The "Good old Days".......Live Steam's "Golden Era", circa 1928-1980.....
The designs featured at Friends Models are from a range of time that began in the long-ago era before World War II, when most live steamers were "lone wolves", connected only by their membership in the Brotherhood of Live Steamers.
In this age, most private and club tracks were elevated on a "high line", and live steamers drove for dozens or hundreds of miles in very primitive autos on a road, highway, and turnpike system that was in its infancy, just to run their 2-1/2" and 3-1/2" gauge locomotives at places such as the home of Brotherhood of Live Steamers founder Charles A. "Carl" Purinton in Marblehead, MA, and at Lester Friend's New England Live Steamers at Danvers, MA behind the Friend Box Company.
It was an era when many live steamers wore suits, ties, and hats for a day of running. Many smoked pipes or cigars as well. It was an era whose original participants began passing from this life in the 1960s, but that nevertheless lasted into the 1970s and 1980s.
It was, to me, the "heyday" of live steam in the USA and Canada, and I have always had a “soft spot” for that era. It was an era that was somehow "lost", or “forgotten”, when that generation's members passed from this life, and when most suppliers stopped supplying 1/2", 3/4", and 1" scale parts and castings. I sometimes call it the "Golden Era".
And so that era does not have to "pass away" with the passing of the "old timers", or the "march of time", or the increased popularity of larger scales and non-steam prototypes, I wanted to do what I could to help preserve it. I wanted to give "the Golden Era" the opportunity to enter the 21st Century.......for current, and future live steamers, to enjoy. I consider thhese small scale, coal-fired, traditional live steam designs too historically important to be forgotten, lost to time, unavailable, and never built by anyone again. From 1980 onward, most of these designs were "lost and forgotten about" for close to 30 years, and I thought that they deserved a future. These designs do not belong only in the fading pages of "back-issues" of old magazines, or in old photos and film, or in fading memories from a half-century ago. They belong in your workshops today, and on your backyard railroad or at the club track, tomorrow.
Lester Friend and Robbie Robinson ride behind a Yankee Shop "Boston & Albany" tanker on the New England Live Steamers track in Danvers, MA in 1940. Photo by Charlie Purinton, courtesy of Albert Grant.
