MTH K4 video at MR

[jondrd]

Anyone check it out? Smoke unit seems to work quite well-don't think anyone wants a smoke unit that will actually replicate reality. Replicating reality would require an industrial strength exhaust system for one's train room. [:D]

I'm assuming that K4 smoke output is solely from the smoke unit and is not motor/drive system destroying itself. [;)]


Jon

[Anonymous]

The smoke is fantastic. That K4 is one fine engine that certainly raises the bar. Maybe a Big Boy and Shay are next (HINT HINT).[swg]

[ndbprr]

MR videos are useless in my opinion. they are so small you can't see any details and the resolution is not adequate. basically you can see a train run and hear some sounds

[CNJ831]

In my opinion, the smoke feature on the MTH K-4 only serves to liken it to the 1950's Lionel tinplate locomotives and totally detracts from any sense of the modeled reality most HO hobbyists strive for...utterly toy-like and hopefully a feature that will be avoided in future high-end HO products. What's next from MTH...little stock cars filled with HO rubber cattle that parade on and off into pens? You ain't dealing with the vintage tinplate crowd here, Mike!

CNJ831

[MisterBeasley]

Aw, cut MTH some slack on the smoke, OK?

Personally, I think smoke is a marketing gimmick. The technology isn't much better than my old Lionels in the Eisenhower administration. However, people don't go ripping any other manufacturer for building a smoke loco, just MTH. On this issue, I don't think there's a valid gripe. I might argue that it's not a good marketing decision to add an unwanted feature to an already high-priced engine, but that's their call. I do agree that putting smoke units in engines tends to make them more attractive to toy-train buyers, and less to prototype modellers.

But suppose, just for the sake of argument, that somebody really invested in some engineering and came up with a smoke unit that looked reasonably realistic, didn't stink the house up and didn't leave residues all over your layout. Of course, it would have to be small enough to fit in normal-sized HO steamers, and cheap enough to produce so we could afford it.

Would we change our minds about smoke? I bet we would. Look at how sound has taken off in the past year or so.

"If you build it, they will come." Our Layout of Dreams should have smoke-belching steamers. The technology just isn't there yet.

[CNJ831]

QUOTE: Originally posted by MisterBeasley

Aw, cut MTH some slack on the smoke, OK?

"If you build it, they will come." Our Layout of Dreams should have smoke-belching steamers. The technology just isn't there yet.

And never will be! Any chemical reaction capable of producing smoke will result in some sort of particulate or fluid residual. That left-over "stuff" is going to be steadily settling out on your tracks, you other prized locomotives and those FSM structures that took you 200 hours to build. After a while, it's going to become apparent on them...although maybe not so quickly on a conventional DC layout where the MTH K-4 can only get up to perhaps 25mph at full throttle!

CNJ831

[MidlandPacific]

QUOTE: However, people don't go ripping any other manufacturer for building a smoke loco, just MTH.

Bowser????? (Bows down in the general direction of Montoursville, PA). They offer smoke units for their kits.

My advice, Mike, is the heck with the Big Boy - give us something we can't get elsewhere. And make it something that runs on eight volts DC. A Shay's a good start.

[MisterBeasley]

Actually, I'm hoping to see some research in non-chemical "smoke" generation. Look at the electrostatic humidifiers, or even those air fresheners that put out a little puff of scented stuff every now and then. There's no high-temperature reaction going on, and the only significant by-product is water vapor. The key, I think, is to get away from the "burning" mentality and look for other alternatives.

As for the fundamental incompatability of DCS and either DC or DCC, well, I think we're in complete agreement there. MTH has the model railroading equivalent of a Betamax. I wouldn't buy a Betamax, even if it did smoke.

[jondrd]

QUOTE: Originally posted by ndbprr

MR videos are useless in my opinion. they are so small you can't see any details and the resolution is not adequate. basically you can see a train run and hear some sounds

The MTH K4 did look like it was running in the dark.


Jon [8D]

[Anonymous]

I can't understand why they didn't blow the whistle in the video. From what I saw sound was about the same as QSI and it seems all the hype made over this engine was full of fluff. And smoke may be nice to all the Toy Train 3 rail O scaler's, but not true HO modeler's! (no pun intended, O scalers)

[jondrd]

QUOTE: Originally posted by mthrules

The smoke is fantastic. That K4 is one fine engine that certainly raises the bar. Maybe a Big Boy and Shay are next (HINT HINT).[swg]

As I stated once before, if MTH wants a share of the HO market they've got to shorten the gestation time from model announcement to market delivery. Juanita shops could have built several real K4's and units produced would have been out on the road in time it took for MTH K4 to deliver on their announcement.

Since this is new market for MTH they may want to digest K4 acceptance before delivering on a Big Boy (wow, another big boy). JMHO


Jon [8D]

[TomDiehl]

QUOTE: Originally posted by CNJ831

QUOTE: Originally posted by MisterBeasley

Aw, cut MTH some slack on the smoke, OK?

"If you build it, they will come." Our Layout of Dreams should have smoke-belching steamers. The technology just isn't there yet.

And never will be! Any chemical reaction capable of producing smoke will result in some sort of particulate or fluid residual. That left-over "stuff" is going to be steadily settling out on your tracks, you other prized locomotives and those FSM structures that took you 200 hours to build. After a while, it's going to become apparent on them...although maybe not so quickly on a conventional DC layout where the MTH K-4 can only get up to perhaps 25mph at full throttle!

CNJ831

I guess you haven't seen this:

http://www.hornbyrailways.com/img/lvestm/movie.wmv

Watch it past the opening prototype sequence.

Now, if they'd just make some US prototypes, this one is a Pacific, though. [:D]

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by 4884bigboy

I can't understand why they didn't blow the whistle in the video. From what I saw sound was about the same as QSI and it seems all the hype made over this engine was full of fluff. And smoke may be nice to all the Toy Train 3 rail O scaler's, but not true HO modeler's! (no pun intended, O scalers)

The reason I believe they did not blow the whistle is that it is the old banshie whistle that sounds like the English ( UK ) engines, and not the normal K4 whistle. You can hear it on the MTH video on their web site. The older PRR engines ans used this whistle, but the K4's and all passenger power in the forties used the later PRR passenger whistle, which MTH choose not to use. BLI / QSI has a freight version of the PRR whistle and they use the same recording for the J1, M1, T1 and K4, which I have. It is not bad, but not exactly the correct sound for the K4 or T1.


Just my thought on this as I heard the PRR engines trackside many times.

[MisterBeasley]

Tom, that's a great link to that Hornby video. Unfortunately, the sound doesn't work here at work, so I couldn't get any audio. Does the system actually vaporize plain old water? I saw them adding something to the tender, and what looked like a different something to the locomotive stack.

Could you give us a play-by-play for those of us working for multi-billion dollar companies who nevertheless have ancient Windows 2000 machines with faulty sound cards on our desktops? Or for the bandwidth-challenged? Thanks.

[dean_1230]

QUOTE: Originally posted by MisterBeasley

Actually, I'm hoping to see some research in non-chemical "smoke" generation. Look at the electrostatic humidifiers, or even those air fresheners that put out a little puff of scented stuff every now and then. There's no high-temperature reaction going on, and the only significant by-product is water vapor. The key, I think, is to get away from the "burning" mentality and look for other alternatives.

But 'little puffs" aren't prototypical. watching a movie of a steam laboring to climb a grade and what you'll see ain't "little puffs" coming from the smokestack. You'll see a veritable geyser of black and/or white smoke. there is no way to model that in a reduced scale mainly because smoke doesn't scale. reducing the particle size will change the characteristic of the plume.

another area where this is noticible is sound. if we were to miniaturize the air horn, the pitch would be much higher than prototype. to get the pitch lower, we have to change the shape of the horn because once again, sound doesn't scale well. therefore, we're left with playing recorded sounds from small speakers and hoping it's close to realistic.

i just got back from eating lunch next to the Berea station. on one of the two CSX lines there's a switch. As the trains traverse this switch, the wheels make a loud, deep "kathunk kathunk"... nothing like the 'click click' the metal wheels on my rolling stock makes as it passes over the turnouts. it's just one of those things that we'll never be able to accurately model because of the physics involved.

Dean

[MisterBeasley]

I still vividly remember a conversation with a guy who had a PhD in Astrophyics, sometime back in the 1970's. He wasn't one of those head-in-the-clouds, disconnected-from-reality types, but rather a real engineering type who dealt with the complex hardware used to measure the incredibly weak radio-frequency signals that we get from the stars. (Our dish antenna was 120 feet across, pointed to an accuracy of a couple of thousandths of a degree, and the receivers were cooled in liquid helium - that kind of stuff.)

Anyway, the topic of wristwatches came up. He claimed that we would never see digital wristwatches, because they would never get the displays small enough and with low enough power requirements to do the job. Despite working daily at the cutting-edge of technology, he was hung up on the "nixie tube" displays, the kind they had in "2001 - A Space Odyssey." Segmented LED's came out a few years later, and now even those look so old-fashioned compared with LCD's.

Now, of course, most of us wear digital watches that are more accurate than all but the best mechanical ones, run for years on one small battery, and are so cheap that you throw them away and get a new one when the watchband breaks.

I don't know what technology might come along to give us realistic model smoke, but I'm pretty sure something could be developed that will make the rest of us say, "Now, why didn't I think of that?"

[TomDiehl]

QUOTE: Originally posted by MisterBeasley

Tom, that's a great link to that Hornby video. Unfortunately, the sound doesn't work here at work, so I couldn't get any audio. Does the system actually vaporize plain old water? I saw them adding something to the tender, and what looked like a different something to the locomotive stack.

Could you give us a play-by-play for those of us working for multi-billion dollar companies who nevertheless have ancient Windows 2000 machines with faulty sound cards on our desktops? Or for the bandwidth-challenged? Thanks.

The first minute and a half of the video is historic footage of the prototype. The model is a OO scale Pacific and is actual live steam in that small of a scale. A good explaination is on another part of their website, even though the video runs in a small window at the top of the page, the written part should give you a good background.

http://www.hornby.com/pages/livestm_live.aspx

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by jondrd

QUOTE: Originally posted by mthrules

The smoke is fantastic. That K4 is one fine engine that certainly raises the bar. Maybe a Big Boy and Shay are next (HINT HINT).[swg]

As I stated once before, if MTH wants a share of the HO market they've got to shorten the gestation time from model announcement to market delivery. Juanita shops could have built several real K4's and units produced would have been out on the road in time it took for MTH K4 to deliver on their announcement.

Since this is new market for MTH they may want to digest K4 acceptance before delivering on a Big Boy (wow, another big boy). JMHO


Jon [8D]

Juanita built 425 examples with only a few of the total coming from outside builders between May of 1917 until 1928, when Baldwin built seventy five of the last K4's.

In fact, Juanita built 123 in the first total year of production, and this was one to one scale, but they omitted the fan for the smoke on the prototype.

I have looked at many pictures of the 1917 and 1918 versions, but that is not the MTH version.

[MisterBeasley]

Yeah! Now, someone needs to merge the steam-producing part of the Hornby with a standard DCC-controlled locomotive. If the immersion heater in the tender can produce enough steam to actually drive the engine and pull the cars, then a simpler system could be used just to blow the steam out the stack, with some sort of valving to synchronize the drivers with the steam puffs.

[dean_1230]

QUOTE: Originally posted by MisterBeasley


I don't know what technology might come along to give us realistic model smoke, but I'm pretty sure something could be developed that will make the rest of us say, "Now, why didn't I think of that?"

The problem i see is that there's no way to scale down a molecule of air. to get a realistic look, that's what would have to be done because it's not just the steam exiting the stack that makes the characteristic plume, it's the interaction of the steam with the surrounding air.

for example, look at the hornsby video. they show vintage clips of the mallet at speed. watch the plume of steam. It rises a few feet above the roof and and then is parallel to the train well down it's length. in one shot, the steam is almost attached to the roof the entire length of the train. compare that to the live steam model. the steam stays attached for about a third of the length of the loco and then it is no more. sure you can say "it's steam", but it's no where near prototypical. it' s just not possible to model that interaction accurately at 87:1.

also, in the the hornsby video you can hear the whistle. I dare anyone to say that the pitch/harmonic of that whistle is 'prototypical'.

as for a lack of imagnination, i remember reading a newspaper article on a perpetual motion device. someone wrote in saying "you know that such a device isn't possible, don't you?" the author responded by saying "it's small minds like yours that in 1900 declared that we have no need for patents because everything had been invented". well sorry, perpetual motion devices are impossible. and to accurately model steam, you have to model the air also.

Dean

[Vampire]

QUOTE: Originally posted by rripperger

My advice, Mike, is the heck with the Big Boy - give us something we can't get elsewhere. And make it something that runs on eight volts DC. A Shay's a good start.

I'll second all that!!! At least a Shay would look prototypical going 13 SMPH on DC.

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by dean_1230

QUOTE: Originally posted by MisterBeasley


I don't know what technology might come along to give us realistic model smoke, but I'm pretty sure something could be developed that will make the rest of us say, "Now, why didn't I think of that?"

The problem i see is that there's no way to scale down a molecule of air. to get a realistic look, that's what would have to be done because it's not just the steam exiting the stack that makes the characteristic plume, it's the interaction of the steam with the surrounding air.

for example, look at the hornsby video. they show vintage clips of the mallet at speed. watch the plume of steam. It rises a few feet above the roof and and then is parallel to the train well down it's length. in one shot, the steam is almost attached to the roof the entire length of the train. compare that to the live steam model. the steam stays attached for about a third of the length of the loco and then it is no more. sure you can say "it's steam", but it's no where near prototypical. it' s just not possible to model that interaction accurately at 87:1.

also, in the the hornsby video you can hear the whistle. I dare anyone to say that the pitch/harmonic of that whistle is 'prototypical'.


Dean

I can verify the whistle in the Hornby video is not prototypical of the A4 engine, but is not too far off off for many the other UK engines. The A4's used a chime whistle much like a PRR passenger sound and it is a great sounding whistle. Many of the other English engines used a whistle much like the Hornby.

The live steam in HO is neat, but is not useable in conjunction with any other system. It would however be interesting to watch.

I purchased an Aster Live Steam # 1 scale engine in 1988 but never fired it up before I sold it in 1997. I did however run it on compressed air for testing and it was amazing.

[CNJ831]

QUOTE: Originally posted by TomDiehl

QUOTE: Originally posted by CNJ831

QUOTE: Originally posted by MisterBeasley

Aw, cut MTH some slack on the smoke, OK?

"If you build it, they will come." Our Layout of Dreams should have smoke-belching steamers. The technology just isn't there yet.

And never will be! Any chemical reaction capable of producing smoke will result in some sort of particulate or fluid residual. That left-over "stuff" is going to be steadily settling out on your tracks, you other prized locomotives and those FSM structures that took you 200 hours to build. CNJ831

I guess you haven't seen this:

http://www.hornbyrailways.com/img/lvestm/movie.wmv

Watch it past the opening prototype sequence.

Now, if they'd just make some US prototypes, this one is a Pacific, though. [:D]

Tom - I watched the whole video. I saw a toy train going at 100-120mph so that the smoke swept back over the engine and a bunch of static display shots with smoke going straight up. I noted that the smoke plume lasted a much shorter time than MTH's and that was an improvement but beyond that I really wasn't impressed. Was I supposed to see something more? I don't run my trains at 100-120mph.

CNJ831

[tstage]

I watched the video on the MTH K4. Even though in my eyes it's still a gimmick, the smoke aspect was sorta slick - just like how your layout and track will become if you decide to run it with the smoke generator for very long. No thanks! [xx(]

To give MTH some credit, from what I could hear, the sound from the K4 was fairly impressive and realistic sounding. I'll stop there...

Tom

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by mthrules

The smoke is fantastic. That K4 is one fine engine that certainly raises the bar. Maybe a Big Boy and Shay are next (HINT HINT).[swg]

Oh for Pete's sake, enough of this boredom already!
Can't light the fires and kick the tires yet, so can we can the suppositions? [zzz][zzz][zzz][zzz][zzz][zzz][zzz] BORING!!!!!!!!

[TomDiehl]

QUOTE: Originally posted by CNJ831

QUOTE: Originally posted by TomDiehl

QUOTE: Originally posted by CNJ831

QUOTE: Originally posted by MisterBeasley

Aw, cut MTH some slack on the smoke, OK?

"If you build it, they will come." Our Layout of Dreams should have smoke-belching steamers. The technology just isn't there yet.

And never will be! Any chemical reaction capable of producing smoke will result in some sort of particulate or fluid residual. That left-over "stuff" is going to be steadily settling out on your tracks, you other prized locomotives and those FSM structures that took you 200 hours to build. CNJ831

I guess you haven't seen this:

http://www.hornbyrailways.com/img/lvestm/movie.wmv

Watch it past the opening prototype sequence.

Now, if they'd just make some US prototypes, this one is a Pacific, though. [:D]

Tom - I watched the whole video. I saw a toy train going at 100-120mph so that the smoke swept back over the engine and a bunch of static display shots with smoke going straight up. I noted that the smoke plume lasted a much shorter time than MTH's and that was an improvement but beyond that I really wasn't impressed. Was I supposed to see something more? I don't run my trains at 100-120mph.

CNJ831

Hardly a toy train. The speed is variable, they have several clips of it going through yards and switches, plus coupling up (a bit rough). The whole clip is about 3-1/2 minutes long. Something to remember, this is not like a standard DC controlled loco, it's a whole different control system. You are actually driving a steam locomotive, not an electric loco disguised to look like a steamer, which is all any of us have done to this point in HO or OO scales. The lever they show the operator working back and forth is actually opening and closing the steam valve in the loco, it's not direct speed control. In the maintenance section, they show handling it with insulated gloves (included)!

[Anonymous]

Will standard DCC work on this loco or do you have to buy dcs to run it.

[jondrd]

QUOTE:

As I stated once before, if MTH wants a share of the HO market they've got to shorten the gestation time from model announcement to market delivery. Juanita shops could have built several real K4's and units produced would have been out on the road in time it took for MTH K4 to deliver on their announcement.

Since this is new market for MTH they may want to digest K4 acceptance before delivering on a Big Boy (wow, another big boy). JMHO


Jon [8D]

Juanita built 425 examples with only a few of the total coming from outside builders between May of 1917 until 1928, when Baldwin built seventy five of the last K4's.

In fact, Juanita built 123 in the first total year of production, and this was one to one scale, but they omitted the fan for the smoke on the prototype.

I have looked at many pictures of the 1917 and 1918 versions, but that is not the MTH version.

[jondrd]