Anyone here got bored and gathered up some cheap trains and run them into each other at full speed just like on the Adams Family TV show? Have you taken video of this?
Modeling the "Fargo Area Rapid Transit" in O scale 3 rail.
Nope. I wouldn't do that to any of my trains.
"IT's GOOD TO BE THE KING",by Mel Brooks
Charter Member- Tardis Train Crew (TTC) - Detroit3railers- Detroit Historical society Glancy Modular trains- Charter member BTTS
Did some stop motion with parts to make it look like that, but no. Don't have any cheap stuff that doesn't have sentimental value.
When I was a kid, my layout had two loops of track intersecting each other. My brothers and I would play a game in which we'd try to knock each other's train off the track at the crossings. One unit was usually a gang car. The other could be anything from a gang car to a whole train.
Of course we used items with nothing more than parts value.
My uncle, brother and I did it all the time when we were kids.
Not now.
Joined 1-21-2011 TCA 13-68614
Kev, From The North Bluff Above Marseilles IL.
They have a demolishion derby each year at the Cal Stewart meet in Ontario where trains are run into each other at full speed. I, personally, don't like it either because of the destruction of the trains.
Earl
There are some old engines that are only worth $10 each.
No, no, NEVER! My brother and I used to race the trains around the 4X8 layout we had as kids, but never even thought of crashing them into each other.
His GP-9 versus my 2-6-4. He always won, his had Magne-Traction. The steam versus diesel controversy writ small.
Rob
Uhhh, that video's funny in a warped sort of way, but let me warn you. You keep that up and the ghost of Joshua Lionel Cowan's going to show up at your house one night, drag you out of bed and kick your butt!
Remember J.L. grew up on the streets of New York. It won't be pretty!
I did it unintentionally the day before yesterday when a coupler popped and my 2018 flew into it's own caboose at full bore.
Trains, trains, wonderful trains. The more you get, the more you toot!
That's excusable Becky, it happened to me last week when a coupler came apart on one of my "ham, bacon, and lard" billboard cars. Happens to us all at one time or another. Ouch!
Quite a bit different from intentional mayhem and destruction, like blowing up model tanks that don't turn out quite right. I plead guilty to that!
Wayne
When I was a kid (in the 1950's), I took careful note of any kid who came over to play with me and my trains. Anybody who acted carelessly around the trains, in that way, was not invited over to the house again.
I never on porpose ran trains into or off the table,but I have done it.
The worst was the nice 666 Marx that I use to run the guts out of on the back stretch of track on my layout.It's really amazing how fast one can get a Marx 666 going in 16ft before it flys off the table onto the floor.
And you guess it,the guts and front plow were everywhere on the floor .
But back in the 70's the Marx were a dime a dozen and my Dad wasn't to sore about it.
Collin ,operator of the " Eastern Kentucky & Ohio R.R."
Pull a Gomez Adams? That's a temptation I haven't had since I was about fourteen.
The full-size folks have put gallons of skull sweat and uncounted megabucks into assuring that trains won't run into:
I respect their efforts, and try hard to duplicate the results.
Chuck
Well, I have run trains off the table, my fault, running too fast. Last time it was an MTH "General" I was running on a temporary layout on the dining room table.
I've got an MTH Class J that the faster you run it the more it seems to squat down, grab the tracks, and get's on with business. I was lulled into a false sense of security with MTH products. The "General" went airborne and landed in one of the dining room chairs! Thank God it didn't crash through one of the cabinets where Lady Firestorm keeps her Belleek Irish china collection! I'd be DEAD!
You know, if the Confederates had flying 4-4-0's they probably would have won!
Since we've evolved into accidental train crashes:
My most memorable one was when my older son derailed a Lionel 682 turbine from a trestle at the edge of my layout. The engine and tender dropped at least four feet to a concrete floor. It was hard to beleive that the only damage was to the boiler front, which had to be replaced.
I haven't tried running trains into each other myself, but here is a video that has been around for a while called...................
OH Noooo!!!!!!!!!!!!
"World's Scariest Model Train Wrecks".
Oddly enough try it and you might be dissappointed. Years ago when the first remake of the Adams Family movies (Raul Julia and Angela Huston) was filmed there was an article in one of the screen magazines about the special effects employed. It turns out that they had a lot of trouble with the train crash scenes, the darn trains just wouldn't break apart like they needed! Locomotive and car shells survived the squib explosives with nothing but a few powder burns. Head-on impacts resulted in a busted coupler or two, but nothing like the destruction the film crew wanted. So they ended up reconstructing the train models using flimsier materials like soft lead and thin balsa wood for car shells. That was the only way they could get the scenes of mangled wreckage that they were looking for.
I have figured out what is wrong with my brain! On the left side nothing works right, and on the right side there is nothing left!
Dsmith, that video was hysterical! Thanks for posting! Thank God they were wrecking HO trains and not our beloved three-railers!
I've got to get this off my chest. Is anyone else annoyed with people using the word "decimate" instead of "devastate" like they did in the video? They're not synonyms and never were. Drives me nuts.
TM Books and Videos has a DVD called "Oh No!", a 55 minute collection of toy train wrecks which is a lot of fun to watch.
Firelock76...I've got to get this off my chest. Is anyone else annoyed with people using the word "decimate" instead of "devastate" like they did in the video? They're not synonyms and never were. Drives me nuts.
I'm with you on that... the one that always grinds with me too is "between" & "among" being used incorrectly.
Back in 5th, 6th, or 7th, grade, I would latch my 1615 0-4-0 steamer to the back of my 210 Alco on the front stretch of the loop of track I had on th eping pong table, turn the throttle up, un-couple them and try to get them to head on in the tunnel that was on the back stretch of the loop. Didn't do it too often.
Amazingly enough, the 1615 was un-damaged and the 210 still has the 'chin' under the coupler.
Lots of other accidents over the years, though. My wife was driving the Polar Espress Berkshire and didn't throttle back enough on the downgrade, sending it straight off of the table. Bent cowcatcher that cracked when straightened.
Just last week, I had a couple of layouts set up at a local train show. Two oopses happened then. A curious finger found the uncouple button on the uncouple/unload track while I was away from the table for a couple of minutes. This resulted in the #600 SW2 making a close inspection of the caboose it had been pulling.
Later in the day, my #746 J class unhooked from the tender. No TMCC throttle control when that happens. It also made a close inspection of its caboose. The lesson to learn here, is make sure your track is level. This was a temporary loop of track set on several tables that were not quite level. There was a kink in the track that would allow the draw bar hook to pull out of the draw bar on the tender.
Doing this acutally has a protoype in real life. There were a number of staged train collisions in the 19th century (such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush,_Texas) - although it seemed to fall out of favor when spectators tended to end up dead.
IT consultant by day, 3rd generation Lionel guy (raising a 3YO 4th generation Lionel Lil' Man) by night in the suburbs of the greatest city in the world - Chicago. Home of the ever-changing Illinois Concretus Ry.
Around the turn of the century, the until-then almost universal American-type 4-4-0 locomotives began to be replaced with larger locomotives and other wheel arrangements as the quality of American track improved. Virtually all of the American types were scrapped. Selling tickets for a staged collision was a way for entrepreneurs to make extra money off locomotives on their way to be scrapped, without significantly reducing their value as scrap.
Bob Nelson
Some of these staged wrecks occurred as late as the 1930's. I've got a video called "Train Wrecks, Crashes, and Disaster" that starts with one such staged wreck.
If you look closely, you can see both locomotives have been rigged with an apparatus to cut the steam lines to the cylinders at the moment of impact to prevent boiler explosions. It worked, after the impact you can see steam venting from both locomotives, quite violently I might add.
Still, seeing those old engines wrecked like that makes my blood run cold, but after all back in those days they were considered junk. I suppose a classic car guy gets the same feeling when he sees cars being wrecked in old movies.
I would have liked to have done a Gomez, but I couldn't afford to either.
The closest thing to that would be with a set my dad bought back in the 60s.
I believe it was a set made by Marx that had an HO train w/oval track. One of the straights was an HO car crossing. If I remember correctly, the HO race car layout was a figure 8 over and under set. Our races tended to last 10 laps around the figure 8 while a third person controlled the speed of the train led by a very untypical looking orange Union Pacific F-unit. Sometimes the cars would just beat the train through the crossing. Sometimes the cars would bounce off the engine like popcorn. Other times that engine would drag the little car(s) in a gruelingly awful grinding death stroke. As bad as it seemed, all three were remarkably resilient as I remember enjoying those races for quite a number of years. It lasted until one fateful day when I experimented by putting the engine on my O27 figure 8. The engine's headlight lit up really bright and the HO engine raced around the track once when all of a sudden a spark flew and I noticed a wire inside had burned out. That was the last time that poor engine ran.
The December 1991 issue of CTT's has a six page article on how the train collision scene was done in the Paramount Pictures' Addams Family movie. There are a dozen out-take photos as well as a schematic of the overall track layout. The locomotives were custom designs that contained smoke and flash charges set to ignite on contact. Power for the collision was actually supplied by a mechanical pulley system that utilized a drop weight.
interestingly enough Gomez never actually operated the trains. Union rules didn't permit actors to do special effects. The on-camera ZWs and the switch controls were ornamental. The trains were really operated off camera from a separate KW and control panel.
Papa-D
Don't have any pictures, but when my 2 younger brothers and I lived home as kids in the late fifties/early 60s, there was a time when the two of them used to stage train wrecks, either with objects on the track, or two engines head on. We had two older brothers that had built us a nicely done layout. The engines used were a 2026 and a 2035. For the abuse they took, they are still in my collection today. The tender received the most damage, with broken shell and rear coupler, but they were repaired. Today I tell people about our Lionel trains back then, I say...My oldest brother built the layout, the second older brother did the art work, after a point I too took to building/expanding the layout, and my two youngest staged train wrecks. Now all of us have our own trains, and the next generation in some cases is taking over. Good thing our postwar trains were built well.
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