A.F. Mail pick up in slow motion

I always enjoy seeing the South Jersey S Gauger's layout setup when I go to the annual train show in Ocean City NJ in December. They have one on their layout and I could watch it for hours.

Doug:

Great video!  I have two of those cars (one red and one green) in my modest American Flyer collection and they are fun to watch operate.  I’ve often wondered why Lionel did not make one in O gauge like they did the operating Moe & Joe lumber car?   They could do it in many different road names and it would be a hit and sell out quickly. 

Bill

My late dad always enjoyed the mail pickup car! Mine was a red, unpainted version. Mail bags also came in different colors as I recall.

I remember having had green ones besides the white.

love to see a standard one in action,,,love to have that !!

I like many of the operating accessories that we can have on the layouts. I now have the mail pickup operating on mine, it took me a while to get the speed of the train right so it would collect the bag rather than batting it into the next county. One more thing I learned was if the mail car was coupled to a Legacy diesel when I activated the accessory, from the Legacy remote, it somehow activated the coupler and would drop the car, spacing it one car farther back, it works fine, can anyone explain why that happens?

Ray

@Rayin"S" posted:

(snip),,,One more thing I learned was if the mail car was coupled to a Legacy diesel when I activated the accessory, from the Legacy remote, it somehow activated the coupler and would drop the car, spacing it one car farther back, it works fine, can anyone explain why that happens?

Ray

Gremlins. 

Yep, gremlins! LOL!

So that's why my mail looks like it was hit by a train 🤔

It looks like the red sack knoçks the second white sac into the car.

Thanks, Ive never seen those cars before.  That first sac had me rollin' 

@WftTrains posted:

Doug:

Great video!  I have two of those cars (one red and one green) in my modest American Flyer collection and they are fun to watch operate.  I’ve often wondered why Lionel did not make one in O gauge like they did the operating Moe & Joe lumber car?   They could do it in many different road names and it would be a hit and sell out quickly. 

Bill

 

They had operating mail cars post war, but nothing like that action.

@Wfttrains:

Some years back at York, Lionel had an 0 scale C&O baggage car with the AF mechanism inside of it on their display layout to see what the reaction would be from members. Apparently not enough people were interested for them to build it. 

 I have installed a reworked mechanism (flipped over and re-bent) into a Lionel aluminum combine to work with the Lionel mail swingarm accessory. It works maybe 50% of the time, which is good enough for me. The hardest thing in building it was putting a sliding shoe pick-up into the truck.

Sorry, I'm not equipped for photos or video.

That's a surprisingly realistic simulation of prototype practice. Thanks for posting.

@artyoung posted:

@Wfttrains:

Some years back at York, Lionel had an 0 scale C&O baggage car with the AF mechanism inside of it on their display layout to see what the reaction would be from members. Apparently not enough people were interested for them to build it. 

 I have installed a reworked mechanism (flipped over and re-bent) into a Lionel aluminum combine to work with the Lionel mail swingarm accessory. It works maybe 50% of the time, which is good enough for me. The hardest thing in building it was putting a sliding shoe pick-up into the truck.

Sorry, I'm not equipped for photos or video.

I must have missed that display at York.  Do you recall if it was an operating display or just a static display?  If it was a static display I can see why there wouldn’t be much interest.  An operating display should have been convincing enough to generate enough interest to proceed with the car.

Bill

Does the Royal Blue loco have an LED headlight installed? If so, it looks like it's running on half wave.

Bill: It was an operating display in the White Hall, one of only two times that I remember Lionel being in there. I think it may have been one of the years that Dick Kughn was still running the company, back in the 90's maybe. It was NOT a club layout.