Category:Mechanical Horse

1935: Dinky 33a Mechanical Horse [image info]

1935: Dinky 33d, one of a range of "Mechanical Horse" trailers [image info]

1935: Dinky 33e Dust Wagon for Mechanical Horse [image info]

1936: Dinky Toys 33R Mechanical Horse and Trailer combinations available with markings for all the major railway companies [image info]

1939: Dinky Mechanical Horse range [image info]

The three-wheeler Mechanical Horse was initially designed by Napier for the LNER railway. Scammell bought the design and prototype, and after further development by Oliver Danson North in 1933, the vehicle was launched in 1934 and became one of the company's most popular lines.

The vehicle's arrival in the early-to-mid 1930s, it's visibility at railway stations and its range of possible accessories and consequential play value, made it an obvious choice for inclusion in the Dinky Toys range in 1935.

The Scammell Scarab

Nowadays, the concept is more strongly associated with Scammell's later development of the three-wheeler, reverse autocoupling idea, the less archaically-named Scammell Scarab, whose branding suggested the vehicle's ability to "beetle about".

The Scammell Scarab, with its distinctive curved bonnet (Crescent Toys)

The Scarab with a range of loads

Scarab with cable drum load

The 1930s Tri-ang Minic range of clockwork toys included some truck-and-trailer vehicles with four-wheeler cabs referred to in Tri-ang's literature as "Mechanical Horses" – we're not currently sure whether these represent other Scammell vehicles, or whether the name was being used generally for trucks with detachable trailers. If "Mechanical Horse" was being used as a generic term, this might explain Scammell's desire with the "Scarab" to introduce a more more specific name that they could promote without it then being used by their competitors.

Concept

The problem facing the LNER and other railway companies in the 1930s was that their parcels and luggage-handling systems had been designed around the use of horses, and hadn't been developed with the idea that horses might be eventually replaced by motorised vehicles.

This meant that anything that replaced the horse had to be designed to be able to cope with tricky situations that normal road vehicles couldn't manage – a "Mechanical Horse" had to be efficient, not too noisy to be driven across a station platform, it had to have high visibility, be capable to driving very slowly and carefully, and it had to be incredibly manoeuvrable in order to be able to work within narrow spaces that horses could cope with – the cab road at Southern Railway's Brighton Station, for example, had a tight 180-degree bend that was covered-over to create a tunnel that normal vehicles couldn't manage, and which could not be expanded.

As well as an incredibly tight turning-circle, the Mechanical Horse had to be able to emulate the behaviour of real horses in being able to back up into a wagon and pull it away ... the difference being that with a real horse, the handler would be in charge of the coupling, whereas with the motorised version, the driver would have to be able to stay in the cab – the motorised horse and its wagons needed a special coupling that allowed the driver to back up into a wagon or container and have it couple automatically, then drive off.

The Mechanical Horse wagons typically had a full set of back wheels and a smaller pair of support wheels and the front - backing into the wagon would result in the sloped coupling pushing itself under the wagon and lifting the small support wheels up off the ground, after which the wagon would be supported at the front by the cab coupling.

Use

The Mechanical Horse has obviously popular in railway stations, but also found niche applications in other situations where manoeuvrability in confined spaces was important, so it was used in warehouses, onboard some larger ships, and in some cases as a delivery vehicle in situations where speed wasn't a primary need.