Fairbanks-Morse Trainmaster
In 1823, a wagonmaker named Thaddeus Fairbanks built a foundry at St. Johnsbury, Vermont to manufacture cast-iron plows and stoves. One year later, his older brother Erastus joined the business, which was thereafter known as the E & T Fairbanks Company. Every wagon load of raw material that was delivered to their plant had to be manually unloaded onto a scale for weighing. When the brothers realized that
their scale was inaccurate as well as inconvenient, Thaddeus decided to invent a new one. He arranged a system of levers that significantly reduced the weight needed to counter-balance a load. He dug a pit for the levers, placing the platform level with the ground. This eliminated the need to hoist the entire load. In 1830, he applied for a patent.
If you have ever bought a load of gravel, coal or animal feed in your
pickup truck, you have probably driven your vehicle onto a scale that was originally designed by Thaddeus Fairbanks.
On June 13 1857, Thaddeus Fairbanks received United States patent #16,381, the first U.S. patent for a railway track scale. It was designed to weigh railway cars either alone or in train. The platform was fitted with rails so that cars could be rolled on and off. The mechanism beneath was set in a pit. It was constructed with suitable levers and bearings to permit weighing a great range of
loads accurately.
Look at the dimensional data printed on virtually any real or model freight car, and you will see a figure labeled “LT WT” indicating how much the car weighs when empty. Railroads weigh every loaded car in a freight train, then subtract the LT WT, to determine the amount of tonnage they haul and to calculate their charge for transporting it. >From 1932 to 1936, Lionel offered a working model of a Fairbanks trackscale for Standard gauge, catalog #441.By 1860, Fairbanks’ scales were the best-known American product in the world. The company had grown to over 1,000 employees; it was exporting scales to China, India, Russia, South America and the
Caribbean; and European sales were so strong that the firm had established an assembly facility in Budapest.
In 1916, a Fairbanks employee named Charles Hosmer Morse acquired control of the company. Subsequently, “Fairbanks Scales” became a
division of the “Fairbanks-Morse” company. During this time, Fairbanks-Morse produced not only scales but also diesel engines, electric engines and pumps. Its diesel engines were used in United States Navy vessels during World War II.
After World War II, Fairbanks-Morse began building diesel-electric railway locomotives, most notably the model H24-66 “Trainmaster”. The “24″ stood for 2400 horsepower (the most
available in a single unit when it was introduced); and the two “6″ digits indicated six axles, all of which were powered. Lionel’s powerful and accurately-scaled model of the Trainmaster became a hit when #2321 was introduced in 1954.
Every Trainmaster model built by Lionel during the postwar and Fundimensions eras, as well as the modern-era reproductions by Williams and Lionel’s recent Postwar Celebration reissue of the #2331 Virginian, had a large red decal on the long hood. No prototype
Trainmaster had an emblem of that size. This was the corporate logo of the Fairbanks-Morse company, and FM paid Lionel to put it there. The logo bears the initials “F” and “M” and shows a hand reaching down to pick up a heavy weight-?a reminder of FM’s origins as a builder of weighing scales.
Fairbanks is still in business today. In 1962, it became the Fairbanks Weighing Division of Colt Industries. A modern
manufacturing plant was built at St. Johnsbury, Vermont, in 1966. A decade later, in 1975, a new factory was built in Meridian, Mississippi. In 1988, stockholder F. A. Norden headed a group that acquired the company from Colt Industries. Fairbanks Scales
corporate offices are located in Kansas City, Missouri. Since 1999, F. A. Norden has been chairman of the board, and his son Richard has been president.
Fairbanks Morse Engine, based in Beloit, Wisconsin, is also still in operation, but it no longer builds railroad locomotives. FME specializes in diesel motors and generator sets, which are used mainly for stationary power generation and in naval ships.
Reference note by p4A Contributing Editor Joseph H. Lechner, Ph.D.