A few Lenoir Locos for Christmas

Merry Christmas to you as well. Thanks for posting the pics of the Lenoir locos. it is really great to see color pics of bill's workmanship. i am fortunate to own 4 of his locos. If you know of any of his for sale i am always interested as well as any of the others custom builders.

Very nice. I would like to know more about the K2a and the K5 locos. Were they made like the PRR models?

Posted, in Tribute to Bill L. if these scans are inappropriate, please remove.  From the Sept 1955 MR.  Several of the Loco's in this spread were supposedly built by Bill L. He must have been quite a model maker.  I wonder if any Jim's engines came from this collection?

Dennis Bill Lenoir was indeed a fantastic builder. his locomotives were extremely smooth runners and for the time frame that he built them they were extremely well detailed. Mack had probably the most Lenoir locomotives and i was lucky enough to get the  Lenoir Akron Canton  & Youngstown 2-8-2 from him as well as a Milwaukee Northern that he never did tell me who the builder was... i was lucky enough to see the huge layout Mack on RT 8 just north of Akron. I'll try to find the postcards of that layout as post them as well.

Dennis,

That old MR article about Mack Lowry's collection is what planted the 2-rail seed in my mind at the age of 9 while I was still playing with my 1951 Lionel Berkshire. It sort of began with my thinking "how come there's nothing like that in my Lionel catalog!

I still have that MR copy and refer to it periodically.

Thanks for posting,

Jim

Beautiful!

Thanks,

Alan

Plus one - thanks to both of you.  

Wow, what an incredible collection.  I wonder what became of it.  I really liked the Pere Marquette observation car too.

In the late 1970's/80's time frame  Mack Lowry could be found at O scale shows with tables full of custom built models for sale.  It seemed he had more models for sale than table space.  The models were typically just rolled in newspaper and stacked in large boxes.  Handling was not subtle. At the start of one show I watched him unroll dozens of Fischer cars and Lenore locomotives.  When a beautifully built Pennsy K5 came out I tried to negotiate the price - but unfortunately at the time it was beyond my budget.  

Ed Rappe

A teenage friend and I vacationed with his family in Akron, OH in the summer of 1957. My friend heard of a person who had scale models, and we were able to find Mack Lowry's men's clothing store in downtown Akron. Mack was not there, but one of his store clerks told us to just walk upstairs to see the collection of engines, which we did. I was and am a NYC fan and was looking for NYC, but we did not see any. I did see large tables of the type used to make clothing, and engines just placed on these tables, all two rail scale. The most predominant were PRR J-1 2-10-4's. I think I saw four but cannot confirm. He also had a few PRR K-4's in the early trim scheme, and some Tuscan red passenger cars. There was some other steam there, smaller steam as I recall but do not remember specific engines. He had a number of B&O EM-1 2-8-8-4's also. (It was ironic to see these models, as the real things were running through Akron during that summer, and we photographed several of them.) There were a significant quantity of passenger cars, including some B&O and some C&O, I think?

In later years I also saw Mac's layout north of Akron, and I do remember one engine in particular, and that was the "proposed" Lima "double belpaire" 4-8-6 with a combined sand and steam dome, a centipede tender with a 4-10-2 wheel arrangement. I have often wondered what happened to that engine.....

I am trying to refresh my memory, and I also recall a Southern green engine but do not recall whether it was a pS4 or not, an Erie Pacific, and a C&O F19 with front pumps. I was surprised at the Sou and the C&O engines as neither ran through Akron, but the Erie did.....

http://oscale.uberflip.com/t/62954    Bill Lenoir didn't build just big steam bruisers. Here is a nifty Lenoir Canadian National 2-6-0, pictured in the O Scale On Line resource magazine. See p.39.

Thanks for that link.  I didn't know about that magazine.

John - Yes, it's a real good source. Here's another, pointed to the proto48 crowd, but it's still all 1:48!     http://www.proto48.org/

Does anyone by chance have a photo of Bill Linoir himself?   I am looking for one to put in the O Scale Hall of Fame page on the www.oscalekings.org website.

Jim Allen. 

Couldn't find a photo of Bill, but here is his biography:  http://www.cfhistory.org/page....p=Lenoir%20Biography