The original concept Whitby (in 1979!) was for a commercial animated display piece which runs on 7 1/2" gauge trackwork. An electric "steam outline" loco, it features built-in sound, a number of special lighting FX, as well as many free and synchronized animated events. Along with any passenger animation (animated characters who might ride on board), it is a synchronized musical part of a musical animated display (layout), through which it travels. Technically, this Whitby locomotive is NOT a scale model! It is full size for the elves, who are only around three feet tall, including hats!

A smaller design & development model (The Little Whitby), in a "design scale" of 4.1:1, which runs on gauge one trackwork, is the focus for The MR Magic Website, and for this series of articles...

A "Little" Background...

More than any other aspect of the design scale model, I wanted the "little Whitby" to sound demonstrably better than any other scale model locomotive, ever. A tall order!

Having worked with then in 1980, I knew just enough about the earliest digital musical instruments (before the term "sampler"), to be able to envision a loco that could act as a musical instrument (a sort of percussion section) within a larger musical score applied to an animated display. If you think I sound crazy now, you should have seen the reactions I got when trying to describe the concept to people back in the early 80's, even from others in the music and theme park businesses. But I knew it could work, and I knew it would be fun! As it turns out, it works better than I had hoped, and it is a great deal of fun to produce, perform, and to witness in operation.

The Fantasonics (TM) Enginears were the first to successfully put speakers on board animated (audio animatronics) characters in the early 1980's. We call this Aural Image Animation (TM) design, and it encompasses the processes involved in mounting speakers on board the various moving parts of animated characters, and preparing sound for playback through them. When the character moves, the sound moves too, creating subtle Doppler shifts, interaction with surroundings, and a point source at the character itself (as opposed to, for instance, the barrel next to the character). The early Disney Imagineers tried to put a JBL 2105, 5" speaker into "Mr. Lincoln" back in the mid 1960's in an effort to establish the character as a point source, but the technology back then precluded any real chance for success. Back then, high end audio signal processing was a bass knob and a treble knob! The speaker was disconnected before the attraction opened. The idea was not attempted again until we came along...

All of the elves, as well as the loco, have on board sound! We based the full sized display piece on the chassis of an existing 1 1/2" scale live steam locomotive kit that runs on 7 1/2" gauge track, made by Little Engines in southern California. Because the display design had been commissioned for existing department store Christmas display "mechanicals" (The Walter Elves by David Hamberger of New York, see photo at right), we wanted the loco to have a cartoon feeling that would be compatible with the elves proportions. It is standard procedure in theme park attraction development to build scale models as design tools, while mistakes still carry scale price tags. So work on the little Whitby was begun. I picked an LGB motor block (I believe it was from an LGB model 2417) as the basis for the scale design model.

Evolution...

In the conceptual design phase, the basic shapes and proportions of the loco were created in the computer, then printed out for the addition of concept sketching by hand. When the overall design was finalized, the additional hand drawn elements were entered into the computer to create the basic illustration, which you will see in variation throughout this series.

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Musical Reference & Computer Art

The piece was designed from the concept stage as a type of musical instrument. Musical references are everywhere. The firebox door handle is in the shape of a treble clef, as are the headlight platform mounting brackets. The plumbing contains several obscure references, too. There is the "baritone sax siphon" based on a baritone saxophone, and the siphon for the steam gauge is reminiscent of (and based upon) a French horn (see below).

 In 1987, Robert Dustin was commissioned to create three (3) photo etched Whitby Locomotive Works builder's plates for this loco (along with a pair of road name plates, and a number plate). Normal locomotives would have only two builder's plates. Since the original artwork was designed as illustration in the computer, it was a relatively simple operation to elongate the overall shape in the vertical axis without changing the horizontal axis at all, allowing for interchangeability between plates on the same mounting pattern. The idea here is that any plate may appear at either side of the smoke box, depending upon the whim of the builder at a given moment...

references to horns...

Below, the computer artwork for the steam gauge dial face, enlarged to 1,000%!

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