Dear all Sorry if this is the wrong group but.... Is Thomas the Tank Engine such as the one used at
Salvé
Rob skrev i diskussionsgruppsmeddelandet: snipped-for-privacy@comcast.com...
real,
It looks like a 1:1 scale model! the chimney and lamp, and the condition of the lococ are giveaways :) Not to mention a buckeye coupling with no provision for a hook! and a very odd looking steam dome............ beowulf
It looks like the same one I've seen live. It's unpowered, though the whistle is hooked to the air line. Functionally, it's a caboose. ;)
When we took my son to ride one, the "real" engine was a diesel pushing the train from the back. It still was great fun for the kids, and you don't have to worry about tykes running around the thing and getting burned or scalded.
real,
My understanding is that the prototype for Thomas was a London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (which became part of the Southern Railway in the 1923 grouping) class E-2 0-6-0T dating from 1913. None of the original E-2 locomotives survive.
I guess your right!!! I am just starved of live steam of the British style...that could of just about been better than nothing. Rob
Having ridden in the cab of the one in Nashville, I concur it's really just a caboose. There's a smoke generator for the stack, and a gas-powered air compressor for the whistle. There are the usual kind of brake appliances one would find in a caboose, as well.
And it's NOISY! (But my girlfriend's son LOVED getting a ride IN Thomas!)
Wow, coincidence. Not Thomas in the US, but...... I was just sent these pics from a friend of mine in Wales.
She's a railfan and she took her neice, Emma, out to see Thomas on tour last month.
Got the pics this morn. after the Bahrain GP.
Thomas over there is a real working animal. Neat.
Rob wrote:
Was looking around the Thomas site. Here's some neat history re- Thomas and the inspirations for such.
Geezer wrote:
Pete,
There are not many preserved railways in the UK that will actually paint a loco blue to represent Thomas - normally thay just stick a face on a suitable 0-6-0 tank and take whatever colour it happens to be painted in - black, red or green. This is from experience of trying to expain matters to my grandson some years ago when we were on the Thomas circuit. :-)
Jim.
But it does look more like Thomas in the books than any exisiting steam loco :-) And the dome looks pretty well spot on for Thomas rivet counters :-)
Jim.
You can't see in any of the pictures, but there is a pusher on the other end of the train.
This Thomas is unpowered with a smoke generator and I believe he has a sound system. (I just couldn't bring myself to call Thomas a "dummy"!) He has all the modern North American hardware so he can be connected to North American equipment. I'm not sure how he gets from place to place. He's small enough to be trucked, but I imagine he's pretty heavy, even being unpowered.
But it's Thomas! Does anyone really care if he's unpowered?!
My three year old would flip! I may take him up to Union this summer to see him.
Doug
Jim Guthrie wrote:
"Geezer" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@adelphia.com:
This must be the one I heard about yesterday. We spent the day at the Kentucky Railway Museum at New Haven. They mentioned a "Thomas" appearance coming up soon. They seem to have these a couple of times each year.
I had heard from someone who spend a whole two weekends "Shoving coal up Thomas's ###" that it was a true steam engine. His comments about the engineer who really liked using the whistle would support the steam engine too. He was a local railroad employee at the time, but I haven't seen/heard him in the last year or two. The story was from around 2000, give or take a year.
Granted I hadn't seen it myself. The descriptions of how the railroad is just mobbed by short folk leave me with the desire to find somewhere else to be.
The reason for the standard US coupler IMHO would be for transporting it from site to site attached to normal trains. At least any picture I've seen would have it rather too big/heavy to make a road trip sensible vs going as freight.
-ken cameron Syracuse Model Railroad Club
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