Awesome brass trucks came with the Dreyfuss boiler.Fully functional coil and leaf springs as well as brake detail...ecen has cast into them Pittsburgh and AAR !
They are passenger car trucks, early frabricated Pullman trucks. not sure if Pullman built them or bought them from a vendor. They are typical of what would have been on earlier heavyweight passenger cars.
My brain is a busy right now, but a little research would refresh more details........
As for who built the models, looks like they came from one of the brass builders in Japan or South Korea.
Sheldon
As designed and originally built, that upper beam would have been wood. Later Pullman practice was to substitute steel for this, probably with different fasteners for the pedestal castings -- every one of these I have seen has rough longitudinal shaper marks on it, making it look like a composite beam of welded strips but it's not. (I also think every one has a Pullman plate on it, rectangular with rounded corners) I bet Ed will have beaucoodles of interesting detail shots... if I'm not mistaken there are examples of this truck construction that were modified with roller bearings and dampers for very high speed in the late '40s.
Those equalizers in the pictured truck appear lightweight for steel construction; I'd argue these were from a wood-framed car prototype. It looks in the picture as if someone has banged the equalizers sideways, particularly the one on the right -- they are cut from plate and should be perfectly straight with no offset.
Thanks for the info!