Mid 1930's all the boys were trying so hard to get everything right ..signalling , realistic operation , standardization of every aspect of railroading (save the actual scale of O scale..different day, different battle) , measuring the working characteristics of the various engines etc ... Harry Bondurant of Wauwatosa , Wi ( next door to Milwaukee) ... builds a working Dynamometer car .... fully described in Kalmbach's Model Railroader in September 1937 .
Fast forward to the Indy meet 10 days ago ... on a table just driven down from Milwaukee ...sits the Dynamometer car ...
Today the Dynamometer car has a few after article modifications ( improvements may be too strong of a word) .... rear truck , odd wood housing with an odd overhead ? pick up ? .. and some graffiti on the back ... implying that Kalmbach may have been in the fish business...?
Both Kalmbach and Bondurant had O scale layouts with "live ' over head wire ..... the dynamometer car works by mechanical action ..so no clue why one would need an over head pick up ...... there are wheel contacts on the front axle ..with a thin wire running (currently) no where ...
The little dynamometer works !! pull front coupler and the needle moves.. sheer magic ( read article to find out all the secrets ) ....once the layout is up I'll bore you with streaming video of all the action of a Mini-Scale Hudson pulling 7 matching coaches ...to test the load ... ..I just know you can not wait ...
Other working dynamometer cars out there ?
Cheers Carey
- Dynamo car Sept 1937 MR 2.jpg (1.31 MiB) Viewed 2282 times
- Dynamo car Sept 1937 MR 1.jpg (1.51 MiB) Viewed 2282 times
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- IMG_5825.JPG (1.4 MiB) Viewed 2282 times
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