cjack posted:I'm not surprised that some of the history is difficult to find. As for smoke fluids, I've never heard of anyone who knew positively what the formula was for them. I got a glimmer of an idea in a post from a former Lionel employer (I'm blank on his name at the moment) as to the newest Lionel Premium fluid that it doesn't dry out when sitting. That seems like a reason to use it and forget the old ones. Do you know what the mechanics are on the older smoke units you have? Is it a platform that a pill would have rested on (they used to use a light bulb with a dimple in it) or is it a resistor in a pile of fiberglass?
I don't know how the smoke units work in my older engines (#233 & #239). My dad bought them new, and he always used the #909 Lionel Smoke Fluid. When I got old enough to know how to set up the trains, I started using that smoke fluid. I liked having the engine smoke all the time. Later, my dad took me to the local train shop. I asked him to buy me more, because the first bottle was about half way gone. I later misplaced the first bottle, so I ended up using about 3/4 of the second bottle: #6-2909 Lionel Smoke Fluid. I'd never heard of any Lionel engines using smoke pellets until my sister married a guy who had a train set from the early 1950s. His engine used the Lionel Smoke Pellets. I don't know how the smoke units in #233 & #239 work. All I know is I can run them until the smoke fluid runs out. I can run them for as long as I want without having to turn the smoke units off. Neither has an on-off switch for the smoke unit, so there's no way to switch them off. However I've put them away for years sometimes before using them again. To this day, I can put drops of smoke fluid in them, and they start smoking immediately. Whatever the design is for those older units, I'm surprised the #8624 has a wick that is in danger of burning up. I watched both of the videos RICKM46 provided a link for, and one of them showed how allowing the wick to dry out by leaving the smoke unit on could cause the wick to burn preventing smoke from flowing freely afterwards.
Train nut,
I don't know what kind of information is available to Lionel Service Representatives through their database system. I'm sure people call them for information about replacement parts and service requests for products produced over the years whether the items date from prewar, postwar, MPC, LTI, or the modern era. If the answers to my questions weren't available to him, he could have told me he didn't know and the information wasn't in his system. That would have been fine with me. I didn't expect him to lie to me. It was frustrating to me when he insisted 1960s engines used smoke pellets, because the units requiring smoke fluid weren't developed until later. He made it seem as if my memory was wrong, when I know it isn't.
