What I have heard about Terry echoes exactly what Richard states.

The two toolmakers I have heard the most about are Wegmann and Paul
Lubliner, mainly because they are Southwest modelers (where I am from), and
they certainly have my admiration for their abilities and modeling legacy.

Wegmann and Lubliner collaborated on N&G Railway Signal Company, maker of HO
and O gauge scale operating railroad signals back in the '70's. I was going
through school at the time and was spending my dollars on books and tuition
rather than scale signals for a future layout. I lamented this later as the
signals essentially "went off of the market" when the career the books
enabled finally started paying off. So I have been searching for these
"works of art" on ebay and elsewhere for many years.

I know it has been said before, but it worth saying again, these guys are
"perfectionists" in every sense of the word. I had several long discussions
with Lubliner in the late '80's regarding how he learned how to create
tooling for such detailed applications. Most of what he had to say was
peppered with "oh, this is easy and that was simple to do, I can show you in
a few minutes how to do it" with a pantograph and his other tools of the
trade. Manufacturer's drawings, good photographs and a few supporting
dimensions from sketches were all that they needed to create these fine
models, and a lot of time and expertise mixed in. But they enjoyed every
minute, just like we should enjoy our modeling time too.

Like Richard said their thrills were in the research and development of the
tooling and construction of the model prototypes. Paul did a fine job in
photographing their finished work (I have some 2.5M images that I can
forward to those interested) and developing ads in RMC, etc. But when their
inventory and/or public interest in the products dwindled so did their
motivation to continue producing both established and new/different models.
Most know of N&G's searchlight (H-2), lower quadrant Style B and upper
quadrant semaphores, but few know about the "other" signals that were tooled
but never brought to market. Paul developed working ATSF upper quadrant
semaphores and colorlight signals, UP colorlights, etc., but never marketed
them.

Last that I heard was that Paul was not totally satisfied with many aspects
of the signal line and wanted to "retool" most of it. I wonder if he feels
the same way about his landmark F-units (which pulled many a steam era
freight car) in retrospect. From my perspective, I can't see how either
could be improved.

Paul

Paul LaCiura
San Francisco, CA
spdaylight.com