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DKS: Good find! I never knew, or suspected, that they made a 24-position rotary switch.
Nice video Lee, but there is some inaccurate info in it. You keep calling that early N scale manufacturer "rapido"*. Well, the actual name of the manufacturer was "Arnold", and "rapido" was not a manufacturer, but a name for a product line of N scale trains manufactured by "Arnold". In those early days both names were clearly shown on the product's boxes and in their catalogs. I don;t ever recall seeing any of their products where only the name "rapido" was used on the packaging. Same is done on the models. Look at the fuel tank of your Arnold F-units and you will see "ARNOLD rapido, WESTERN GERMANY". Not just "arnold"....The Arnold company was bought and sold, and currently it is owned by Hornby. At some point the rapido name of the N Scale line was dropped and contemporary Arnold N scale products only use the brand name "Arnold".* Rapido was always written in stylized lower case letters
Back when I volunteered with Character Counts, I would do a lesson for the school kids called "TV is a time waster"... Here now, for your viewing pleasure, is Episode 3, more evidence to support that theory.Happy Hi Railing!Lee
Nice video Lee, but there is some inaccurate info in it. You keep calling that early N scale manufacturer "rapido"*. Well, the actual name of the manufacturer was "Arnold", and "rapido" was not a manufacturer, but a name for a product line of N scale trains manufactured by "Arnold". In those early days both names were clearly shown on the product's boxes and in their catalogs. I don;t ever recall seeing any of their products where only the name "rapido" was used on the packaging. Same is done on the models. Look at the fuel tank of your Arnold F-units and you will see "ARNOLD rapido, WESTERN GERMANY". Not just "arnold".Here is an excerpt from one of the early Arnold's catalog of rapido products. Note how the copy uses "Arnold" as the name.The Arnold company was bought and sold, and currently it is owned by Hornby. At some point the rapido name of the N Scale line was dropped and contemporary Arnold N scale products only use the brand name "Arnold".* Rapido was always written in stylized lower case letters
Interesting that they refer to their version of the Rokal coupler as "simplex-coupling," which AFAIK is not a trademarked term, and was not used before 1970. http://davidksmith.com/birth-of-n/rokal.htm
Arnold N scale was also for a period imported by Revell.At least some of their models had different roadnames than the Arnold Rapido models. For example, that D&RGW FP9 loco was likely a Revell Rapido unit.http://davidksmith.com/postage-stamp-trains/revell_catalog_5.htm
But you already know all this David.
Thanks for the great discussion, and for the clarification on the brand name. Makes perfect sense. I better do some more homework!Maybe I'll add a phone in segment where Peteski and DKS can fact check me in real time!This has been a fun project so far. Sorry the layout is so small... I feel like it's getting repetitive...Lee
I always thought the banner image of the Arnold a$$ power pack was Photoshopped, but I see that itis actually in the catalog page pictured above.