You can do some searches on this forum and get some answers to most of your questions. Realize your criticizing a product designed in the 80s and made in the 90s. If you do some research you will find that MTH put quality and scale back into the train hobby when they started back in the 90s. Clearly a product you have has deteriorate. Kind a like your 1990 car. They did not paint it with rust on it, but it did rust later. Hopefully you did not pay $1000 for that engine.
That method of battery charging existed when folks were still using Post War ZW to run their trains and rechargeable batteries were a REALLY new thing to O gauge railroads. Most did not have a battery charger. But one did come out shortly after.
Kind of like when I was a kid and we put our finger into a ring on a phone and rotated it to make a phone call...
