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Carlson .09 Rail Car
Designed and built by John Carlson
In addition to designing and building a number of different .19- and .29-size tether cars, and prior to his successful collaboration with Red Davis to produce the Davis-Carlson Mites, Chicago's John Carlson produced a small number of mite cars built specifically for rail track racing.
In several cases, Carlson simply modified his successful tether car pans by adding rail guide mounts to the wood patterns for the pan castings. But his .09 size rail mite pattern was unique (shown third from the top in lower right photo) and no equivalent tether car version of this pan is known to exist. Even so, the designs of the rail guide mounts cast into the side of the .09 size rail pans are identical to those cast into the sides of his .19/.29 size rail pans.
The car shown in the photos was John Carlson's personal McCoy .09 powered car. He raced the car on a small indoor rail track which was located in the field house of Calumet Park in Chicago. The 1/48th mile, 4-rail track was owned by the Chicago Mite Car Club for which Carlson served as president.
Unfortunately, the track had to share space in the basement of the field house with a local kennel club and members of the kennel club complained that the noise from the little race cars bothered their dogs. Eventually the kennel club won out, and the rail track was disassembled and removed ... another example of a race track that went "to the dogs".
