- Yates, Raymond F.
The Boys' Book of Model Railroading.
New York: Harper & Row, 1951.
ISBN 978-1-127-46606-1.
-
In the years before World War II, Lionel was the leader in the
U.S. in manufacturing of model railroad equipment, specialising
in “tinplate” models which were often unrealistic in
scale, painted in garish colours, and appealing to young children
and the mothers who bought them as gifts. During the war, the
company turned to production of items for the U.S. Navy. After
the war, the company returned to the model railroad market, remaking
their product line with more realistic models. This coincided
with the arrival of the baby boom generation, which, as the boys
grew up, had an unlimited appetite for ever more
complicated and realistic model railroads, which Lionel was
eager to meet with simple, rugged, and affordable gear which
set the standard for model railroading for a generation.
This book, published in 1951, just as Lionel was reaching the
peak of its success, was written by Raymond F. Yates, author
of earlier classics such as A Boy and a Battery
and A Boy and a Motor, which were perennially wait-listed
at the public library when I was a kid during the 1950s. The
book starts with the basics of electricity, then moves on to
a totally Lionel-based view of the model railroading hobby.
There are numerous do-it-yourself projects, ranging from
building simple scenery to complex remote-controlled projects
with both mechanical and electrical actuation. There is even
a section on replacing the unsightly centre third rail of Lionel
O-gauge track with a subtle third rail located to the side
of the track which the author notes “should be undertaken
only if you are prepared to do a lot of work and if you know
how to use a soldering iron.” Imagine what this requires
for transmitting current across switches and crossovers! Although
I read this book, back in the day, I'm glad I never went that deeply
down the rabbit hole.
I learned a few things here I never stumbled across while
running my Lionel oval layout during the Eisenhower
administration or in engineering school many years later. For
example: why did Lionel opt for AC power and a three rail system
rather than the obvious approach of DC motors and two rails,
which makes it easier, for example, to reverse trains and looks
more like the real thing? The answer is that a three rail
system with AC power is symmetrical, and allows all kinds of
complicated geometries in layouts without worrying about
cross-polarity connections on junctions. AC power allows using
inexpensive transformers to run the layout from mains power
without rectifiers which, in the 1950s, would have meant messy
and inefficient selenium stacks prone to blowing up into toxic
garlic-smelling fumes if mistreated. But many of the Lionel
remote control gizmos, such as the knuckle couplers, switches,
semaphore signals, and that eternal favourite, the
giraffe
car, used
solenoids
as actuators. How could that work with AC power?
Well, think about it—if you have a soft iron plunger
within the coil, but not at its centre, when current is
applied to the coil, the induced magnetic field will pull it
into the centre of the coil. This force is independent of the
direction of the current. So an alternating current will
create a varying magnetic field which, averaged over the
mechanical inertia of the plunger, will still pull it in as long
as the solenoid is energised. In practice, running a solenoid
on AC may result in a hum, buzz, or chatter, which can be
avoided by including a
shading
coil, in which an induced current creates a magnetic field
90° out of phase to the alternating current in the main coil
and smooths the magnetic field actuating the plunger. I never
knew that; did you?
This is a book for boys. There is only a hint of the fanaticism
to which the hobby of model railroading can be taken. We catch
a whiff of it in the chapter about running the railroad on a
published schedule, with telegraph connections between dispatchers
and clocks modified to keep “scale time”. All in
all, it was great fun then, and great fun to recall now.
To see how far off the deep end O-gauge model railroading has
gone since 1951, check out the
Lionel Trains 2019 Catalogue.
This book is out of print, but used copies are readily available
at a reasonable price.
September 2019 