MTH Premier "O" Scale 3 & 4 Truck Shay Steam Locomotives Announced

March 15, 2023 - M.T.H. Electric Trains will be releasing Premier O Scale 3-Truck and 4-Truck Shay steam locomotives in 14 different livery configurations this Fall. Many of the liveries will be complemented with separately sold 6-car Skeleton Log Car sets. Each of these offerings is expected to begin shipping to M.T.H. Authorized Retailers in November 2023. This new production of the Shay will include the steaming quillable whistle feature for the first time.

Check out each of these offerings HERE.

These items are available to order from your local M.T.H. Authorized Retailer.

ABOUT THE PREMIER O SCALE SHAY STEAM LOCOMOTIVE

Like many innovations, the Shay locomotive was invented by an entrepreneur trying to get a jump on the competition. When Civil War veteran and ex-schoolteacher Ephraim Shay opened a sawmill in Michigan in the 1870s, logging was largely a winter operation. Roads made of ice and snow enabled lumberjacks to bring timber to mills with horse-drawn sleds.

Shay reasoned - correctly, as it turned out - that laying rails through the woods would allow him to supply his mill year-round and undercut his competitors' lumber prices. Horses, Shay's original motive power, proved problematic as they tended to get run over by log cars on downgrades. Shay experimented with a small steam engine but the pounding of the side rods was too much for his light temporary track. The lightbulb moment came when he noticed that his flatcars, however, were not tough on the track, and he decided to power a flatcar with a steam engine and a belt drive to one axle. It was several years later in 1880 that machinist John Carnes at the Lima Machine Works while modifying a locomotive for Ephraim Shay, came up with the idea of powering all trucks with a drive shaft and beveled gears. Within a few decades, the re-named Lima Locomotive Works was one of America's Big Three steam locomotive builders.

Of the 2,770 Shays that Lima produced, only six were built after 1930. By 1944, when the Western Maryland ordered a massive 3-truck Shay to serve a Maryland coal mine, few Lima employees remembered how to build one. Shop crews preferred working on more familiar engines for the war effort, and it took a year to construct WM No. 6. What turned out to be the last and nearly the largest Shay ever built worked just four years before the mine closed and she was retired. Fortunately, one of the nation's first railroad museums opened nearby just a few years later, and No. 6 became the WM's contribution to the B&O Transportation Museum in Baltimore. Even more, fortunately, No. 6 was later traded to the Cass Scenic Railroad in Cass, West Virginia, where she steams in tourist service today.

Check out each of these offerings HERE.

M.T.H. Electric Trains will be releasing several limited-edition Lighted Billboards beginning this Fall in three unique schemes. Each of these offerings is expected to begin shipping to M.T.H. Authorized Retailers in September 2023.

Check out each of these offerings HERE.

These items are available to order from your local M.T.H. Authorized Retailer.

M.T.H. Electric Trains will be releasing a slew of limited-edition Christmas releases beginning this Fall including an ES44 Diesel locomotive and matching caboose, Bump-n-Go Trolleys, Operating Hand Car, several complementing box cars, Gondolas with Lighted Snowmen, an ALL-NEW Flat Car with Lighted Christmas Trees that feature a Lighted Star, a Flat Car with a Lighted Nativity Scene and a lighted Country Passenger Station. Many of these offerings will be available in Christmas themes and in North Pole themes and all are a great way to add to your own holiday collection of past cars, sets, and buildings. Each of these offerings is expected to begin shipping to M.T.H. Authorized Retailers in October 2023.

Check out each of these offerings HERE.

These items are available to order from your local M.T.H. Authorized Retailer.