I started tinkering with old trains as soon as I got into the hobby thirteen years ago. Here's one of the first real "restoration" projects I ever attempted. It's a prewar Flyer locomotive that I modified into a 4-4-4 boxcab electric; I call it the Blackbird!
The locomotive started off as a rust-bucket American Flyer 3113 "Bluebird" locomotive that I bought for a pittance at one of the first TCA shows I ever attended. I managed to find a small cell phone picture of the original locomotive for your entertainment. The motor was complete and included a working manual reverse unit, but the zinc wheels were badly cracked and seized up. I was able to buy another motor with better wheels out of a junk box and scavenge the parts that I needed to get this one running.
Here is the back of the Blackbird. The railings were hand-bent from brass tubing. The front and rear trucks were hand-drawn on a piece of cardstock, then transferred to a piece of sheet brass, cut out and painted. You'll notice that a lot of the metal detail parts are still a bit rusty. At the time I didn't have any power tools so everything I did, including scraping rusty parts, was done painstakingly by hand with steel wool and hand tools, and I couldn't figure out how to get all of it off. Removing the lithography from the engine body took hours of tedious scraping! I was able to borrow a can of Brasso to clean up all the trim, which came out very nicely.
Later that summer I made a Craigslist find of a box of hulked out old tinplate trains, including a number of very dilapidated old coaches. This gave me enough parts to build a couple matching cars to run with the Blackbird.
I settled on a black and silver paint scheme. The carrier irons were gone from the cars (probably when the previous owner added those postwar trucks) so I cut new ones from aluminum and glued them on. I rigged a spare Lionel coupler on to the Blackbird so it could link up with them.
I decided to take the Blackbird down off the shelf and run it on the tinplate loop for a little while. The ancient AF motor with its twist-lever reverse still runs pretty well!
