Roger, your restoration and accompanying story are wonderful. When you place your "new" loco on the display layout, you should have a couple of the before photos on display for people to see.
We all know the hobby has changed a lot over the past couple decades. When I first re-entered the hobby again, I immediately stated doing repaints and restorations. I always found it interesting that it was the HO guys that were full of compliments. Frequently it was with the explanation "We've been doing this for ages, but it's so rare to see a Lionel guy doing this sort of thing."
The decline of commercially available decals in O tells me, it's still an uncommon thing.
I remember being at one show, and some guy was saying you should never do any repaints or restorations because these are Lionel trains and are all collectible! So I pulled out a beat up postwar gondola I had just bought, and said to him with a grin "Okay, give me $200.00 for this." With disdain he replied " That's a piece of junk... it'll never be worth anything."
I smiled and said, "You just shot your previous argument full of holes. See you at the re-paint shop."
There's market value and then there's personal value... and there's usually a big difference between the two. But even the market values are not what they were a couple decades ago.
Roger, nice work on that engine and tender. Book value: Who knows?
Personal value: Reading your story about this loco and seeing the finished product: Priceless.
