TALGO

[BEAUSABRE]

Something for the old timers out there...

TALGO is a particular design of car suspension and running gear

"Talgo trains are best known for their unconventional articulated railway passenger cars that use in-between carriage bogies that Talgo patented in 1941, similar to the earlier Jacobs bogie. The wheels are mounted in pairs but not joined by an axle and the bogies are shared between coaches rather than underneath individual coaches."

So how did truck mounted couplers on model equipment come to be called "Talgo"

I won't even get into the "NMRA" vs X2f or Mallery Horn-Hook coupler debacle. That was a bunch of builders declaring a prototype design to be adopted, which it was not.

[7j43k]

Haven't a clue.

 

But I did turn up a picture of Old Talgo #1 (you might want to shield your eyes):

 

 

 

Ed

[gmpullman]

7j43k

But I did turn up a picture of Old Talgo #1

Wow! I haven't seen a whalebone hoopskirt in years — 

 

BEAUSABRE

So how did truck mounted couplers on model equipment come to be called "Talgo"

I believe it was due to the similarity of having the "draft gear" pivot with the truck going in to curves as opposed to having the draft gear rigidly mounted to the car body:

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talgo#/media/File:Sistema_talgo.svg

 

Regards, Ed

[Overmod]

There was a sort of Talgo craze in the '50s, led by ACF, that culminated in many of the more (in)famous 'lightweight trains of the future'.  I suspect it is this that made 'Talgo' enough of a 'household word' to be attractive to modelers.

I always assumed it was the idea of 'steering' the following truck into curves, rather than just letting it pivot idly, that was the idea.  The original Talgo system was not a 'guided-axle' system... in fact, it had no axle between the wheels at all (the aisle for passengers between cars actually went close to track level between the wheels!): each car had only two wheels, at the back, and rode a bit like the trailer of a tractor-trailer on the rear of the car ahead of it.  This gave predictable good steering going forward... and predictable weird geometry going in reverse.  But of course no high-speed train of the future would be backing up except in emergencies, and I had the strong impression as a boy that the same assumption had been made in many areas of 'consumer' model railroading.  As I recall, the design of the beloved horn-hooks shoved the trucks in opposite twist going backwards, and this would happily detect a range of 'issues' in track for you.

[dh28473]

Where were these built?

[Overmod]

dh28473

Where were these built?

The original train was built in Spain, but ACF in Berwick took a very early interest in the technology, and built cars and engines both for service in Spain and, as a demo, a train in the very early Fifties that toured much of the United States.  Prospective modelers will doubtless enjoy this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XXtCkMQvxM

Here was probably the watershed moment the idea 'took off' in the United States:

http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,861012,00.html

In researching the Essl locomotive I came across a patent for the ACF locomotive structure (2719488, filed Sep 2 1949 as #113727 but not granted until Oct 4 1955) by Robert Walsh (and a patent search on his name reveals other ACF work on practical implementation of the G-O idea, including detail design for coupling a typical Talgo car to a locomotive with the four trailing wheels seen in the '488 patent drawings).