Looking for information on 80's lightbars

[SomerenV]

Hey everyone! I'm a 3D modeler and for a project I'm trying to find information about lightbars from the 80's from a couple of countries. Finding information about what non-English countries used back in the day is near to impossible so I'm going to ask here for some help. Here's what I've found myself in terms of the lightbars used back in the 80's:

Germany (Hela RTK 3 & 4)
United States (Twinsonic & Mars Skybolt)
Netherlands (Aero Dynic 24 EH & ??)

Here's the countries that I can't find any information about:
Sweden


United Kingdom




Italy


Spain




Japan


I really hope this forum can provide some answers. Also, if I'm missing some widely used lightbars, please let me know. Thanks!

 

[cmb56]

Hello and welcome to this forum.
I can give you some information of what the lights are but some of them are difficult to identify.

The Swedish bar is a bar made by, the now defunct, company Trafyr Multitronics. This bar is equipped with two Pintsch Bamag KLN-12BQ.
This bar was a bar the customer could mount any equipment on, of their choice.
The Swedish Police used and specified the glass lens optics from Pintsch Bamag from 1970 to about when LED lights came on the market. There are still police cars with the Standby light bar with this optics.

The first British police car has a Federal JetSonic.
Difficult to say what version.

The second police car has a Lucas beacon. Lucas is no more but the light company has become LAP Electical.
I can not identify the flashing lamps in the front.

I can not identify the Italian sound and light combination either.
There are alot of manufacturers in Italy.
It might be Sirena Electra but I am not sure.

The first Spanish bar look like a Dietz OmniChief or maybe a Chinese copy?

The second has a Aplicaciones Tecnológicas Vama (now Federal Vama) light bar.

The Japanese light bar might be any of the Japanese manufacturers or even imported from Taiwan, look a little as Maxim Inc. Who knows.
Osaka Siren Co. and Patlite Co. are two large manufacturers.
Because nothing from Japanese manufacturers reach Europe and USA there are very little known here.

Michael

 

[Mars Light]

If you need more information regarding European emergency lights there is a German forum with a lot of specialists for these blue lights.
Let me know if i can help you to ask there your questions.

 

[SomerenV]

Hello and welcome to this forum.
I can give you some information of what the lights are but some of them are difficult to identify.

The Swedish bar is a bar made by, the now defunct, company Trafyr Multitronics. This bar is equipped with two Pintsch Bamag KLN-12BQ.
This bar was a bar the customer could mount any equipment on, of their choice.
The Swedish Police used and specified the glass lens optics from Pintsch Bamag from 1970 to about when LED lights came on the market. There are still police cars with the Standby light bar with this optics.

The first British police car has a Federal JetSonic.
Difficult to say what version.

The second police car has a Lucas beacon. Lucas is no more but the light company has become LAP Electical.
I can not identify the flashing lamps in the front.

I can not identify the Italian sound and light combination either.
There are alot of manufacturers in Italy.
It might be Sirena Electra but I am not sure.

The first Spanish bar look like a Dietz OmniChief or maybe a Chinese copy?

The second has a Aplicaciones Tecnológicas Vama (now Federal Vama) light bar.

The Japanese light bar might be any of the Japanese manufacturers or even imported from Taiwan, look a little as Maxim Inc. Who knows.
Osaka Siren Co. and Patlite Co. are two large manufacturers.
Because nothing from Japanese manufacturers reach Europe and USA there are very little known here.

Michael

Wow! Thanks for the excellent information! I think I've found the Japanese lightbar: Osaka Siren MS-XA2. At least it looks a lot like the one in the photo. The Dietz OmniChief also looks the part. The only one I can't really find is the Italian one so that search continues.

If you need more information regarding European emergency lights there is a German forum with a lot of specialists for these blue lights.
Let me know if i can help you to ask there your questions.

That would be very helpful as German isn't that good. Maybe they know what siren/light the Italians used back in the 80's.

 

[dg0223]

I don't really know what information you're trying to get, but the information you have for the United States is incomplete, to say the very least. That said, it is also incorrect.

The United States used way too many lightbars during the 1980's. I don't know if you're looking to get information from a specific agency, or if you're just looking for general information, but the TwinSonic was around way before the 1980's. There are patents and other documents that have been posted on this page that date the TwinSonic all the way back to the late 1960's. Yes, there were still departments that used the TwinSonic all the way into the 80's and even to the 90's. The San Diego Police Department is one that comes to mind, but there were several lightbars that were released in the 80's that had replaced the TwinSonic. Obviously, Federal Signal had already released the AeroDynic and would later release the JetSonic in the late 80's. The other of the big three emergency equipment companies would release several bars in the 80's, from the Force 4 XL to the LP 6000, and Whelen would debut their popular Edge series in the 80's as well.

The same can be said about the Mars Skybolt. Yes, there were some agencies that still used Mars lights into the 80's, the most popular among them being the Chicago Police Department, and several agencies in the southeast would use them, since Mars relocated their factories from Illinois to Florida, but the agencies were few and far between in the 80's.

There were lots of different types of lightbars being used in the United States in the 1980's. You can't really pinpoint them to just two lightbars, particularly ones that had been around since before the 1980's. And again, if you're talking Federal Signal products, I would actually break down the popular, or best selling, lightbars they released as the several models of the AeroTwin/AeroDynic in the early 80's and the JetSonic in the late 80's, not the TwinSonic.

 

[dg0223]

Another question that you may want to ask is the evolution of emergency lighting from different areas around the United States. You'd get a lot of answers that way. For example, in the 1980's, the LAPD were still using late 70's Mopar cars with the iconic black can lights on the roof. From there, they went to different versions of the AeroDynic with the steady burn red light, finally settling on the all light version that they used all the way into the 90's with the external Hella alley lights.

Tne NYPD went from the Signal Stat lightbar to using a couple of different lightbars in the 80's, from the Yankee/Dietz/Napa style lightbar, to the other iconic NYPD AeroTwinSonic, to the JetStream on some of their vehicles (although I don't know if those JetStreams were used in the 80's, they may have been used in the 90's with the Vision/Vector bars).

Then, in my neck of the woods, Deep South Texas, we were pretty much a Federal Signal town. We went from Ford Fairmont police cars with red and blue TwinSonic 12X bars, then moving to the 4 panel AeroDynic CBBC-CRRC with amber outer sections to the rear on top of Dodge Diplomats, and finally the JetSonic on top of Chevy Caprices. There was one year when we went with the Whelen 80 with the plastic chromed cone shaped rotators (I think that is the 80H), and there was one year when we went with the Whelen Edge 9000 with that space-aged futuristic speaker. The county sheriff used a lot of Federal products as well, from clear/clear TwinSonics in the 70's to red/blue visibars in the 80's, as well as the AeroDynic.