ETS (SEMAFOR) Trains From Czech Republic

[Anonymous]

I saw this company mentioned in the current CTT and also a pic of a tinplate steamer. Their website looks interesting. Do any of you own one of these trains? If so, how do you like them?

pax[C):-)]

[spankybird]

Good Morning All,



Hi Joe,

I have look at these with great interest. The last I looked, they didn’t have a smoke unit and was conventional control only. What I was really worried about was if something goes wrong with them, HOW do you get them repaired. Will parts be available?

I guess that is a concern with any new produce, but with this being made in Czech Republic has me a little more concerned.




tom

[Dr. John]

I ordered one of their catalogs out of curiosity. They look to be very durable, tin-plate models. They are kind of pricey for conventional control engines. Lots of character.
I would have to see one run in person before ordering one (which seems pretty unlikely.)

[lionelsoni]

I bought a little 4-wheel switcher painted for CSD in a train shop in Prague, then went to the ETS factory store and got two boxcars for it to pull. I imagined that the locomotive was a fantasy, since it looked so toy-like. But I found pictures of the prototype on the internet that confirmed it to be an extremely accurate model.

(One car is painted for "Budvar", which is short for "Budjovice Pivovar" or "Budweiser Brewery", "Budjovice, or "Budweis" in German, being the eponymous town for the American beer, whose taste is despised and name much resented by Czechs.)

The ETS stuff is indeed folded tin-plated steel, with a few zinc castings, but very well done as models, not at all like prewar toy trains (not that there is anything wrong with them).

My locomotive was set up for two-rail DC, with a wound-field (universal) motor and a rectifier to get direction control. I added a Lionel pickup and an American Flyer e-unit (all that would fit under its small hood), replaced the green 5-mm headlight LEDs with white 3-mm LEDs, as well as the taillights, added directional lighting, and moved two of the 6 headlights to a more prototypical position.

A Christmas visitor, urged unwisely by my son, broke a buffer from a boxcar in a hard coupling in 2002. Despite promises from the owner, I was never able to get a replacement from the factory until my wife's cousin went in person and got some for me.

Although the cars are very short, like the prototype, they do not do as well on sharp curves as Lionel-style cars with truck-mounted couplers. "S" curves in particular are impossible, since the body-mounted couplers swing in opposite directions at the middle of the curve.