Repair toy steam engine

Sorry but electrically heated seems to defeat the purpose!

I notice that they all have water sight windows now which mine lacked. I suppose some people were running them dry, overheating, and having the end caps--probably brazed on--blow off.

Why, when I was a kid we had to go mine the coal ourselves, using our fingernails to dig!

I'm not sure that going out and buying a little can of sterno is any worse than running the boiler off of electricity. The electrical operation certainly sounds more convenient and the kid and his/her parents might be more likely to fire it up more often.

Tim.

Oh yeah! Watching the water boil was half the fun not to mention the anxiety of waiting for it to start boiling to know you were on your way to seeing the flywheel cranking. I watched a show on the history channel about steam locomotives a while back. Occasionally they would blow up with a mess of dead bodies and they would find ton pieces of cast iron from the engine hundreds of yards away. --- Steve

Obviously a clean burning fuel for indoors is a must but that aside I think I would have enjoyed burning little crumbs of real coal especially for the smell. Probably a pain to get a coal fire started though. I'm surprised they didn't / don't just fuel these things with alcohol.

The reason an electrically heated boiler seems pointless is that with the possible exception of an unverified reference to Italy having built electrically heated steam locomotives anyone having electricity who desires mechanical energy is going to use an electric motor!

I lived in that town! You forgot to mention that the road to the coal mine was uphill both ways, and there was always two feet or more of snow on the ground, year-round.

BTW, we are now importing coal. From Canada? Mexico? How about all the way from Africa?! I'm not making this up.