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.
