Hi Bill,
That is interesting. I didn't think anyone was making the original ones. The pure chemical is fairly expensive. The person at Lionel that supplied them extracted the chemical from a commercially available waxy material. The waxy material consists of 3 isomers (structures) of the same chemical formula. Two of the isomers have a very high melting point while the third isomer is drastically lower. It is the lowest melting material that was isolated and then pressed into pellets. This material was about 60% of the combined isomers so I guess he got pretty good yield. He sure did make a lot of them over the years!
