Gerry Penrose

Gerry Penrose is a live steamer in Ontario, Canada. He owned and operated a hobby shop named "Pen Models" in Oakville.

From Live Steam Magazine, November 1976:


 * Gerry Penrose began making rubber-band powered modesl of airplanes in England back in 1932. In 1946, after serving in the RAF from 1939 to 1945 when he crashed, Gerry bought a small lathe and built LBSC's Tich, his first Live Steam model and his first use of a lathe.  Since then he says he has "built three more, plus about four boxes of mistakes!"


 * Gerry and his family came to Canada in 1954 and has been in the television repair business (which he learned by the we-finger-and-screw-driver method, he says) and a film equipment service business.


 * In 1969 Gerry started Pen Models in the basement of his home. The business expanded and, in 1973, he opened a store in suburban Toronto.

Rich Carlstedt wrote in 2002:


 * I remember, and knew Gerry Penrose. I lived in Canada in the 1970's and use to go to his basement shop in Oakville, Ontario to buy steam engine castings...he really was quite a guy, can't comment on his writing as I was not into 3/4 scale locomotives.


 * Did you know he was very mechanically minded and went with the University ( of Ontario, I think) as a technician on a scientific exploration trip to the North Pole (early 1970 ?)....He kept the snowmobiles running under extreme duress as you can imagine...he was very resourceful man.


 * Interesting comment you made. He told me he had a battle going on with Model Engineer at the time, but I didn't understand the real issues.

David Powell wrote in Chaski.org, May 2004:


 * To the best of my knowledge Gerry Penrose is in happy retirement. Ted McJannett bought what remained of Gerry's steam related stock some years ago.

Beaver
Gerry designed and published drawings for an 0-6-0 in 3/4 inch scale he called Beaver. The design was published in Live Steam Magazine starting in November 1976.

Several mistakes crept into the design. An editorial on page 21 of the December 1976 issue of Live Steam claimed the mistakes were introduced by a contract draftsman, and corrections were printed.

It is claimed that the Beaver design drew heavily from Martin Evans Caribou, and subsequently a lawsuit was failed against Live Steam Magazine for publishing Gerry's design. Editor of the magazine, William Fitt, wrote the following in his editorial in Live Steam Magazine, February 1979:


 * A case in point was the Beaver series that appeared in Live Steam Magazine which, in fact, turned out to be a line-for-line copy of the Caribou designed by Martin Evans and published in Model Engineer Magazine. Omission of one set of drivers did not remove the original 0-8-0 design did not remove the copyright protection originally secured by Mr. Evans and by Model Engineer Magazine.

Here is the description of Beaver from the first article published in Live Steam Magazine, November 1976:


 * Patterned after the Canadian National's Class 0-16, Beaver represents twenty 0-6-0's built by Montreal Locomotive Works in 1919 for the Canadian Government Railways.