LGB announced the Frank S. in the 1991 Catalog and it was a wake up call for more than just a few of us ozone burning "G Gauge" fans. LGB commissioned Aster Hobby, Inc. of Yokohama Japan to build the Frank S. and should be commended for taking the leap into garden scale live steam for the masses. Unfortunately, the landing wasn't all that smooth. Originally priced in the >$2500 range, the locomotive sat on retailers shelves until the price came down to less than $900 for a brief spell. Most of the Franks that I know of were aquired at roughly this price and they moved very well based on empirical evidence. Supply and demand kicked in and the price moved up to around $1300 and LGB got in on the "frenzy" (?) in this price range and moved excess inventory from Europe to the U.S.

LGB got the design requirements right, and Aster did an excellent job on delivering an easy to operate, mostly scale, LGB school-of-thought live steam locomotive... except the fuel system! The fuel valve is infamously tweaky (full on or full off, nothing inbetween, and it creeps). LGB has replaced many of the valves (is LGB great or what on customer service?) and several practioners in the hobby have made retrofit products available. The fuel system bug has in no way detracted from the acceptance of this locomotive in live steam circles, and the ulitimate testament to it's robustness and design are the many variants that have come off the work benches of live steam hobbyists. Several are featured here, but in no way reflect the relatively large number of kit-bashed and tweaked Frank S. chassis. Newcomers to the hobby could hardly go wrong by starting with the Frank S., and at the same time there are no lack of Frank S. locomotives in established steaming circles.

The Frank S. is fitted with a pressure gauge mounted under a rubber cover that serves as the cab hatch, lubricator on the side plate, regulator, reverser, and water glass on the backhead. The Frank S. was designed with a small tank in the smokebox to capture the condensate created when the loco first moves off the blocks (priming), but it is of marginal benefit, quiets the stack report, and hinders a decent plume... so many have been removed. Fitted with piston valves, LGB offers a mounting kit for a single servo for easy addition of one channel R/C to control both direction and speed with the reversing valve.