...oh, yeah...who'd o' guessed?
While advertised at $9.95 in this ad (an impressively low price at the time for a locomotive model of this type), by the time of the January 1963 issue of Model Railroader magazine "Trade Topics", it had risen to $10.95, $15.95 assembled. Other changes include the electrical pickup and metal drivers...
All in all, I count three variations, my geared one with the plastic drivers, the one in Trade Topics, with the metal divers, and their first version with...can you believe it...their Hi-F rubber band drive? That will be an interesting find should one come my way...
UPDATE: A reader writes... "(T)hat would be the second production version (not counting the pre-production RB drive, of course). The first version still had the large steel axles for the RB drive with teeth cut into the rearmost axle driven by a worm on the motor shaft, and no whitewalls (that's the one I have). The third version was upgraded with metal drivers and loco pickup. According to the guys on the Vintage HO forum a while back, no one has ever seen a pre-production RB drive.
Many thanks...
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