Originally Posted by Becky, Tom & Gabe Morgan:
One thing we've always wondered: how did so many prewar trains survive the scrap drives? A whole lot were lost to overzealous moms cleaning out toy boxes. Each survivor must have a story.
I can at least tell you the story of my father's #252.
He received it for Christmas, 1929, as far as I've been able to tell. Then, when he went off to WWII, it went in his parents' attic. Somehow during that interval, it got very beat-up, lost one of its couplers and most of the brass trim items. Likewise, most of the latch couplers on its three passenger cars went missing or broken off. Dad always denied any knowledge of how this damage occurred.
At any rate, sometime in the mid-Fifties (1955, I think, when I was seven), after we got back from a visit to my grandmother, Dad was beginning to set up our yearly train platform, when he brought out a battered cardboard box. Inside was a strange-looking green locomotive -- made of sheet metal, no less -- and some pieces of 027 track.
I was intrigued, and asked Dad about it. To my puzzlement, he told me that this had been his train set when he was a kid, which set my mind down entirely new pathways. Here before me was actual physical evidence that not only had my father once been a kid himself, but had played with trains, just like I did! I felt as though a window had been opened onto another world.
But the mood did not last. Once we had the train platform set up and my own 2026 was chugging along its rounds for yet another year, I decided that I wanted to see this strange relic in action. I put it on the track and raised my 1033's voltage...
Nothing happened. I could see a bit of sparking from the internal mechanism, and heard a faint, ominous hum. I alerted my father to these facts, and he tried the same test, with the same results. That night, he took the shell from the chassis, looked inside, and prodded here and there. Eventually, he shrugged and said he could see nothing wrong with it.
I was disappointed, but still thought such a fascinating piece belonged on the layout somewhere. I put down a couple of sections of straight track and made a static display out of the 252 and its cars. My amateurish applications of 3-in-1 Oil accomplished nothing beyond making a minor mess. But at least, even as a motionless display piece, it could still be a part of the family's Christmas. I did that into the mid-Sixties, every year, until that inevitable day late in my high-school career when I decided I was Too Old for Toy Trains.
Fast forward to 2010. Dad had passed on some years before, and Mom was in one of her cleaning-up moods, this time focusing on the attic. On one of my visits to her, she brought me a vaguely familiar-looking cardboard box. Inside was the sad remains of the old tinplate train. The passenger cars were no more deplorable than they'd ever been, but the 252 was a zombie version of itself, even worse than the first day I'd seen it. The headlight, pantograph and whistle were missing altogether, the body was long separated from the frame, everything was covered in years of dust and grime and -- worst of all -- the dreaded Zinc Rot had claimed the drive wheels, reducing them to brittle crust. "Do you want this?" Mom asked me. "Otherwise, I'll throw them out."
I hesitated. Certainly the cars were worth having, but the locomotive looked like it had already been consigned to the garbage years before. Could it even be restored? And if it could, did I have the skills and the patience to do it? By this time, I'd become fairly proficient in bringing postwar locomotives back to life (my own 1951 2026 not the least among them), but this was something new. Would it even be worth the trouble?
Oh well, I decided. I've just retired, so I have all the time I'll need. What've I got to lose?
So I took the box home for further study. The 252's body shell wasn't in bad shape. Certainly, I'd seen much worse. But the mechanism...
I began by cleaning everything of years of accumulated gunk. The 3-in-1 Oil from my days of bumbling innocence now came back to haunt me, but alcohol and plenty of Q-Tips removed its residue and much else. And when I'd gotten things reasonably clean, I had to admit that Dad had been right -- there didn't appear to be anything seriously wrong.
Deciding that even if the armature wires were shot I could at least make a shelf display out of it, I began prying into the motor with a bright lamp and a toothpick. First thing I noticed was that the brushes were missing altogether. Again I wondered how this damage could have happened. I ran a few simple electrical continuity tests and couldn't find any shorts or dead wires. But down there, deep inside the motor frame...
I probed deeper, and discovered one of the missing brushes jammed between the armature and the field coil. When I teased it out with a miniature screwdriver, it dropped to the tabletop, followed just seconds later by its twin. They weren't even badly worn!
I doused them in an alcohol bath to remove soaked-in oil, and meanwhile cleaned the commutator thoroughly. At last, I lubed the bearings with LaBelle oil, returned the brushes to their places, and attached a couple of wires to my 1033. I touched one to the frame and the other to a roller...and was amazed to see the ancient motor spin merrily for the first time since...well, probably the late Thirties! I felt like Dr. Frankenstein surveying his creation's first lurching steps. It's alive! It's alive!
There's little need to go into detail about the rest of the resurrection process. This was when I discovered Jeff Kane of The Train Tender. I ordered new trim parts, new couplers to replace the broken ones, and, most of all, new wheels. All the wires with old, cracked insulation had to be replaced, and in one case, rerouted. With everything back where it should be, I re-lubricated thoroughly and screwed the body back in place.
I twirled a new light bulb into its new headlight housing and put the locomotive on a loop of 027 test track. All of my trials had been successful. Would it still run? Carefully, I attached a lockon to the track and cracked the throttle of the 1033. The little 252 hummed for a second as if disoriented by waking from its decades-long sleep, then took off down the straightaway like a happy puppy learning to run.
Next the cosmetic issues. Once I'd gotten the grime off the locomotive and cars, they didn't look bad at all. There were some chips here and there, but nothing major. I decided not to attempt repainting them. With a coat of high-quality automotive wax on them, they looked just fine.
The cars were next, of course. With their new couplers, they could be connected at last. New light bulbs soon had them illuminated once more. And with the lights down low, you can almost believe it's Christmas, 1929, once again.
And that's the story of how at least one prewar train survived -- and will continue to survive, when I pass it on. I really doubt that the WWII scrap drives claimed many of them; they were just too precious to their owners (and too large an investment to the adults who purchased them). Time, forgetfulness and lack of understanding from subsequent generations were their biggest enemies, and probably still are.
We are all stewards.
