Large Scale Central

November 1949 MR "Sound - A New Challenge"

Electronics Power and Sound
#1

Sunday afternoon at our model RR club I had the impulse to pull out a binder of 1940s and 1950s Model Railroader magazines. There is something way, way, cool every 5th to 10th page.

November 1949 issue editorial on page 17, by John Page, “Sound - A New Challenge”
Used my camera to take a ‘spy shot’ of the page, and the last paragraph, to save it for my reference.

The last paragraph:

[quote]“Good railroad sound effects would be a fascinating auxiliary to any pike. If they are possible at moderate cost, the time may come when a “silent” pike will be as outdated and “flat” as the silent movie today. But if sound is worth having at all, it’s worth doing right, and that’s going to take suitable recordings and more “know-how” on the subject than we have at present.
Who has more ideas to keep the ball rolling?”[/quote]
Interesting, development of the feature was being plotted over six decades back.

Also on page was commentary on standardizing couplers at that time and why it was not yet time in the history of coupler development to do so. Author was of a mind that universal acceptance by modelers of a future coupler was what should be the agency which set that eventual standard.

#2

I enjoy finding old articles like this just to see how things have come to pass. I’ve been especially interested in sound systems since the early days of PFM, and working with my dad to develop our own sound systems for our trains. I’m pretty sure if the author who wrote that passage 67 years ago heard today’s latest sound systems, he’d probably say “yeah… that’s what I’m talking about.”

I don’t know that we’re fully “there” yet with regard to a sound system that truly recreates the prototype with all its nuances, but I think we’re to the point now where our limitations aren’t so much the ability to do it technologically, but limitations of the user interface to control them.

Later,

K

#3

Yea, well, steam sound has a way to go on most systems. Steam engines “breathe” differently depending on how hard they are working, and most steam sound systems use the same chuff all of the time.

I remember reading about the CTC16 system when it was first being developed. I thought it would be cool to be able to operate 16 locomotives independently on the same railroad. The problem was, the boards were kit builds, or home builds, and were too large for the N gauge locomotives I was running at the time.