Lionel's "Bean Can" Tenders - Cheap Train Sounds

Hello again, this is Mike with Toy Train Tips and Tricks, and the chugging sound that you just heard is Lionel's low-budget, ultra-low-tech mechanical sound of steam, or sometimes just called the chugging sound of steam, used by Lionel during the MPC era, the 1970s and early 1980s, on their bottom-end starter sets, most often with a locomotive with a DC-only motor, or one like this uncatalog set from 1975 with a mechanical reverse unit. These were the, as a matter of fact, it was this very set. These are the cars that came with that set, and so Lionel was using this as a way to add a little bit of oomph to their bottom-line, bottom-tier sets. This particular one has the mechanical reverse, headlight, no smoke, but the chugging sound of steam. So let's take a closer look at this chugging or mechanical sound of steam, as Lionel called it, and see what's under the hood. All right, taking a closer look at our tender here, at first glance it looks a lot like the Marks Sound of Power configuration with this wheel, but on the Marks version, this wheel has metal contacts that control the chugging of the electronic soundboard inside the tender, kind of like the Lionel electronic Mighty Salom steam, but with a totally self-contained in the tender without any wires to the locomotive. However, this is low-tech. There's nothing electronic in here. Basically, as the wheel turns, you hear objects inside falling and making the chugging sound. So let's take this apart and show you how it works. But basically, you've got a rolling cylinder with like a rubber tire on there to give it a little bit of traction so it doesn't spin against the center rail. These mechanical units came in a couple of different tender body styles, most frequently with the short streamlined tender with either the cold load, like this one, or sometimes the oil burner type. Take this one screw out, and there's tabs on the other end, so you just separate it like so. And it sometimes also came on the squareback tender. And so here is what you have. Now, opening this up, there's a lot of this oxide-looking dust here. My guess is that is from whatever the objects are that are spinning around in there deteriorating over the course of 40-some years, because the dust in there is coating everything. Also notice, if you can see here, let me hold something behind this, the cold load on these is semi-transparent. There's lots of holes in there to help let the sound out. That's a nice feature. So it looks like it's a solid cold load because it's dark underneath, but you can see there's lots of holes there to let the sound out. The chamber itself, so we have our little cylinder here, and we've got two chambers here and here that actually hold the magic beans, we'll call them, and then the other two quadrants of our cylinder are open again to allow the sound to escape. And I don't know if you can see on camera here, but if I look inside these holes, I can see quite a bit of this oxide type material, whether that's just dust or whether these are metal pieces that have rusted and the dust is coming off. But yeah, it is pretty much on everything on the inside of the tender. And it just snaps into place in this little V-channel right here and it rolls along and makes the chug-chug sound. Now Lionel was not nearly as proud of this development as they were of their electronic version. First of all, the electronic version came out first, right from the beginning of MPC era. These didn't show up until at least 1973. I know they were out by 75 because that's when this set was made. And they do appear in the catalog from that point up into the early 80s, always on, again, bottom-of-the-line sets with either DC-only motors or AC motors with the mechanical reverse, just to keep costs down as low as possible. Whereas the electronic Sound of Steam was usually bullet-pointed in the catalog, the mechanical would be listed in the features of the locomotive, but not a lot of attention was drawn to it. As a matter of fact, even in this 1980 catalog, two places on the same page of the same catalog refer it by different names. One, the chugging Sound of Steam, and other, the mechanical Sound of Steam. So Lionel really... the marketing really didn't push this as a major feature. I think they were somewhat ashamed of it. Even in the technical drawings, there is no exploded drawing of how this assembles, just a little sub-note on this tender page from 1978 saying, well, these are the parts you need to substitute if it's a mechanical Sound of Steam tender rather than the other. The other thing I notice about this is, notice the plastic frame instead of the typical sheet metal. You can see that because there's additional details on here that wouldn't be on the sheet metal frame, but it's also lighter. So that's another difference. This would be cheaper, even though it has more detail than your standard tender, because it's all plastic. Instead of the sheet metal, it is less expensive. So really cutting costs everywhere they possibly can on these sets. So here it is, the mechanical Sound of Steam now. This debris that I see here confirms what to me... I remember it being a louder sound when I was younger than it is now. And so my guess is that really is true, because one, we see this thing deteriorating. And I'm also assuming that down inside the cylinder, inside these holes, there's probably a lot of dust in there helping to clog out the sound. So it would be theoretically possible to make your own of these. There is a YouTube video of someone making their own using a cylinder that's made to hold fishing weights, fishing line weights. It's about the right size, and I put it in there, and it actually works. Or, you know, this could be made out of many different things. About the only part that wears out is this little rubber tire, which this would be easily replaceable with, say, vinyl electrical tape. You just need something with just enough tension to it to grab onto the center rail and make the cylinder roll rather than slide. And that's about it. As this gets too fast, the centrifugal force keeps the beams from falling, and so that's why the sound disappears at faster speeds, because everything is forced to the outside, and you lose the chug-chug-chug of the pull, because the centrifugal force overcomes the force of gravity, and it ends up the only time you're hearing it there is when I'm actually touching it versus when you're going slower. When you're going slower, let me get a piece of track, and the magic video piece of track appears, and you can hear it chugging as I go back and forth across the piece of track. But again, you go too fast, you go too fast, and you get nothing until it comes to a stop. So there it is, the mechanical sound of steam slash chugging sound of steam slash whatever Lionel was calling it at that particular time. This was the, again, the low-budget, low-tech version of adding sound to your steam locomotives. And so if you run across one of these tenders with this, that's what it is, the mechanical sound of steam. So I hope you enjoyed the video. If you do, like it, share it, subscribe, tell your friends, tell your neighbors. Until then, keep the trains running, and we'll catch you next time on Toy Train Tips and Tricks.