In the late 1970s, when brass was king, the pages of Model Railroader and Railroad Model Craftsman were a sight to behold: every second page, it seemed, boasted a beautiful picture of a gleaming, superdetailed brass steam engine, as different from the Tyco and Life-Like models that I had as was possible to imagine. Pacific Fast Mail owned the rear cover of MR, and every month brought a new model of some large western steamer- some professionally painted, others shown in the raw, so to speak. Brass in the 1970s did for model railroading what small batch brewing did for alcoholism in the 1990s: it dramatically improved the experience of your addiction.
One of the great importers in those days was West Side, which began as a side project of Dick Truesdale, in prosaic ordinary life an airline pilot on a trans-Pacific run. He blazed a path that is today well worn: that of modelers who started a business to obtain the products they most wanted.
Like a lot of modelers in that era, he did not follow a rigorous prototype in his own modeling, instead picking and choosing things he liked, and modeling them. WSM’s approach owed a lot to that kind of approach, combined with a high degree of prototype fidelity and good operating characteristics: I have WSM models that run like sewing machines. They clearly reflect a modeler’s priorities, and aren’t meant to just sit on a shelf.
His choices of prototypes for his models likewise reflect a combination of his own interests and a shrewd appreciation of the average modeler’s tastes. At that time, most importers’ efforts were centered on doing everything they could to ensure that individual models replicated prototypes as closely as possible, and West Side’s models (particularly of D&RGW engines) were so specific that some of their model runs duplicated most just a specific class, but a specific engine: they offered four or five different models of D&RGW’s K-27 class Mikados, in an effort to depict the visually obvious differences between individual engines. At the time, that was a pretty distinctive achievement. But he also did some interesting experiments at the opposite end of the modeling spectrum: he made models of things that never existed.
While that characterization may not be grammatically accurate (how can you make a representation of something that never existed?), the little brass engines that resulted are items of great interest today. I know of only two, although the Railroad Model Craftsman product review for the first announced it as the first of a “Freelance Series;” if that series ran to more than two models, I have never seen the others. The first was an HO scale 2-10-0, sold as “The Brute” in 1980, and made for West Side in Korea by Samhongsa. The second was an even more intriguing idea, an HOn3 Beyer-Garrett clearly meant to answer the question, “If the D&RGW had decided to buy a Garratt, what would it have looked like?” For that effort, Truesdale turned to Nakamura-Seimitsu, a Japanese importer with a long line of beautiful models already to their credit; they turned out the Garratt in 1981.
RMC reviewed the Brute in their August, 1980 issue, and had a lot to say, virtually all of it favorable (they took issue with the mounting of the air pumps on either side of the smoke box, on the grounds that it was unknown, but clearly not impossible). The reviewer probably knew his readers well: he did not spend more than a couple of philosophical paragraphs getting to the bottom of the question of whether the model was plausible: he clearly found it to be so. Assuming, probably correctly, that modelers would buy this engine to run, he devoted the remainder of the article to assessing its quality and its performance, and found both to be better than acceptable. You can see the model that Dick Truesdale kept for himself here. He described it to the current owner as “a freelance design of what was my idea of extreme power,” and implies he had a pair of them: that would have been a sight!
I have always heard this was an engine assembled out of components originally meant for other models. That seems likely; it’s not as if they had drawings to work from. That was clearly the case with the Garratt, as we will see, but I don’t have the complete listing of the models that the manufacturer could have drawn on for components, so it’s not 100% clear to me where all of the parts and components came from; I have heard various speculations about a C&O 0-10-0 or a B&O 2-10-2.
For the American Garratt, they had a fascinating task: how to take some existing parts, and transform them into a plausible model that incorporated the obvious elements of a locomotive type that never ran in the U.S. Thanks to HO Seeker’s collection of West Side G files and Seiichi Kumata’s wonderful two volume history, The Art of Brass, it’s possible to trace some of the major parts sourcing decisions. The boiler and cab assembly looks as if it came from the slide valve-equipped K-27 model of D&RGW 460 that Nakamura made for West Side in 1977. This was a worthwhile attempt to model a popular locomotive as it looked during a time period that unfortunately never captured a lot of modelers’ attention; the only photos I have ever seen of the prototype show it in storage, not in operation. The rear tender may have come from the same model, albeit with considerable modification to build it up; the front and back engines definitely did, but they came with an alternative set of cylinders, equipped with piston valves, for modelers who wanted to modernize the model’s look (the link above to Dan’s Train Depot shows an engine with piston valves installed).
I am of two minds on the front tender body, aesthetically the most notable thing about a Garratt, and one to which Breyer Peacock and its prototype customers gave considerable design attention. The lead tender on the model looks similar to the “bread loaf” tenders SP used for a lot of its narrow gauge engines in eastern California, but none of the tender bodies I can find that were used for other models WSM imported quite match its shape; they were made in any case by Microcast-Mizuno. The SP “fire train” WSM imported from Korea in 1978 features a standard-gauge tender that looks similar in shape, but it’s unclear whether it would be adaptable to a narrow gauge model.
Neither was imported in large numbers: West Side imported just 100 of the Garratt, and probably fewer than 200 Brutes. Both have retained and to some extent grown their value, but the importer is the beneficiary only of the initial sale - which may explain, in spite of their enduring popularity among modelers, why they remain unique little treasures.
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