MTH 30-2512-1 Trolley Sound

I think the simple reason is that Pittsburgh still has trolleys at least Light Rail and Allentown and Easton hadn't had trolleys since the late 40s or early 50s.  There are only so many places you can get those sounds.  Even current Pittsburgh sounds wouldn't be right for a Brill Semi Convertible, but where are you going to find an operating Brill Semi Convertible on city streets other than maybe Porto Portugal?

MTH produces wonderful stuff, but when it comes to the talking trolleys they can

do some strange things.  My St. Louis PCC has two incorrect street

locations called out, each including part but not all of two Pittsburgh street stops. Another trolley has a strange routing.  I think that MTH takes this position:  These are old trolleys and no one (except real old folks) really cares about the content of the "talk-talk".  There may be a way of creating your own file with the correct Allentown or other LVT street stops but I don't know how to do it.

Lew Schneider

Lew Schneider 

Does it have Lou Redman's voice announcing the stops like on the first MTH Pittsburgh PCC? 

Bill

You are talking about a trolley that is at least 13 years old and expecting it to be on a technical level as what is being produced today. T'aint going to happen. Making things true to life wasn't a main driving force at MTH or Lionel then. Just accept the fact the 13 year old trolley you bought isn't as good as you wanted. By the way it doesn't look like MTH ever made an Allentown Brill in PS-2 so upgrading it to PS-2 for correct announcements isn't an option.

I rode Trolleys for years in Philly from the 50's until the 70's when I moved away but still when i would visit after and you very seldom would her the Motorman announce the stops. The Subway Elevaited trains never made stop announcements until the arrival of the newer trains in the 80s. I always disable the station stops on my mth cars because that voice does get to you after a while. 

Sounds like that Brill in fact has Lou Redman's voice.  I have the MTH

PS1 PRYS Route 64 E. Pittsburgh-Wilkensburg and it's a true winner.  Redman not only calls out the stops, but he mentions points of interest along the way. And of course,

his accent was pure Pittsburgh.  By the way, I like the PS1 trolley sound, because when the E unit is activated there is a wonderful sound of air being exhausted.

Those of you with PS2 PCCs should definitely run it every once in awhile on "automatic".

All sorts of announcements show up that don't appear on the non-automatic playlist.

One of the best of Cincinnati.  Not only are streets called out, but so are connecting trolley routes.

Lew Schneider  P. S. The attached photo shows my madness.

Lew Schneider

I run both my Baltimore Brill and Baltimore streetcar on auto all the time. You have to be precise when setting up the routes but once you got it saved, you are good to go, mine runs and stops at all the stops perfectly.

You sure have me beat on PCCs, Lew!  I have a total of 41 O gauge trolleys of various types, but only four PCCs compared to the 11 I see in your collection.

I have a special fondness for the PCCs because they operate so well on SuperStreets, and with PS2 they maintain a nice, steady rate.

I have a wonderful North Shore Line two car interurban set made by Lionel\K-Line in the transition period. It has the conductors bell and a great sounding air horn. The problem? The conductor sounds as if he inhaled a full tank of helium and had one too many cups of coffee before making his run. Sounds like a certain part of his anatomy is being squeezed by vice grips. It sounds absolutely ridiculous in contrast to the more reasonable sound effects, so MTH is not alone in this odd disconnect with trolley sounds. No one yet has made that distinctive low frequency grinding sound of traction motors winding up..so distinctive to this type of motive power. Of course then there is the MIA steeplecab...

My suspicious were confirmed.  I have that Pittsburgh PS-1 PCC with Lou’s voice.  I didn’t notice a Pittsburgh accent?  Did any of yinz? 

Anyway with stops at Duquesne Univ., Pitt Stadium and the Pittsburgh Playhouse, how could MTH possibly pass this car off as a street car from the Lehigh Valley?  Also if these cars were made like that in 2000, surely there would have been sufficient backlash from owners that it would have been much discussed somewhere, either on this Forum, the OGR Subway/Transit/Trolley Forum or some other internet Forum or hard-copy publication long before now?  And if the St. Louis PCC car also has some Pittsburgh stop announcements, how many other non-Pittsburgh cars have them, too?  Did the other Railking Brill trolleys also have the Pittsburgh stops?  I’m glad I only wanted the Pittsburgh cars! 

I too, used to run my PS-2 PCC’s in auto-mode although I had problems getting it programmed to start in the forward direction at the first stop.  But lately I’ve been running two on one track both locked in forward with manual and automatic stops using relays triggered by insulated rails to stop the second car.

And I envy Lew’s PCC collection also.

Now here’s a question: I want to run my PS-1 and at least one of my PS-2 Pittsburgh PCC’s together locked in forward but at the minimum voltage required to operate the PS-2 versions, the PS-1 runs so fast that it will fly off the track at the D-21 curves.  Anybody know how to slow down the PS-1 or otherwise solve this problem?  On this layout I’m running conventional using a Z-1000.

Bill

 Wow, this is an interesting situation! I'm wondering if MTH just had a bunch of the Pittsburgh chips left over from the PCC car, and to save money, they just installed them in the Allentown trolley. Either that or maybe a mix up with a small percentage of the run.

As far as Pittsburgh streets being mixed in with other city announcements, maybe it was a programing issue. I too wonder why this hasn't been reported before?!?!

Is there anyone else out there that has this trolley with the Pittsburgh announcements?

Very nice trolley collection Lew!

Well, I have to close now. I'm going to red up and see if the Stillers are on TV!

Here are the details on the MTH Pittsburgh-St Louis mixup.

The Pittsburgh Overbrook trolley (S. Hills line) has stops called:

Creystone/Killarney (Not sure if the first name is correct. Could be Cregstone)

Castle Shannon

The St. Louis 14 University Clayton trolley has stops called:

Creystone Big Bend Loop (Or maybe it's Cregstone Big Bend Loop)

Castle Clayton   

The correct stops should have been:

Big Bend Loop

Clayton

Too bad this was never corrected.

Lew Schneider

Now that the server issue has been resolved, I can finally post again. I believe I can shed some light on the Lou Redman question.

As other s mentioned, LVT stands for the Lehigh Valley Transit Company. Since I'm from Allentown, I was very excited and bought this trolley way back when it first became available.  And yes, I expected to hear Lehigh Valley area station stops announced, and yes, I was similarly disappointed to find out that Pittsburgh area names were on the chip! I posted this to the Forum back then.

I was very surprised to receive a phone call a week or so later regarding my post. The stranger on the other end identified himself as Lou Redman! Who did not know that name back then???!  He congratulated me on recognizing the names on the chip as from the Pittsburgh area, asked how I knew, since I'm not from that area. I explained that my family enjoys going to Kennywood Park and riding the coasters and other old and unique rides in their collection.  He went on to ask if I knew who's voice was on the chip. Of course, I did not know that one. He then explained that the voice on that chip is indeed his, and that is what MTH wanted recorded!

So there is only one chip for that particular trolley, and the names called out are, for whatever the reason, intentionally incorrect. I am not aware of another chip with the proper area names ever being produced. I don't believe that chip can be re-recorded, but since I'm not an electronics guru, I'll leave that determination to others. Meanwhile, you are pretty much stuck with what you have. So go ahead and play it, and enjoy the voice of a memorable TCA icon!

Chris

LVHR

PS Thank you, Lou!

Lew & Chris:  Thanks for sharing that very interesting information, at least for this former Pittsburgher and streetcar fan.  These two posts help to explain that the Pittsburgh streetcar stop announcements on two non-Pittsburgh MTH trolleys were the result of two separate mistakes by MTH, not just one as I and possibly others assumed, and that one of those mistakes was intentional.

Chris: Yes, thank you to Lou Redman!  Do you know if MTH used the exact same chip with Lou’s voice and ALL of the same stops as the first Pittsburgh PCC in 1999 (MTH #30-2505-1 signed for route 64 East Pittsburgh) and just made more copies of it, or is it a different chip that they recorded using some of Lou’s already-recorded announcements?  Why does that matter: well if it’s the latter and MTH wanted to use Lou’s voice so badly, why didn’t they give Lou a list of appropriate stops along the LVT to read to make it geographically correct?  So as you said that mistake was obviously intentional.  For comparison, there are 11 stops on the PS-1 PCC chip with Wood Street first and East Pittsburgh last.

Lew: I believe the name and spelling of that Pittsburgh stop on the Route 37 Shannon car is “Cretestone-Killarney”.  The way I read your post, the MTH St. Louis PCC car names that stop and the Castle Shannon stop on its chip instead of two similarly-named St. Louis area stops  (along with some correct St. Louis car stops).  If so those incorrect names were taken from the SECOND MTH Pittsburgh PCC (MTH #30-2543-1 with PS-2) cataloged in 2003.  I had incorrectly assumed from the earlier postings that MTH used some of the same announcements from the first Pittsburgh car discussed above.  But what makes it even harder to explain how MTH got them mixed up is that the MTH St. Louis car was cataloged in 2002, one year earlier than that second Pittsburgh PCC!  BTW that second Pittsburgh PCC has Frank Hare’s (another TCA legend) voice calling the car stops because Lou Redman had passed away in 2002.  Do you know who’s voice they used on the St. Louis car?   

Oh well, these are only toys!

Thanks again for the postings.

Bill

Hi Lew:

I remember seeing Cretestone in writing somewhere so I just did a Google search for “Cretestone-Killarney, Pittsburgh” and here’s a link to one of the first hits, a 1982 photo of a 1700-series car with the caption stating it was dropping off passengers at a stop identified as by the photographer as “Cretestone (Killarney Drive)”: http://jimmie-g.com/streetcars-4.html  

Hope that helps.  With grandparents and other relatives in Castle Shannon I must have passed that stop hundreds of times when I lived there but never knew it by that name either.  Perhaps “Cretestone” was the first name of a business located near there?  Anybody from Castle Shannon or Overbrook on this list to confirm?

I agree with you on the inaccuracy of the stops on MTH’s Shannon PCC.  I acquired that car shortly before Frank passed away and never got a chance to ask him why they left out a downtown stop.  I can’t imagine that Frank would let them record his voice without including a downtown stop.  They must have run out of room on the chip when they transferred the recording and had to cut one stop – but of all the stops to cut!

I never rode a PCC in any of those other cities but you would think that MTH would have done their homework or as you suggested, seek input from trolley fans with local knowledge.

And please correct me if I’m wrong on this but I heard that it is possible to re-record the sounds on MTH PS-2 chips using the DCS system (which I don’t have)?  If so, I will take it over to a friend who has DCS and redo that chip with 2 downtown stops and leave out two of the intermediate stops if I have to.

And finally I’d like to re-ask the question I had asked in an earlier posting in this thread as you may have run into this problem, too: I want to run my PS-1 64 East Pittsburgh and at least one of my PS-2 Pittsburgh PCC’s together locked in forward.  But at the minimum voltage required to get the PS-2 versions to run at a reasonable speed, the PS-1 runs so fast that it will fly off the track at the D-21 curves.  Do you or anybody else out there know how to slow down the PS-1 or otherwise solve this problem?  On this layout I’m running conventional using one Z-1000.

Regards,

Bill

Hi Bill,

Thank you very much for the information on Cretestone-Killarney.  I checked all sorts of records going back into the late 19th century, but found nothing. Of course I was looking

for Creystone and Cregstone. Surprised that the great Google didn't correct me. Sorry that I can't help you on the PS1, PS2 and operations questions, but people like Marty Fitzhenry in the O Gauge Forum should be able to help.

Lew Schneider

I have that trolly, You are correct. it is a Pittsburg sound chip, not a Lehigh Valley one. MTH said they send me another chip. Never came.

O well maybe in a hundred years it will become a collector item.

Well this has turned into a rather wide ranging discussion!

John, did you contact MTH right away? Did they say that they had the correct chip, or just a different one? They told me that the Pittsburgh chip was the one that was intended for the LVT trolley?!?!

Anyone,

The three Pittsburgh PCC cars that I have are: 30-2505-1, 30-5121-1, and 30-2584-1.

I know that there is also a Steelers PCC that I do not yet have. Are there others that I

am overlooking?

Thanks

Yes, there is one more which was MTH #30- 2543-1, the first Pittsburgh PCC with PS-2, it is cab #1711 with 37 Shannon destination sign.  That’s the one with Frank Hare’s voice discussed earlier in this thread.  The “Terrible Trolley” is 30-2586-1, has “EXPRESS” in the destination window, is cab #1713 (BTW, the same as 30-2505) and has Myron Cope’s voice calling Steeler-related sounds, not streetcar stops.  And for those that doubt there was a prototype Terrible Trolley, attached is a photo.

HTH,

Bill

Great! I'll have to look up the 2543-1. Yes, I have seen the real Terrible Trolley. Does it still operate?

Thanks

All remaining PCC’s were retired by PAT in 1999.  But sometime in the mid- or late 1980’s #1713 was repainted by PAT back into its original PRC red and cream paint scheme.  It was probably painted again into the PAT white before being retired. 

Last I heard #1713 was in a museum somewhere in Ohio.  Not sure if its still there and if it operates.  But identical sister #1711 is at the PA Trolley Museum in Washington, PA, is painted in its original red & cream and is operational.

Here's a link: http://www.pa-trolley.org/

HTH,

Bill

Hello 30th st. The young lady told me if it was the wrong one she would send the right one to me . That was the last I heard. it was the wrong chip. Lehigh Valley is 250 miles away from Pittsburg, MTH just has a fascination with Pittsburg.