Weekend Photos - 09/11/2020

[healey36]

When The Old Man died back in 2000, my brothers and I disbursed his small collection of electric trains to various sons and daughters, nieces and nephews. There were only two pieces I hung onto, one being his Consoli/Western Coil Zephyr set (his pride and joy), and a tender-less Lionel 221 beater he picked up at a Greenberg show in Timonium, Maryland:



When he acquired it, It was missing quite a few bits, which he tracked down and replaced over time. The tender is a 221-W found in a bin at a local meet, which I cleaned off, repainted, and re-decaled for him. While the loco is painted some sort of dreadful satin black, he left it alone. There remain a couple of things to be done which he never got around to; he wanted to remove the awful dry-transfer numbers on the cab and replace them with more appropriate reproductions, and he wanted to remove the paint a previous owner had applied to the nickel-rimmed drivers.

Born in 1925, he was a child of the Depression. He was lucky, as my grandfather, a cutter for a men's clothing manufacturer in Baltimore, never lost his job throughout. Despite their collective good fortune, my grandfather was deeply scarred by the experience, losing much of his faith in the American banking system and corporate America in general, something that he carried for the rest of his life. As a family, they were cognizant of what was going on and they tried to help others as much as possible.

In 1934, they took a trip to Chicago to the World's Fair (also known as the "Century of Progress International Exposition"). There, The Old Man, a future mechanical/civil engineer, saw the first of the Streamliners, the CB&Q's Pioneer Zephyr and the Union Pacific's M-10000. The technical innovation and design surrounding those trains just blew him away, and it shaded his interests in toy trains forever. When he was a kid, he asked for a Flyer Zephyr set for Christmas, but received a Hoge 900 set instead, likely because it was far less expensive. If you've ever seen one of those, they are awful.

The 221 was a postwar effort by Lionel to replicate the Dreyfuss Hudson. I seem to remember reading somewhere that it was actually intended for prewar production, just never made it. While he was never a big Lionel fan, he thought this one was worth having. The lure of the Streamliners was strong.

I have a rubber-stamp around here somewhere to replace those numbers (Sarge tells me they might be removable with a bit of tape), and those driver-rims still need to be stripped and polished.

Maybe someday.

[chuck]

That's a pretty nice looking loco, best of luck on the restoration. How does well does it run?

[healey36]

It hasn't been run for quite awhile, but it was a strong runner the last time we had it on the track. No resto planned, just clean it up, replace those gruesome cab numbers, and polish the paint off the rims. It sits back on its haunches slightly, which is strange. I need to look at that and see what's causing it. Could be something's bent or twisted internally. It would be great to find a set of the postwar green 6440/6441 sheet-metal passenger cars for it.

Here's a pic of a Hoge 900, similar to the one The Old Man received as a kid:



I remember seeing it in a box in the attic when I was a kid, but he never brought it out. He eventually gave it to a guy he knew that was a collector. For as hideous as it is, I wish we still had it.

[rogruth]

Healey
The blue and silver sheet metal passenger cars are the right ones for the 221 in black or gray.
That set was my first Lionel in 1946. I now have a replacement for the original one I had.
It is meant to and will only pull not more than four cars. Three came with it.

[healey36]

Thanks, Roger. I wasn't sure which set of the sheet-metal passenger cars went with it. A friend of mine runs a set of the green ones and the combination looks sharp. I have a pair of prewar sets, one in blue and silver, the other in blue and gray. I'll have to run down a postwar set in blue and silver.