Lionel AC Open-Frame Motors

[EIS2]

I am curious to know how many different types of open-frame AC motors Lionel produced.  I think I have seen different brush-plate configurations, but as I recall, all of the armatures and field windings looked the same. 

I believe they switched to a Pullmor at some time, but I don't know how to identify a Pullmor motor, nor what the motor looked like before the Pullmor was introduced.

Earl Staley

[Penny Trains]

I always understood that Pullmor motors had at least one driver tire and that that was how to tell them from other MPC motors, but I don't know if that's true.

[David1005]

The Pullmor motor is a stand alone motor with a die cast housing on one end which houses the bearings. At the other end is a molded Bakelite brush holder, which may also hold a bearing.  The other postwar motor was the parallel plate motor, used on many steam locomotives, which had a sheet steel or aluminum frame that held the armature and drive axle bearings and the armature shaft and drive axles are all parallel.  The Pullmor motor is usually a worm drive and the parallel plate motor is a spur gear drive.  Other motors used were the Scout motor, which is a unique design with a minimum of parts. Some of the later, less expensive, diesels used a Pullmor motor style built into the truck frame.  The whistle motor was a small open frame unique to that application. There were several different motors used on some accessories. This includes the vibrator motors, a few OO style motors and permanent magnet DC motors. A few Pulmore motors used on accessories had built in gear units. In the early postwar years some accessories used prewar motors, including the 97, 164 and 313.

[lionelsoni]

"Pull-Mor" was American Flyer's name for their traction-tire arrangement, starting in 1953.

http://www.rfgco.com/pullmor1.html

Lionel, who by then owned American Flyer, began using the name around 1970 for their existing universal motors.  Note that the distinction between them and the newer "can" motors is not simply AC versus DC.  The can motors are strictly DC, but a universal motor, as its name suggests, is a series-wound motor that will run on DC or AC.