tin

Fix or restore Lionel track

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Fix or restore Lionel track

It’s that time of year again. Time to get that old Lionel (or Marx or American Flyer) electric train running before the holidays sneak up. More often than not, the track isn’t in the best of shape. Fortunately, it’s not all that hard to fix or restore Lionel track.

Believe it or not, you can effectively remove rust from old Lionel track with a ball of aluminum foil. A small ball of aluminum foil plundered from your kitchen and five minutes of your time is likely to be enough to restore a loop of Lionel track from rusty, unusable junk to reliable operation.

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What’s wrong with American manufacturing and industry

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I read a disheartening story today. It’s the story of an entrepreneur, making models out of his garage and selling them. A competitor took a liking to his models and started selling crude copies of them, made in China. The competitor is so much larger than him, he can’t afford to sue.

There’s something even more sad than this story, however. It was some people’s reaction to it.The whole thing started out as hearsay on a train forum. Someone noticed a striking similarity between two companies’ competing products. Fans of the larger company rushed to its defense, and someone who claimed to know someone came in with claims about the larger company copying the smaller. Eventually the person who designed the originals chimed in and confirmed that yes, the designs were his, right down to the placement of the cracks on the sidewalk being identical.

He went on to say in very human terms who it hurt. He’s a guy in southwestern Missouri who could make more money as a draftsman, making buildings out of his home for the love of making buildings. He sells the design to another small company in Maine who buy materials, produce parts, and assemble them into kits for sale, employing a handful of Americans along the way.

And, if sales deteriorate too far, eventually he may have to go back to work as a draftsman. Which most likely means some other draftsman will be looking for a job.

Buying the crude, cheap Chinese-made knockoffs from the other company hurts the designer. But not only that, it ripples over to the manufacturer/distributor and its suppliers, all of whom are employing Americans who are just trying to earn an honest wage working for small businesses.

But the copies sell for about half the price.

To some of the people hearing this story, the end–half-priced models–entirely justifies the means. The cheap copy is, well, cheaper, and more convenient–requiring less assembly and being easier to find, since the larger competitor sells its products in more stores–so that’s all just fine and dandy. Who gets hurt doesn’t matter as long as the purchaser is happy.

Maybe the guy just likes jerking people’s chain, or maybe he really believes this, but he was painting the people who felt empathy for the designer as the ones with the problem.

Others present an easy solution: Sue. Well, he’s not stupid. One look at his models should tell you that. He looked into that. The problem is that a one-man operation can’t hope to compete with a company that sells $50 million worth of product per year. Imagine what happens if the larger company generates a mere 100 hours’ worth of billable work for the smaller company’s lawyer, at $400 per hour. That’s a $40,000 legal bill. If the kits sell for $75, their wholesale price is less than 25. That means he has to sell 1,600 kits to cover the legal bill. And in the meantime he also has to sell enough kits to pay himself enough to pay his mortgage, utilities, and put food on the table.

If that $40,000 doesn’t sink him, maybe the next 100 hours’ worth of work will. All they have to do is delay the trial long enough to make giving up look like the best and most reasonable alternative. They don’t have to be right, and they don’t have to win. They just have to make sure the other guy runs out of money first.

Now I know the majority of Americans have no interest in wood and tin 1:48 scale models of general stores. But the wonderful thing about American capitalism used to be that someone working out of a garage or spare bedroom could make niche products and sell them to the people who want them without breaking any laws. It’s one of the ways our ancestors got ahead in life.

I’m not sure my son’s generation is going to have those same opportunities. Not when a big company can come steal products from guys like Dale in Carthage, Mo. with no fear of recourse, and self-centered consumers will gladly snap them up, just because they’re cheaper, even if they know they’re buying stolen property.

People can blame Barack Obama or George W. Bush or Bill Clinton or NAFTA or unions or any of the other usual scapegoats for being the reason why jobs are hard to find. But none of those guys caused the predicament that Dale in Carthage, Mo. is in.

That’s purely the fault of the people who buy knockoff products, with a narcissistic, end-justifies-the-means attitude, and the people who tolerate it.

But it’s a lot easier to blame the politicians than it is to look in the mirror.

We just lost the best pure writer alive

Dave Farquhar Writing

Everyone and his uncle is writing about Kurt Vonnegut today, I’m sure. I have to admit I wasn’t a Vonnegut fanboy by any stretch, but I had a great deal of respect for him. I always thought he was the best writer alive during my lifetime.I know I’ve read a few of his short stories from time to time. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read Slaughterhouse Five (which is probably something everyone in Washington D.C. ought to read–I think we’d be better for it as a nation) but I should. It’s a common book, so the next time I see a used copy, I’ll buy it and read it. That could be Saturday for all I know.

But a Vonnegut essay did have a profound effect on me. I first read it at 18. It was a short, probably 400-word essay titled How to write with style, written for a paper company as a promotional piece. Go read it.

My favorite passages:

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

Had I heeded this advice at 21, there’s no telling how many things I would have published by now.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

Don’t visit dictionary.com and try to work the word of the day for the last week or so into what you’re writing, in other words. (Yes, some people do that to try to make themselves sound smarter than they are–including people who should know better.)

The writing style which is most natural to you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child… I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench… I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am.

I was going to say it’s steel that’s galvanized, not tin, but technicalities aside, everyone else’s opinion of his own sound was much better than his own. There’s another lesson here: If you find yourself enjoying your own writing too much, your ego is too big.

I just have one other thing to add. Vonnegut hated developing new characters. If you’re an aspiring fiction writer, a way to get around this weakness if you have it (I do) is to keep elements of the story on notes on index cards rather than sitting down and writing furiously, which is my natural inclination and I’m sure I’m not the only one like that. The two most important elements of a story are plot and characters, and it’s the characters that make it interesting. Start with a few lines out of a psychology book that seem to describe someone you used to know, then flesh in some details. Imagine how those people would interact with the other people you’re creating, and the world in which you’re placing them.

And so it goes…

An O scale glossary of sorts

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I just spent some time explaining some of the terminology that goes along with Lionel and other O gauge and O scale trains. That made me think maybe a definition of some terms might prove useful to somebody. So here’s an O scale glossary.

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Cheap buildings for a train layout

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Cheap buildings for a train layout

I’ve read about The New Pretty Village, published in book form by Dover Publications in 1980, as a source of buildings for a train layout, particularly a layout featuring tin litho Marx or prewar trains. Now I’ve got one in my hot little hands. I found some pictures of a reproduction online, and Marx expert Walt Hiteshew’s layout has used them as well.

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Build a quiet and reliable toy train layout

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I hear two complaints about Lionel/American Flyer/Marx electric train layouts (besides the common complaints from uptight scale modelers, that is). One is the amount of space they take up, and the other is the noise.

Let’s tackle the noise. While we’re at it, we’ll tackle reliability.

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A train layout photo

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A number of people have asked me to post a photo of some trains, so here’s a photo of a train, with some scenery, mostly hand-made by Yours Truly.

You’ll have to click here to see it, as it’s larger than my blogging software allows.Gatermann will notice that the tender is facing the wrong direction. Just pretend I’m auditioning for Ebay.

The train is a Marx. The locomotive is Marx’s CP locomotive, a gift from my fiancee. It’s one of Marx’s more desirable locomotives because it’s attractive, but common enough to still be affordable. It’s called a CP because it’s loosely based on a Canadian Pacific locomotive of the 1930s. With the exception of the Pennsylvania Merchandise Service car, all of these Marx cars are worth between $3 and $5. The Pennsy car is worth a bit more. It’s not particularly rare, but Marx made a lot of variations of it, and collectors like to get all the variations, which drives the price up.

The tiny gas station on the left is my design. Yes, the sign reads “Farquhar Oil Co.” Now you know the source of some of R. Collins’ fortune. This was one of the first paper buildings I tried to design and I think it turned out OK.

The confectionery and penny store are based very heavily on a series of building-shaped candy containers made by West Bros. around 1914. They were a lot of work but I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. They are paper as well.

The buildings on the right are free downloads from a company called Microtactix. They specialize in wargaming. Those two buildings happened to be about 20% undersize compared to mine, so I blew them up a bit and used them. Not quite the look I’m going for, but they’re close enough for now and they were easier than designing my own.

The tin lithographed train station in the distance was made by J. Chein, probably in the late 1920s. Chein made a lot of tin litho toys; I don’t know if their trains were windup or if they were strictly pull toys. It’s in terrible condition but putting it on the back of the layout obscures that somewhat. Guys like me are conditioned not to worry about scale too much; the Chein station is close enough, looks the part, and cost me a fraction of what a Marx station would cost, which in turn would cost a fraction of what a comparable Lionel would cost.

The block signal behind the confectionery is Marx, as is the red tower. The “snow” is white tissue paper, and the streets, which aren’t very visible, are a cobblestone pattern printed on paper that I cut out and affixed to the tissue paper with tape. Not very traditional and definitely not durable, but it worked.

It’s not much, but it’s a decent start of what I’m envisioning. I think if I draw a neighborhood of buildings in the style of those West Bros. ripoffs, it’ll make for a nice layout reminiscent of what a good toy train layout could have looked like in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as reminiscent of city neighborhoods that are rapidly vanishing forever, to make way for more convenience stores and Walgreen Drug Stores–oops, they don’t call them that anymore.

Tin litho buildings for a traditional pre-war train layout

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Tin litho buildings for a traditional pre-war train layout

In 2004, after being back in the hobby a few months, I decided I didn’t want a train layout like the ones I saw in the magazines, which all take a hi-rail approach. The layouts looked nice, but they all had the same buildings and figures on them. I wanted to do something different. That got me looking for tin litho buildings for a traditional pre-war train layout. And it started a quest that continues to this day.

Don’t get me wrong. Today I have more than enough tin buildings to populate an 8×8 layout. Had I known what I was looking for from the start, it would have taken a lot less time. I might as well share my experience.

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Last weekend\’s find

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You never know what you’ll find when someone advertises “old trains.”

This is an American Flyer Type 4 locomotive. This variety was manufactured in Chicago from 1927 to 1929. It’s powered by clockwork, as many inexpensive toy trains were at the time. You wound it up with a key. The key for this one is long lost. I may be able to find another one, but keys are easily fabricated from K&S brass parts, available at hobby shops.

Amazingly, the motor still runs. The train doesn’t. It’s missing one of the drive wheels, and the other wheel isn’t soldered to the axle very well. Replacement wheels are still available and I can re-solder the other one. It ought to take about $5 worth of parts and about 15 minutes to get it running again.

It runs on O gauge track, the same as Lionel. But the track has two rails, you say? It sure does, because it’s not an electric train, so there’s no need for the third rail. This train predates American Flyer’s 2-rail S gauge electrics by about 25 years.

The locomotive is made of cast iron, cast in two pieces and held together by a screw. The tender and passenger coach are made of pressed steel, plated with tin. This is commonly called “tinplate”. The graphics on the coach are lithographed, a form of offset printing. This was very common on cheap toys up until the 1950s, when lithographed tinplate was gradually replaced with molded plastic, which was cheaper, could hold more detail, and could be made without any sharp edges.

This item isn’t particularly rare, but it’s an interesting curiosity.

I’m very happy to have it, but the genealogist in me really wishes people would hang on to things like this. This was someone’s grandfather’s train. All too often people’s reaction to an old train is “What’s it worth?” They’re looking for a fast buck.

In this condition, this particular train is worth about 50 bucks, give or take a few dollars.

Any toy that once belonged to any of my grandparents would be worth 10 times that to me.

Getting rid of some rust on old toy trains

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I’ve seen some old tin 6-inch Marx cars in nice condition, but I sure seem to have a talent for finding Marx rustbuckets too. I also have a set of very nice Lionel tinplate–nice except for their rusty couplers.

Professional restorers remove rust by bead blasting. How do you deal with rust if you don’t happen to have a sandblaster laying around?A number of products exist catering to auto restorers. They claim not even to damage paint in some cases. I’m told that Oxisolv works safely on toy trains, or at least on Marx trains. Finding the stuff is another story. Every place I’ve looked wants as much to ship it as they want for the liquid.

As I was poking around under my kitchen sink this evening, I came across a household cleaner intended for removing rust stains from bathtubs. But the label also said it would remove rust stains from tools. Not seeing any difference, chemically speaking, between soaking a pair of pliers in the stuff and soaking a Marx train wheel, I broke out my rustbucket Marx 553, removed its wheels, put them in a plastic container, and dribbled on enough cleaner to cover it.

An hour or so later, there was visibly less rust on the wheels and axles.

Most of these products use a mild acid that readily eats away iron oxide, but has little effect on plain old iron. If you’ve heard the legends about Coca-Cola dissolving rusty nails or freeing rusted bolts, it’s the same principle.

I’m not quite brave enough to try it on the painted surfaces, and different brands will almost certainly vary, but this is a cheap way to at least improve a car’s wheels, especially if you happen to already have the stuff on hand.