Does anyone still run or even still have,,rolling stock that you have had since you were a kid?
I still do!
For me my old rolling stock dates back to the mid to late 1970s.
Sill got some of my original AHM and Tyco cars.
I even still have an NW coupola caboose, HO scale, made by Lionel!
I was going to scavenge it for parts,,but then i turned it over and
saw the word "Lionel" on the bottom it became a Keeper.
I was surprised by that,,did a bit of research and rediscovered that yes,
for a brief time Lionel did produce HO scale trains
Sometimes I still run these,,get out the Tyco cars,,a Sara Lee box/reefr,Star Kist box/reefer, Borax hopper, Ajax hopper,Jell-O hopper,Kellogg's hopper, Berkshire Ham and Bacon reefer,,AHM? Dairymans League reefer and a AHM Oscar Meyer reefer that i still got the AHM box for it!
Used to have the Tyco Morton Salt hopper,,but that one vanished,,no idea when it vanished.
Still got the Tyco,,I think it is about a 60 footer Hi-Cube Union Pacific boxcar,
a very prototypical car for Tyco at the time.
Still have the Michigan Alkyline tanker,PennRR Gondola and SF caboose and
FM C-Liner from my very first set, AHM. The C-liner still works! It is not in mint
condition, took parts from a beyond fixing it twin C-liner such as removing
the traction tire wheels and replacing them with wheels that do not need
tires,,the loco can't pull more than 3 or 4 cars now,,but it Works!
Kind of thrill to hear that loco growl again after being in storage for about
24 years. The C-liner is Santa Fe War bonnet, classic red and silver.
Got some other rolling stock units too, but thats enough for now.
Your Turn!
Aah, a trip down memory lane...
Wow, and what memories they are! I remember being 15 and visiting an uncle in Atlanta, GA. I went to a LHS and saw a six pack of undecorated box cars (these were kits). Had to have them. I can't remember the brand or price, but I do remember being short on cash. There was also infatuated with a Bachmann Union Pacific steam loco (smoke unit), a 2-6-0 if I remember. The owner and I struck a deal. I would take care of his lawn the following weekend and he would give me the loco and cars. Showed up at 7:00 am and got to work! That was 25 years ago. The loco officially "died" ten years ago, but I still have the box cars. I just left them undecorated all these years. They are still in good condition and roll smooth.
Thanks for taking the time to read!
Chuck S
Pueblo, CO
the tyco and ahm stuff, like most train set equipment from the 1970s, were truly dismal performers. and yet.....i still have some around. with a little investment to replace the wheelsets and the truck mounted couplers you could make some nice running cars out of them. some of the stuff they had was truly unique, like the 60' hi cube boxcar, or its little brother, the standard height 60' boxcar. ahm had a model of a tie car, sort of a bulkhead flat with a bar cage along the sides. or the 6 dome tank car. all of these i would consider upgrading simply because of their uniqueness.
and back in the days before the bowser cabooses, the old tyco streamlined caboose could be kitbashed into a reasonable model of a pennsylvania N8 class caboose.....
metal wheels and body mounted kadees make a world of difference.
For me, the rolling stock from my childhood means the '60s, and even the early '60s. ;D
Most of what I still have from those thrilling days of yesteryear is now just on display for nostalgic purposes; however, I'm now actively collecting--and running--rolling stock from those days, especially Mantua/Tyco from the late '50s and early-to-mid '60s.
Thank you, eBay. ... :D
It amazes me what you can sometimes find "out there." A year ago Christmas I scored a half a dozen old Tyco freight car kits--great kits, with solid cast-metal underframes and screw-on trucks. The kits had been assembled, but the wheels showed no sign of track wear, and the paint was in pristine condition. The cars were in their original boxes. The only thing wrong with them was that once assembled, the kits really didn't fit the boxes--the couplers stuck out too far--so that most of the couplers were broken. But replacing the couplers was no big deal. Now they are among my current favorite pieces of rolling stock. :)
I guess I disclose my age when I mention my Main Line models and Ambroid kit built cars that I have.
There was some pretty awful stuff made in the seventies. I enjoyed buying Tyco and Life Like cars at train shows and swap meets (often two for a dollar) and redoing them. I had a whole train of AHM offset side hopper cars. I went through many experiments before I was able to retruck them with my favorite trucks from Central Valley and Kadee couplers. I passed on my collection to a minister who still has them on a layout in the church hall basement. By the way, the Atlas FP-7s I gave him are still running after thirty years although we did have to replace the wheelsets once or twice.
Quote from: jbsmith on April 23, 2009, 10:13:52 PM
Does anyone still run or even still have,,rolling stock that you have had since you were a kid?
I still do!
For me my old rolling stock dates back to the mid to late 1970s.
Sill got some of my original AHM and Tyco cars.
I even still have an NW coupola caboose, HO scale, made by Lionel!
I was going to scavenge it for parts,,but then i turned it over and
saw the word "Lionel" on the bottom it became a Keeper.
I was surprised by that,,did a bit of research and rediscovered that yes,
for a brief time Lionel did produce HO scale trains
Sometimes I still run these,,get out the Tyco cars,,a Sara Lee box/reefr,Star Kist box/reefer, Borax hopper, Ajax hopper,Jell-O hopper,Kellogg's hopper, Berkshire Ham and Bacon reefer,,AHM? Dairymans League reefer and a AHM Oscar Meyer reefer that i still got the AHM box for it!
Used to have the Tyco Morton Salt hopper,,but that one vanished,,no idea when it vanished.
Still got the Tyco,,I think it is about a 60 footer Hi-Cube Union Pacific boxcar,
a very prototypical car for Tyco at the time.
Still have the Michigan Alkyline tanker,PennRR Gondola and SF caboose and
FM C-Liner from my very first set, AHM. The C-liner still works! It is not in mint
condition, took parts from a beyond fixing it twin C-liner such as removing
the traction tire wheels and replacing them with wheels that do not need
tires,,the loco can't pull more than 3 or 4 cars now,,but it Works!
Kind of thrill to hear that loco growl again after being in storage for about
24 years. The C-liner is Santa Fe War bonnet, classic red and silver.
Got some other rolling stock units too, but thats enough for now.
Your Turn!
Personally, I would keep them exactly as is, they are collectors items. Better to buy new stuff to modify. At a minimum, keep all the old parts so you can restore them.
Quote from: Eryalen on April 25, 2009, 09:30:54 PM
Personally, I would keep them exactly as is, they are collectors items. Better to buy new stuff to modify. At a minimum, keep all the old parts so you can restore them.
A lot of that old stuff we modified was new at the time we modified it. Just like the new stuff you modify today will be old stuff in 30 or 40 years, and might be collectors items by then.
One of my favorite old cars is a Tyco flat from the late sixties. It has a bird's nest of electronics stuck on it from my early experiments with multi train control, a contemporary of G.E.'s Aztrac. (It's been so long I have forgotten how to spell it.)
The trains I had as a kid were MARX and my originals are long gone. But I have managed to acquire and restore the exact types of cars I had, thanks to eBay. I started off with S-scale sized cars running on 0-27 track. Almost 60 years later, I am getting into S-scale sized cars running on H0 track (think 0n
30.)
Jim
Yup; I like them too. I found out that the Tyco culvert flats could be easily converted into coil cars and will do about seven for the club layout. A Tyco Baldwin Sharknose is getting a new lease on life. It now has the mechanism from a superweight Athearn F7 installed inside the carbody (bought as body only at a train show) A little metal had to be removed from the nose end of the underframe to let the Tyco carbody sit flat upon its new underframe, The nicest thing was the discovery that the Sharknose carbody was able to snap on to the tabs that Athearn used to mount their own carbodies to the mechanism. A match that looks like it was purposely designed that wasy at the factory from the beginning. The last thing done to this model was to replace the EMD Blomberg trucks with thos from an Alco RS-3 trucks by Roundhouse. these were ordered from Athearn. I am still working on this model for it is my intention to add a sound decoder to it. Yours, William Rupert
Believe it or not I actually found my old HO tanker last night after digging through some of my old stuff last night. So it's funny that this thread was made. :P It was a North American N.A.TX. 5912 single dome. It was in great condition...minus losing one of it's coupling hooks. :P Sometime next weekend I'm thinking about getting Knuckle couplers for it. (The other coupler is a Kadee, and I prefer Knuckle couplers over Kadee any day.)
Anyways some of the other old rolling stock I had gotten when I was a kid were ones that came from kits, they were Christmas related type of boxcars and I had gotten a Union Pacific flatbed too.
So to answer your question "Do I still run my old rolling stock?", Yes... yes I do.... :)
;)GREETINGS!! ???What is all this hype about "OLD STOCK"?? :oTHAT is what I am running, when I can run it!! :-\I'm still trying to get my layout up and running, but most of my stuff is TYCO, AHM, BACHMANN, and LIFE-LIKE!!
::)All is DC, and the closest that I have gotten to a "remote control" is the old LIFE-LIKE set-up that you hook to your track, and a hand-held gizmo lets you go forward (3 speeds), backward, or stop. It also has the diesel horn button that you can use, but the sound comes out of the station that the power is coming from!
:PWith over a hundred engines, I don't see a conversion to DCC at all, and I'm really wondering if I want to go to ALL THE TROUBLE AND EXPENSE of converting my COUPLERS!!
;)No, when I do get everything up and running, it will not be very prototypical, but it will be fun.
:DSmoking engines, burning buildings (2), lots of sirens and other noisemakers that I have gotten out of toys gotten at GOODWILL and other "JUNK STORES"!! I've even got (somewhere) the sound of a guy taking a shower- it was originally in a toy duck!!- that I'm going to put in my "TRUCKSTOP"!! ::)
:oYup!! It'll be fun, noisy, but NOT prototypical!! :P
THANX!!
8) Ernie
Quote from: bevernie on April 26, 2009, 05:24:29 PM
:PWith over a hundred engines, I don't see a conversion to DCC at all, and I'm really wondering if I want to go to ALL THE TROUBLE AND EXPENSE of converting my COUPLERS!!
Tell you what, Ernie. My situation is similar to yours. I have 14 computer-paper boxes full of almost 50 years' worth of HO equipment. The engines are all DC, and I'm staying with DC. Moreover, almost all the rolling stock has horn-hook couplers--and mostly the stock is staying with horn-hooks.
I say "mostly" because I have converted a few pieces to knuckle couplers. When I bought my Spectrum Richmond 4-4-0 (because I wanted a
circa-1900 4-4-0), I
almost retrofit it with horn-hooks. Ultimately I decided not to, and converted a few pieces of Mantua old-time rolling stock to knuckles so that I would have a train for the engine to pull. I discovered that you can drop a knuckle coupler right in the truck-mounted coupler pocket of the Mantua 1860-series freight cars, and it works just fine.
But virtually all the rolling stock is staying with horn-hooks, "as built" by the manufacturer.
And the Richmond eight-wheeler runs on DC. :)
Quote from: Jim Banner on April 25, 2009, 10:36:15 PM
One of my favorite old cars is a Tyco flat from the late sixties. It has a bird's nest of electronics stuck on it from my early experiments with multi train control, a contemporary of G.E.'s Aztrac. (It's been so long I have forgotten how to spell it.)
I think it was ASTRAC, Jim. :)
When I was a kid I somehow acquired a book on model railroading--I think the author was David Sutton Rose but I'm at work now and can't check--that included a chapter that touted ASTRAC as the coming BIG THING in model railroading.
I often wondered what happened with that system because I never heard or read anything else about it except in that book. ???
Quote from: Johnson Bar Jeff on April 27, 2009, 11:49:42 AM
I think it was ASTRAC, Jim. :)
When I was a kid I somehow acquired a book on model railroading--I think the author was David Sutton Rose but I'm at work now and can't check--that included a chapter that touted ASTRAC as the coming BIG THING in model railroading.
I often wondered what happened with that system because I never heard or read anything else about it except in that book. ???
Well, I was close, but I guess that only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
The book I referred to, above, was called
The Complete Book of Model Railroading, and the author was David Sutton (no "Rose"--I wonder where I got that from? ??? ). It was copyrighted in 1964, and it contained a chapter titled "ASTRAC--A New Concept for Radio Frequency Control."
I have some very old Marx 0-27 tinplate that I use to run under the Christmas tree but stopped that after a couple times. Tinplate is Very noisy. You cannot hear yourself think when it is running. All metal rolling stock and engines.
Rich
regarding astrac,
i believe it was discontinued for lack of sales. but the concept has been refined and upgrades. we now know it as dcc.
Just a point for Chaz, kadees ARE knuckle couplers and I don't see how you don't like them so much unless you are only running short trains. I'd still prefer kadees over plastic couplers any day.
Thanks, J-bar Jeff. With my spelling, I must have been thinking of the train controls the Aztecs used.
ASTRAC used five different radio frequency signals on the tracks. These were superimposed on top of the ac on the tracks in timed bursts. In each of five locomotives, a tuned circuit detected the bursts at only one of the five frequencies. If the burst arrived late in the positive half cycles of the track ac, a TRIAC was triggered on for a short time (until the next zero crossing of the ac.) This would move the motor, and thus the locomotive, forward at low speed. If the burst arrived earlier in the half cycle, the on time was longer and the speed was faster. If the bursts occurred in the negative half cycles, the motor and the locomotive would move backward. This worked well enough if the wheels and tracks were perfectly clean.
Because the motors were powered only ever second half cycle, the track voltage had to be relatively high to get an average of 12 volts on the motors. I seem to remember it being 20 volts. These high, narrow pulses tend to heat motors more than straight dc does, and is even worse with the inefficient, open frame motors of the time. If the tracks or wheels were a little dirty, the arcing that occurred could generate its own radio frequencies. These could, and did, trigger the TRIACs, in either the correct or wrong half cycle. These reverse cycles added to the motor heat. The result was a lot of burned out motors, which made ASTRAC less popular than GE had hoped.
All in all, it was a primitive system. But I suppose it eventually developed into DCC, the same way that Morse code developed into email. There were a lot of other systems tried, both before and after AZTRAC, but none of them achieved the wide acceptance that DCC has.
Jim
Thanks, Jim! That was interesting. Whenever I pull that old book off the shelf, I wonder why ASTRAC didn't catch on.
Seems like the difference between ASTRAC and DCC is like the difference between a black-powder muzzle-loader and an AK-47.
Read your post with interest since I do have some old passenger cars (3) that I still run. I bought them when I was 16 or 17 years old (1957 or 1958). The interesting thing is that when you turn them over you see that they were made by Fleismann in the US Zone of Germany. The steam engine I bought at the same time is now missing parts but I keep it on display near the layout (just to remind me of what it looked like).
The passenger cars don't have a road name but the color seems to match PRR maroon.I did need to change a coupler so that I could pull them with a Bachmann small steamer. Looks good when it pulls into the train station of my 1950's town (complete with a movie theater showing 'The Atomic Kid', yes the Town theater from the Back to the Future movies).
Guess some of us are stuck in our childhood.
Paul
ok here's one for all you collectors out there.
way back in the early to mid 1970s i remember a train set that was able to use both hot wheels type track, and standard HO track. the cars had horn hook couplers, and a futuristic design. does anybody know what these were and where i can find out more about them?
Quote from: jward on May 01, 2009, 11:21:26 AM
ok here's one for all you collectors out there.
way back in the early to mid 1970s i remember a train set that was able to use both hot wheels type track, and standard HO track. the cars had horn hook couplers, and a futuristic design. does anybody know what these were and where i can find out more about them?
Was it a Tyco turbo-train? I'm not familiar with what you are asking about, but I think I saw something similar recently during my daily eBay check.
no. the tyco turbo trains came much later, around 1990. these were in the 1970s.
I seem to remember someone bringing out a set that had both slot cars and trains. Each ran on its own style of track, except at a crossing. I suppose the object was to mow down the autos at the crossing. My memory puts it in the sixties, a time when slot cars were competing with model railroading.
Video arcades hadn't hit the scene yet, but there were still ways of separating kids from their hard earned quarters. One of them was to rent space, then set up a large, multi-lane slot car track and charge kids for running their slot cars on it.
This link will take you to an interesting read on the history of H0 slot cars and trains.
http://www.hoslotcarracing.com/History.html (http://www.hoslotcarracing.com/History.html)
Jim
EDIT - add link
Hello Everyone: :P
I have a junk box find by tyco / mantua and the darned thing still runs, it is one of those diesel switchers, but this one has a motor similar to the pittman motor and not the pancake crap.
as for collectors, who cares, if you enjoy the hobby and you plan on keeping the cars and such to run and use, modify them as you wish,
I have repowered a lot of the old mantua and tyco steamers, thanks to Dan at yardbird trains I have kept them running, and I have detailed them.
it's nice to see an engine that is heavy as heck pull a lot of cars without hesitation,
I have weathered and modified some cars, some of those old AHM cars and tyco cars were never produced by other companies,
I still have a soft spot for Train Miniature cars, I love those cars for the steam era, especially the beer cars
I think we all like to keep a part of our past with us, trains for a lot of us had a lot of special memories while growing up.
take care
George
Jim - The slot car site brings back a lot of memories. I use to have a couple of Aurora sets. I used to go to the slot car tracks, too, with my Ford Cobra and Lasalle hearse converted for slot car use. I think the Cobra was 1/24 and the hearse was 1/32.
Quote from: Jim Banner on May 02, 2009, 02:08:08 AM
I seem to remember someone bringing out a set that had both slot cars and trains. Each ran on its own style of track, except at a crossing. I suppose the object was to mow down the autos at the crossing. My memory puts it in the sixties, a time when slot cars were competing with model railroading.
I'm reasonably certain Tyco had a set like that. I have some old catalogues from the late 1960s at home. I'll try to remember to take a look.
I have retrucked, recoupled and run a few items from my grampa's hobby days. He started HO in 1947. One item I won't upgrade or run is a tin and brass box car with "land 'o' lakes" on the side. It has brass trucks and a coupler system with metal rings and some kind of vertical hook in the middle. I have three cars like that, and I've never seen anything else like it. They sit in a display case to remind me of grampa and how he got me started in the hobby when I was 7.
Regards,
70's stuff is "old"? ???
I've still got my Revell SW-7 from Christmas 1957, and several Ambroid kit cars from around the same time period.
Len
Quote from: jonathan on May 05, 2009, 10:47:20 AM
It has brass trucks and a coupler system with metal rings and some kind of vertical hook in the middle.
Could be Mantua couplers. These were the "standard coupler" before Kadee came along. They worked much better than the X2f (horn-hook) couplers but didn't look very realistic.
Jim
0:07
;DGREETINGS!! ;)Years ago, I had the old TYCO TRAIN/RACE CAR SET!! :o I rewired one of the race car lanes, such that the cars would move in opposite directions, as on a highway! ???Wonder what I ever did with that old set??
::)I've thought of doing it again, but I doubt that I will!! :-[
THANX!!
8) Ernie