Real steam!

[bulleidboy]

Hornby appear to be in the process of producing steam locomotives with real steam. For those who did not watch the Hornby programme on Yesterday channel, they showed a Schools Class(?) with real steam - this is not a re-introduction of steam driven loco's - the steam (smoke) came out of the chimney and was synchronised to the "chuffs" . There is another company that are (were??) well on track for producing something identical - this was shown in the modelling press some months ago, and there is a Youtube video of it in operation. Something else to start saving for

[Walkingthedog]

It uses water to generate the steam. The guy said that the prototype they were using only held a couple of teaspoons of water.

[Steve M]

He said they currently had a 2 min running time but hope to get to nearly 20 mins . I thought it looked quite good. Improved the sounds and chuff synchronisation as well from what I saw.

[Walkingthedog]

And not using oil means no oily film on the loco. Hopefully no rust

Even I thought it looked very good.

[bulleidboy]

They also commented that the steam appeared to linger - which is realistic to the real thing. Might be even more impressive if your layout was in a cold garage.

[Walkingthedog]

Yes it didn’t drop down in lumps.

[Rog (RJ)]

I don't think it's actually steam as I understand it's using an ultrasonic water vapour generator but the effect looks pretty good, especially as it's in sync with the chuffs.

[Walkingthedog]

I don’t think real steam floating about on a layout would be very good for the scenery.

[Rog (RJ)]

Someone on another forum has posted that the water is pre-heated before it gets the ultrasonic treatment.

[RAF96]

Same ultrasonic atomiser as is used in indoor garden water features. The tech has been around for donkeys years but first the atomiser disk needed to be miniaturised to fit in locos, and then the control gear, which then had to be modified to synch with the chuffs, which is likely to be on a similar principle as sound to light discos. All very clever stuff, but the associated module will need to be bespoke to fit each loco hence factory install only along with sound - not going to be a cheap add-on and no retro-kits.