OK, I'll have a go. I used to own an Egolf K4, and a few freightcars.
The K4 came from George Eschbach before me, and was one of two that ran for many years on the old Harrisburg Club's layout. Another old friend of mine, long gone, was a gent named Ben Peters. He was at the club one Sunday, a junior member, and was running this very loco when the news of Pearl Harbour came over the radio.
Both of them ended up being sold to Dan Henon (founder of the old 48/ft O Scale News magazine), then this one went to a mutual friend of Dan and George Eschbach when Dan's collection went to auction. Then George ran it for years on his Bald Eagle and Northern; it was in OST some years ago, #30 on Page 7.
There really was no sign of a smoke generator of any sort in it. It was said to have been made in 1929, so perhaps the later ones didn't have such a thing. The version Lionel came up with is reputed by the TCA people to have been a great breakthrough, the wax pellets being invented in someone's kitchen sink, &c. Like many TCA "history" stories, I imagine its either suspect in itself or the inventor knew of Egolf and perhaps lifted the notion from him. After all, the TCA people believe toy-trains begat the scale world using O Gauge, when in reality the scale world if anything grew in parallel. What was Lionel making that was remotely formative to the scale world even in 1929?
One might want to be just a little careful about the notion O Scale was "crawling" in the '20s, though putting the word "commercial" in front of your statement would be pretty accurate. O Gauge as a track gauge and modelling medium dates back much further, and was a natural progression from #3, #2, and #1 Gauge, being "naught" or #0 Gauge. Maerklin gets the usual credit for 0, though that's arguable, back around the turn of the 20th century, and gents clubs with a model engineering bent (the NYSME probably being probably the best documented survivor of that era in the USA) had people building scale models before WWI. I've seen precious few from that era in the USA, but there are many lovely scale models built to 0-Gauge still in existence I've seen in the UK that date to the late Victorian and the Edwardian era. People built models as "model engineers" then, and that really was the birth of the hobby, and might be why the scale still attracts railroad modelers (modelbuilders) as strongly as it does, while model railroaders (layout builders) are a more recent addition to the family.
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