The Lost 8023 MPC Alco

Back in the day, Greenberg Publishing book authors were encouraged to create a few fictitious entries in their manuscripts to help thwart wholesale copying of their work by competing publishers. These "ringers," as they were called, mostly went by unnoticed, but occasionally someone would ask about them.

Generally speaking, there were about a half dozen ringers per edition and the 8023 Canadian National Alco is one of them. It doesn't exist.

TRW

Interesting!

@PaperTRW posted:

Back in the day, Greenberg Publishing book authors were encouraged to create a few fictitious entries in their manuscripts to help thwart wholesale copying of their work by competing publishers. These "ringers," as they were called, mostly went by unnoticed, but occasionally someone would ask about them.

Generally speaking, there were about a half dozen ringers per edition and the 8023 Canadian National Alco is one of them. It doesn't exist.

TRW

Oh man, you're a fountain of cool information!!! Thank you again! Do you know of any other fictitious entries off the top of your head? No worries if you can't think of one 👍

Wow! very interesting. Thanks for the info.

PaperTRW,

Please feel free to start a thread/post of these MPC variations, 'ringers' etc.

Another item come to mind is the Great Northern 4-6-4's that was to use up leftover 2055 postwar parts. This was in 1970.

I speculate that part of the reason it was never produced is it was to have the postwar style air whistle, and there was not enough whistle units and relays for a short production run. The few whistle units  MPC had in stock were used in the short lived 2125 whistle shack. The parts were used for the 8206 in 1972.

@Chuck Sartor posted:

Another item come to mind is the Great Northern 4-6-4

The 8062...  but I'd bet it was just a little too ambitious for 1970 production.

ADCX Rob - Regarding the 8062, that's the exact same theory I proposed in my tca e-train article quite a few years ago.

While the exact reason the set wasn't made may not be known, one theory is the engine was simply too complicated  to get into the busy production schedule, as certainly  in 1970 Lionel-MPC was scrambling to get production set up in Mt Clemens and the remainder of the line done in time for the 1970 holiday season. Or perhaps it was just wishful thinking when planning the set for the 1970 line.  It's unfortunate this set wasn't made, as the 665 type steam loco was certainly more impressive than the typical 2-4-2 locos offered by Lionel in 1970. It would have also been the first MPC steam engine with a whistle; however the whistle would have to wait until 1972.

@ed h posted:

ADCX Rob - Regarding the 8062, that's the exact same theory I proposed in my tca e-train article quite a few years ago.

While the exact reason the set wasn't made may not be known, one theory is the engine was simply too complicated  to get into the busy production schedule..

IF it was possible, it could have been done in Hillside, but 1 of two things had to happen, either a MagneTraction chassis based 6 driver steamer with spoked sintered iron wheels, which took six years to eventually happen, or a retooling of the 226E drivers, last used in 1949, to accommodate the traction tire for "Pullmor Power" and eliminate the wheel treads, which is what happened in 1972.

My guess along with the shortage of whistle units, is I bet they had a relatively large leftover stock of pre-assembled 2055 motor units and shells. but not enough for a run of steamers in what must have been a very hectic year. 

@PaperTRW posted:

Back in the day, Greenberg Publishing book authors were encouraged to create a few fictitious entries in their manuscripts to help thwart wholesale copying of their work by competing publishers. These "ringers," as they were called, mostly went by unnoticed, but occasionally someone would ask about them.

Generally speaking, there were about a half dozen ringers per edition and the 8023 Canadian National Alco is one of them. It doesn't exist.

TRW

I’ve read that Rand McNally routinely inserted fictitious towns on their copyrighted maps for this same reason.

Curt

Between 67 and 69 in Hagerstown and Hillside, it was just get it done with whatever parts were around.

juniata guy, all of the copyrighted maps, encyclopedias, etc. have/had copyright towns/roads/facts/etc. for this exact reason.  In fact, the science fiction writer Fred Saberhagen used this practice as the key part of one of his Berserker short stories titled " The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron".  I must admit I never thought about this issue as far as the guides were concerned but it makes sense.

   Most of the time they were of no consequence to a user but there were exceptions.  Back in 1971 my brother and his friend bicycled coast-to-coast for their senior summer.  They were way out west and counting on a particular town for a re-supply of water.  When they got to the spot on the map all they had was a large expanse of western nothing (not to worry - they made it to the next real town - very thirsty but alive and unharmed).

I don't think these fake entry markers exist on car navigation systems that are commonly in use today, and the goof-ups are just due to electronic glitches somewhere, but I've had them tell me to turn off a freeway into a cornfield and such things any number of times.  

I think a lot of people have experienced this or similar things. Sometimes you have to engage your "common sense override" system.   

Unannounced changes, modifications, and substitutions happen all the time in many manufacturing situations. I suppose Lionel could have been a poster child for this, especially in the earlier years. The number of variations, changes and unexplained alterations they made seems almost infinite.

My favorite Greenberg ringer was an "Olney Bologna" reefer included in a Greenberg's Flyer guide (i.e., "only baloney").

There's a great NYC anecdote originally published in Sports Illustrated that the NY Daily News (morning edition) had long suspected the NY Post (afternoon edition) of printing the Daily News' college basketball point spreads verbatim.  The Daily News surreptitiously changed an entry for "Morehead State" to "Murdoch State" as a trap for the Post (i.e., the Post's owner was and is Rupert Murdoch).  According to the story, the Post walked right into it.

You can see the story in the SI archives.  It's a fair distance down the page so keep scrolling:

https://vault.si.com/vault/1980/02/11/scorecard

Steven J. Serenska

But on the othet hand, maybe it was proposed by MPC and there were no orders.  They did make a moden red, black and white CN noodle FA-FB-FA a few years later.

They did the CN 8025 A-A set in 1971.

My Greenberg' Guide to Lionel Trains 1970-1991 Third Edition copyright 1991 has no picture of 8023 and makes no mention of it in the text, which lists and pictures 8022 and then jumps to 8025. So it seems less than likely that the 8023 was any kind of a "ringer," but rather something Lionel was going to produce and then decided not to, and so Greenberg dropped it from listing it in their later version Guide. No. 8025, another Canadian National FA - but the version with the orange nose and black and white striping - was produced in 1971. It is possible that there wasn't enough interest in the plain-Jane 8023 to produce it (and Lionel really needed to stimulate sales in those days), so the decision was made to shelve it from the 1970 production plans and produce the more colorful and interesting 8025 the next year.

Lionel may have been thinking about a copy of the No. 228 from 1961. Another strange one - shown in an advance catalog but never showed up in a consumer catalog, and - like the proposed but never produced 8023 was to have been - only made for the Canadian market.

@RetroMikado posted:

Oh man, you're a fountain of cool information!!! Thank you again! Do you know of any other fictitious entries off the top of your head? No worries if you can't think of one 👍

You're welcome. Somewhere around here in an old box of manuscripts I have the list of ringers, but off the top of my head, I remember the ones that tripped people up the most:

1988 edition: 8023 Canadian National Alco and 8456 Norfolk Southern GP-7

1990 edition: 9137 Pennsylvania Gondola -- by far, this was the piece that caused the most ruckus. A lot of people collect Pennsylvania items!

@EMD posted:

Please feel free to start a thread/post of these MPC variations, 'ringers' etc.

See the above. My e-mail is in my profile if anyone has any MPC questions or feel free to post here on the forum and I'll take a stab at 'em.

TRW

@Chuck Sartor posted:

Another item come to mind is the Great Northern 4-6-4's that was to use up leftover 2055 postwar parts. This was in 1970.

@ADCX Rob posted:

The 8062...  but I'd bet it was just a little too ambitious for 1970 production.

@ed h posted:

While the exact reason the set wasn't made may not be known, one theory is the engine was simply too complicated  to get into the busy production schedule, as certainly  in 1970 Lionel-MPC was scrambling to get production set up in Mt Clemens and the remainder of the line done in time for the 1970 holiday season. Or perhaps it was just wishful thinking when planning the set for the 1970 line.  It's unfortunate this set wasn't made, as the 665 type steam loco was certainly more impressive than the typical 2-4-2 locos offered by Lionel in 1970. It would have also been the first MPC steam engine with a whistle; however the whistle would have to wait until 1972.

To date, I've never found any internal documentation for several 1970 items, including the Great Northern 4-6-4 and Penn Central Satellite Car, so it's unknown how far along they were developed. And even though it was catalogued, items like the 8030 Illinois Central GP-7 wasn't produced until 1971.

TRW

@Dominic Mazoch posted:

But on the othet hand, maybe it was proposed by MPC and there were no orders. 

@breezinup posted:

So it seems less than likely that the 8023 was any kind of a "ringer," but rather something Lionel was going to produce and then decided not to...

You guys are certainly welcome to speculate all you'd like, but my answer above wasn't a guess. The 8023 was created as a ringer for copyright purposes.

TRW

Color me disappointed if not particularly surprised.  Errors are inevitable, but deliberately making a train reference work inaccurate to protect copyright is frustrating.  Deliberately making a road atlas inaccurate to protect copyright is reprehensible.

There are other ways of doing the job without resort to fabrication and misdirection.

The Lionel service manual has tons of 'ringers'!

@PaperTRW posted:

See the above. My e-mail is in my profile if anyone has any MPC questions or feel free to post here on the forum and I'll take a stab at 'em.

TRW

Todd,

How rare are the Lionel sets in the 1971 Canadian Parker Brothers catalog ?  In all my years of collecting I don't think I've ever come across any in person. How about the T-1174 set in particular ?

Ah, what might have been!