from these units is very oily, and after a little time will start settling on everything in the room, in an oily film that's difficult to clean.

Of course, that doesn't help you if your son really wants to see the smoke. I'll have to defer to those having experience with these units to help you there. But, be advised of the two issues above.

Log in, those of you who are old enough to have, in the days of private railroad passenger service in the United States:

1. Ridden overnight in a Pullman car.
2. Eaten meals in a full-service white-tablecloth diner.

I'm working on a narrative of several overnight trips my family took by train in those long-gone days

Jeffery Ward requesting the stories is enough for me.

I'll republish the ones from the past first, since I suspect many new people haven't seen them.

My trackside railfanning days were from about 1961 to 1966, with a hiatus briefly interrupted in 1972. The first narrative will be in an account of a mail train stop back home in the very early 60s. Number 5 was a remnant of a former name train called the Argonaut that had run all the way to the west coast, until the late 50s when it was cut back to Houston, lost its pullman car, and lost its name. After that, the train became an almost entirely head-end car consist- mail storage cars, express reefers, a couple of railway post office cars, and one or maybe two coaches at best.  These mail train stops were the bread and butter of Railroad passenger service, an every day workaday event in almost every small town in the country, until 1968 when the railroads lost their postal contracts, and the ability to financially keep passenger trains above water, which led to the founding of Amtrak, a few years later.

We actually rode Number 5 to Houston a couple of times before it was discontinued, once in the Pullman, while it was still on the train (a story in itself), and the other in a coach with broken air conditioning, attesting to the fact that the railroad was trying to run the passengers off of the passenger train so they could discontinue them.

All of these narratives describe every day life at the time, but the railroading of those days is long gone, and there aren't many of us around anymore who can recall it as it was. I hope some of y'all enjoy these stories.

My layout is only 15 inches wide but it is 50 feet long and runs through two walls to occupy 2 1/2 rooms in the house. The house is so small that this  is the only way I could get anything meaningful Model Railroad wise going in the house, wanting more realistic operations than a 4 x 8 could afford.

Today, I remembered this record I had heard as a kid. It is very appropriate for my Model Railroad.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h4BYdTrkWoo

In the old forum, I narrated some very detailed analyses of great railroad scenes in older movies from the steam era. Unfortunately, all of those appear to have been lost in the data loss at Bachmann concerning the forum.

However, I had published several stories of my experiences on the railroad back home as a youngster. All of those have survived in my own data, but were also lost in the Bachmann event.  The two that come to mind at the moment are the story of T&NO West Tower back home in the 60's, and exploring an abandoned B&O tunnel in West Virginia in the early 1970s. There was also a narration about watching a mail train stop in my hometown in the very early 60s.

I had started a multi part description of the now long-abandoned Missouri Pacific branch line in our town as I saw it as a teenager.  It was also lost but I still have the completed parts in my own data.

My question is - how much of this stuff does anyone want to see?  And where to start. I don't want to unnecessarily take up space here if no one is interested. Please advise.

That's good to know.  Thanks.

I was looking at the online store on the Bachmann website and noticed a number of things not there anymore. I wonder if they've been discontinued.

1. Under the consolidation, no new items are shown.
2. Only three road names are shown for the 10-wheeler, which makes me think they are slowly selling them out. Fortunately, the Texas and Pacific one is still there.
3. The USRA pacific is no longer shown. I'm glad I got one while they were around.
4. The USRA mikado is still there, but the Southern Railway one and the New York, central one are no longer shown.
5.  And, the mogul is not there at all.

All of this makes me wonder if Bachmann is slowly getting out of the steam engine business, other than the 0-6-0 and variations, which seem to be in most of the steam engine train sets.


Sent from my iPhone

I'm back.  Still figuring out how to negotiate the new forum.

Anything new?  Or do we still need a photo hosting services?