This battered Lionel set #98 found its way to me recently. I'm not one for restorations of vintage equipment, but I think I might make an exception here:





It's always fun to see what the old-timers did with their equipment, for example that interesting coupler adapter. Anyway, the guy that dropped it off said it had been in his parents' attic, untouched for close to sixty years. He said it belonged to his father, probably from new (late 1920s), and had faint memories of it running around the Christmas tree when he was young. I'm humbled to have it.

Started making a parts list...

Drove down to Halethorpe yesterday morning to pick up a lot I acquired from an estate sale. A 1930's era Lionel set that's been carefully repainted (albeit not in original schemes), it's probably worth about the thirty bucks I gave for it:



My understanding is that this set was received new back in the day (a couple cars added subsequently), then refurbished by the original owner decades later, perhaps in the 1960's. It had been sitting in a nice dry attic for the last 30-40 years after the original owner's passing. Virtually zero collector value in this condition, but epic provenance.

Plan to service the locomotive, replace any missing parts (loco pilot truck, lumber stakes, brake-wheels, etc.); otherwise it'll be left as is. Someone took a lot of time to "restore" it to their taste; far from me to undo it.

It'll need a new home.

I picked up this Lionel 1688 locomotive at York this past week:



It was missing its pilot truck and its tender. TrainWorx stocked a replacement pilot truck and retaining clip, and I had an orphaned tender up on the shelf. The 1688 cleaned up nice and runs well, but it has a small chunk knocked off on one side under the cab window/door. This will be a placeholder until I can find a better one.

Lionel introduced the 1688 Torpedo (2-4-2) in 1936, and followed it in 1937 with the 1668 Torpedo (2-6-2). Both were part of Lionel's O-27 line until 1940. They were typically offered in sets with the lithographed 16XX-series O-27 freight cars or the 169X-series passenger cars, both of which Lionel adapted from the Ives catalog. They are nice colorful sets. The real Pennsy Torpedo was a shrouded (streamlined) K-4 Pacific designed by Raymond Loewy, one of the great industrial designers of the era.

Probably two or three decades ago, I found a battered 2679 at a local meet that had a frame fashioned from a piece of wood and was painted top-to-bottom in satin black paint. I was at a loss for why someone had done this and had decided to just tear it down for parts. Fortunately, before I did this, a fellow enthusiast saw it on the workbench and asked where I'd found one of the wartime freight cars sold by Madison Hardware. I had no idea what he was talking about, but the story is that MH used a bunch of excess prewar stock from Lionel to "manufacture" a few 16XX/26XX series freights which they sold in the shop during the war (a time when the toy manufacturers were prohibited from metal toy production and were instead producing various pieces for the Army, Navy, etc.). He expressed great interest in it, so I gave it to him for his collection.

It got me to thinking, what if Lou and Carl had made blacked-out versions of the more ornate/complex 654...what might that have looked like. I had a few rough examples on-hand, so I used one of them to come up with this:



Now Madison, if their technique on the 2680 was a fair measure, would have just painted the entire thing black...trim, domes, journals, number plates, everything but the wheels and couplers, but I couldn't bear to do that, so a bit of a compromise. I submit a 654 as Madison might have made it in 1943 until they ran out of bits...maybe.