I clarified with my friend who gave me all these, plus more to come later, that it was his father in law that built all of these, and had a massive layout in the attic of his house, and this was in SC, so summer time would have been a cooker. The father in law was the son of a man named Buckwalter, (I forgot his first name, will dig it out) the primary inventor of the roller bearing. Lea, the son in law who is 85 now, so we are talking 1930-40's for the main build, his son ran the layout with his granddad as late as the 1960's. The layout could be run automatically with a mechanical clock that could be programmed that the granddad built that did things like cut in and out different track blocks, and moved turnouts allowing the train to take different paths on each pass, selected by the minute hand. Trying to get any photos of it,
I'll clean that engine up a bit and get some better photos, but its 8 drive wheels and trailing truck are not kit bashed, but the lead truck is. I don't think this was originally a 4-8-2, but a 2-8-2. The center rail pickup is a bit kluge, perhaps he had to repair it at some point. I wonder how he got the loco drive and the dual motors in the tender to all work together? The E unit in the tender also was wired to the loco drive, and judging by the type of wire used to hook loco and tender together, almost looks like aviation grade Teflon, it was redone much later than the original build. The valve gear and piston remind me of an O scale live steam loco.
