Train is coming around the bend.......

I finally took the train out of the box and gave it a cleaning.  I now know why that I was so slow to do it as it has a sad ending.  My brother and I received this train from Santa.  It was in a box and wrapped in brown paper, with white heavy string tied around it to keep it shut, as scotch tape would not be available in our household, or Santa's household.  On the brown paper was written in large letters ' To Dwight and Larry from Santa.'

It was a dark early morning when the the four of us got up out of warm beds and went in the dark downstairs to see what Santa had brought.  I believe it is 1957 and I can remember that we had to wait for Dad to throw a log in the stove in the basement before we could go in to see the gifts. The house was in bad shape and it was very cold in the winter and the one bare light bulb in the ceiling still gave the presents a special look.  For a kid, it was so magical, as none of that was there the night before when I went to bed.

Dad and Mom of course are gone now.  But the co-owner of the train is gone too.  I lost him last year and I really didn't know it was going to bother me to mess with this train.  If his life had not been so tragic and self destructive.  If he had not been so unhappy and lonely always searching in the wrong places for what he needed, I wouldn't feel so bad about cleaning it up.
I am going to make it a joy in life somehow, as I get the thing running again, and I can remember Dwight when he was happy.  That was a long time ago.

I don't know where my parents bought it, but I don't see Lionel on the engine so I don't think it is a real collector's item.  My parents could have ordered it from the Montgomery Ward catalog, or bought it from Western Auto, or one other store, Coast to Coast. They were two hardware stores in the near by town.

It is funny that I blogged earlier about a cheap wind up train that I had and it also had New York Central printed on it's side.  I remember as a kid how difficult that it was to get the hitch of the train to go into that coal car.  The wheels on this set are cheaper than a lionel train as I have one older car from my two older brothers set in which to compare them. Unfortunately the back hitch of this car is broken so I won't be able to connect any of the following cars to it.  I will have to work on that.

I am going to leave this picture small as I am still having trouble taking pictures of red items with my camera. It is blurry, but I bet you can get the picture, right? This is the traditional boxcar of the train and the caboose. There was one other car that came with this train, and I know it had to have been tossed.  My nieces and nephews played with these as Mom had just thrown all things into one box. Things did get broken.  The set had a low car that had four fake reels of wire on it.  It was probably stepped on and easily broken into.  The wire spools had been taken off by curious hands.

I almost left out the caboose.  I am so glad that it is still in one piece.

My two older brothers had a Lionel train.  I thought the engine was still around, but couldn't find it when I cleared my parents house.  This  tank car is from that set as it has Lionel Trains printed on it's side. This is the one my neighbor fellow was grabbing at when he was over to the house the other day.  He collects Sinclair items and thought he had found a gold mine. The wheels and hook-up hitch are made so well compared to my brother's and mine train set.  The engine of my older brothers set had burned out.  I will ask them if they took it with them in the last few years, but I doubt it.  None of the other cars of that train are around either.

As all things get complicated, when you don't want them to, there is not a piece of track in sight.  I have a friend uptown, who owns a hardware store slash antique toy museum, and he keeps a track set up at all times.  I will leave the engine with him to work on to see if he can get it back in working order.  His toy museum I will share about later, but I may be able to get track for him.  Oh yes, no transformer either.

Well, it is late Sunday afternoon and we did make it down to Des Moines to church. It got up to 7 above today but we are already down to 3 degrees now.  Our entire week is going to hover just above 7 or 10 degrees and the nights will be in the minuses.  It is getting to be difficult to stay in so much, but it is Iowa.    Thanks for reading......have a good week.