2023 Premier O Scale 3 and 4-Truck Shay Locomotives Announced
March 14, 2023 - M.T.H. Electric Trains will be releasing Premier O Scale 3-Truck and 4-Truck Shay steam locomotives in 14 different livery configurations this Fall. Many of the liveries will be complemented with separately sold 6-car Skeleton Log Car sets. Each of these offerings is expected to begin shipping to M.T.H. Authorized Retailers in November 2023. This new production of the Shay will include the steaming quillable whistle feature for the first time.
PROTOTYPE HISTORY
Like many innovations, the Shay locomotive was invented by an entrepreneur trying to get a jump on the competition. When Civil War veteran and ex-schoolteacher Ephraim Shay opened a sawmill in Michigan in the 1870's, logging was largely a winter operation. Roads made of ice and snow enabled lumberjacks to bring timber to mills with horse-drawn sleds.
Shay reasoned - correctly, as it turned out - that laying rails through the woods would allow him to supply his mill year-round and undercut his competitors' lumber prices. Horses, Shay's original motive power, proved problematic as they tended to get run over by log cars on downgrades. Shay experimented with a small steam engine but the pounding of the side rods was too much for his light temporary track. The lightbulb moment came when he noticed that his flatcars, however, were not tough on the track, and he decided to power a flatcar with a steam engine and a belt drive to one axle. It was several years later in 1880 that machinist John Carnes at the Lima Machine Works, while modifying a locomotive for Ephraim Shay, came up with the idea of powering all trucks with a drive shaft and beveled gears. Within a few decades, the re-named Lima Locomotive Works was one of America's Big Three steam locomotive builders.
Check out each of the offerings below.
