Dear Fellow Trainees:
I just discovered something that I had never noticed before about this set, as well as the number of years of production.
I had always thought that this was only made for three years, but I discovered that it was actually made from 1946-1949.
It also seems that they threw in a #97 coal loader in 1948 and 1949.
Both copy for 1948-49 mention that the coal elevator operates by remote control.
I bought this set years ago at a Greenberg Show at Hofstra University , but the coal elevator was not part of the purchase, nor was I aware that it came with it at the time.
My question is did the ECU-1 operate the coal elevator, or was Lionel's use of the words "by remote control" just a vanilla term?
The actual pieces in the set had color coding to correspond to those on the ECU-1. Was there a special version of the #97 coal elevator?
thanx
Bob MIntz