Model Train Journal

A few scattered tank cars from the pile:

















Many others laying around, but a few favorites.

Healey

Nice.
I see Lionel and Flyer. There may be more that I don't see.
Others?

That green Sinclair with the axles jutting out the sides - you'll poke your eye out!

And that's not right, playing with trains poking your eye out....

Terrific, thanks for sharing. Since none of us were alive when these were made, why do we find them so alluring and nostalgic? A mystery, but a nice mystery.

We find them alluring because the're made of sheet metal hand assembled and painted instead of plastic.

I thought about this a bit, and I think it is also the realization, at least for me, late in life, that these toys brought some child joy as much as a century ago, and while the child is probably now gone, the joy remains for those who contemplate the beauty of the toy and what it meant to the child and to us a century later.

I may have been alive although very young for some of them. My uncle had a mix of Flyer and Lionel and had a few cars for which he had made coupler adapters. Oh yeah, I was born in 1934.
Don't know about others but I have become much more nostalgic in the last 25-30 years and I think nostalgia is the most likely reason for the popularity
of these trains. 20-30 years ago it was because some thought they would be able to retire on what these would sell for.Nostalgia was a factor also.

I've accumulated an abundance of this stuff over twenty-five or thirty years of hitting meets, shows, antique malls, online sales, wherever. Now I'm at a point where I need to seriously think about shedding quite a bit of it. They are toys to me, they have little-to-no monetary or intrinsic value, other than they are representative, to me, of eras long past (America's industrial past, the era of quality in design and manufacturing, etc.). I also think about, as Neil said, some kid probably received these things for Christmas, or his/her birthday, likely from a parent or dear relative. I've had a number of items given to me by friends and neighbors, toys that belonged to them, or to their parents. There's a story, mostly unknown to me, for each. There's also a lot of regrets, i.e. people will say they had a Lionel set, but it got thrown away, or given away, or just that they wish they still had their stuff from when they were a kid. I had a second-hand Flyer set and a Marx clockwork set when I was a kid...still have most of the Flyer set, but the Marx is long gone.

When my extended family comes over to the house around the holidays I usually make a point of running the trains for them. The kids get a charge out of it...not unusual for sessions to run for a couple hours. The adults tend to lose interest after twenty minutes or so, but the kids will hang with me for at least an hour. I recently pulled together a couple of vintage Lionel sets for young sons of a couple of my nieces, intending to hand them off. Just a steamer, tender, two or three freight cars, a caboose, oval of track, small transformer, wire and a CTC. When I called both of my nieces to see if they were cool with it, they both turned me down. "We don't really have the room", they said, or "They have too many toys already", or "They like to play on their iPad." I was pretty surprised, although I guess I shouldn't be.

So I gotta move to Plan B (whatever that is), and start moving some of this stuff out. Family appears to be a non-option. I've no interest in selling this stuff, and I've no interest in handing it out to people who will sell it in short order. I'd love to find some kids that would/could have fun with it, who might hang onto it, maybe even remember where they got it. They're out there, just gotta find them.

Then there's 1400 board wargames, and about 600 small ship models. I think I have a home for these, but now I wonder.

Oy, I hope they lift the sequester soon. I gotta get the hell out of this house.

healey36 wrote:A few scattered tank cars from the pile:

Healey

I picked up a couple of those at a train show, badly battered and missing trucks and couplers for a buck apiece. At the time of purchase, I had an idea of using them for something but that idea is now lost in the ozone!

I hear ya, Dave, many of these have cycled through the basement over the years. This is one I looked for a long time, an example of the very last 1680/2680-series from the very last of the O-27 sets made just before the war. The shiny aluminum paint gone, the handrails omitted, the wheels, journals, and domes blackened. By early ‘42 it was over, Lionel started their war production assignments.

Thank you Healey, very enjoyable post.

Neil wrote:I thought about this a bit, and I think it is also the realization, at least for me, late in life, that these toys brought some child joy as much as a century ago, and while the child is probably now gone, the joy remains for those who contemplate the beauty of the toy and what it meant to the child and to us a century later.

We are not all gone Neil.

My first train was a ride-on locomotive made from steel. It was in a scrap pile to support the war effort but my dad took it out of the pile and brought it home.

My 1st train, 1944

Actually, mine was better, it had wheels printed on the sides.

Tin trains made a short comeback after the war.

My 2nd train, 1950

I disassembled and reassembled the engine and cars so many times that most of the bent tabs broke off.
The engine on this one is plastic. I can't remember if mine was plastic or tin. I do remember the sparks coming out of the smoke stack and the annoying bell.

Wayne, lol, I had a similar Marx mechanical set, although I think the loco was sheet-metal. Same tender, gondola, and caboose for sure. Around 1963 or so, the Old Man gave one to my brother and I each. We took all of the track from both sets and combined it for a decent sized run (all curves). Had a lot of fun with those things.