Hello, and welcome to my page!
I enjoy the model railroad hobby, it's one of my winter hobbies. I mostly work with HO scale railroad trains, both standard gauge, and narrow gauge railroads. Most of the people who know me personally know that I like model trains.
A few days ago, a friend of mine offered me two boxes full of old Lionel train stuff that she had gotten from someone else while helping them to clean out their house. I haven't been a Lionel train collector in the past, but these two boxes were full of pre-WW2 train stuff. For Lionel train collectors, the pre-WW2 train cars and accessories are a definite area of collection, with some individual pieces being quite desirable for collections. I had seen a few pictures of what was in the 2 boxes, so I knew that there were some interesting things in the boxes.
I picked up the 2 boxes on Thursday, brought them home, and pulled everything out of the boxes to see what was there.
The crane car was the first thing that got my attention. That's a car that I haven't seen much at the model train shows that I've gone to in the past. I pulled all the stuff out of the boxes to see what I had.
Some of the pieces were in poor condition, some of them were in decent condition, and all of the various pieces were in "played with" condition. I suspect that poor storage conditions over the years was part of the reason for the poor condition of some of the pieces. If you leave this old tinplate stuff in a typical basement for a number of years, just piled in boxes, the metal parts tend to get rusty.
I decided to do some internet searching to see if I could find out approximately when the various train cars were made. All of the train cars in the boxes were made before 1942, except a Marx plastic toy train set.
The cars in the back row of this picture were made some time between 1925 and 1930. The cars in the front row were made some time between 1935 and 1937, from the meager information that I could find on the internet.
The 2 passenger cars in the back row of this picture were made sometime between 1929 and 1932. The hopper car and the tank car in the front row were made around 1925, and the orange passenger car was made sometime between about 1919 and 1925. I believe the orange passenger car is the oldest piece out of everything that was in the box.
This is the body, frame, and motor assembly for one of the engines that came with the early train sets. I'm guessing that this engine probably dates to 1920 to 1925. It is obviously not in working condition, it was like this in the box.
This engine dates from the late 1920s and into the early 1930s. I haven't done much research on this engine to narrow down the time frame. This engine is incomplete and probably does not work. It can probably be repaired to working order, if I can find the parts. It's interesting how many parts, both original and reproduction, are available for these antique toy trains.
The crane car is my favorite of all the cars in the 2 boxes. it is also the newest car that I got, along with the spotlight car. These cars both have the box type couplers instead of the earlier lever couplers, and the even earlier hook type coupler that Lionel started their O gauge line of toy trains with. These cars also both have "automatic" uncouplers, the crane car only has the uncoupler on the end opposite the operation knobs for the crane. Both of these cars were made between 1938 and 1940.
As I said earlier, none of these cars are in perfect condition, with chipped paint, faded lettering in places, and some corrosion in a few places. I wiped down all of the cars and cleaned up the rust as best I could with a brush. I didn't want to damage the paint further by using more aggressive methods of rust removal. I don't plan on restoring these cars, I'm just going to display them on a shelf the way they are, with a bit of work to straighten out bent parts, and a few replacement parts, such as the missing wheels on the green tank car. They do have a certain antique charm the way they are instead of restored. I didn't get any track in the boxes, so I'll try to find some used track in decent condition to display the cars on.
I'll probably write some more about these cars, and the accessories that were also in the boxes once I'm able to find out more information on them.
That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!