Last Updated on November 28, 2024 by Dave Farquhar
Last week I helped an old friend, Dan, get his dad’s Lionel train layout running for one last time. Dan’s dad, David, had built the layout sometime in the 1970s using traditional methods, but had partially disassembled the layout sometime around 1988 and could no longer remember how it went together. In the process of helping, I learned that a Lionel layout doesn’t have to be permanent to be special. A temporary layout can be just as memorable.
Time is catching up to David and his wife, Ruth, and they are having to downsize. Dan and his brother Erik wanted their Dad and their kids to see the layout during one last family get-together. Dan knew I know a little about trains and asked me if I could help.
A postwar-style layout built in the 1970s
The layout was a standard 4×8 sheet of plywood with painted areas for the track and a road and accessories the way many people did in the 1950s. David attached the track to the board with slotted wood screws and drilled holes for wires strategically along the layout so he could do point-to-point wiring using solid core bell wire. I imagine he bought everything from the late great Central Hardware. He explained it wasn’t the layout he had as a kid, but he built the layout to resemble what his dad had built for him.
David built the layout years before Peter Riddle’s classic Wiring your Lionel Layout book came out. He had a folder full of instruction sheets that came with every Lionel accessory he had ever owned. I think he simply followed the wiring instructions from each sheet when wiring up the layout. He clearly had a system when he set it up, but then when he added to the layout, he used another system. I could understand why, decades later, he couldn’t remember how it went back together.
Starting with the basics
It didn’t take me long to figure out which wires supplied power so I could hook up a transformer and see what we were working with. Then when I powered it up, I saw smoke coming from under the table. That was a bit scary. Usually that means there is a short circuit, although I found it interesting that the circuit breaker on the transformer didn’t trip. Finding the short circuit was probably the most time consuming part of figuring out the layout.
But this really was a temporary setup. I budgeted around 4 hours to get a minimum viable layout operating, and then get a few accessories working again and ensure the trains could operate on the layout.
The setup wasn’t going to be permanent. In 1988 or 1989, when the layout went into storage, they were always going to set it back up again someday, probably some Christmas. But the years turned into decades, and something else always took priority.
This year, for the 4th of July, the last opportunity came about. Dan was coming in from out of state with his family, and this was probably going to be the last major family get together before the big downsizing.
There wasn’t enough time to make everything perfect, but there was certainly enough there to make a representative layout so a grandfather could show his grandchildren what he was interested in growing up in the 1950s when he didn’t have video games.
The original locomotive
David’s original locomotive, a 1666 from 1946 or 1947, was on the track when I arrived. He explained he received it as a Christmas present sometime in the 1950s, and his parents had bought it used. But it was in beautiful condition. I saw three very small paint chips on the cab. Erik explained David had taken extremely good care of them, and said when he was growing up, he wasn’t allowed to touch it.
Unfortunately it didn’t run quite as well as it looked. It made it around the track about one and a half laps before David said he usually ran it the other direction. So I stopped it, turned it around, and then it didn’t want to run again.
None of my usual quick fixes worked, so I moved on to some other things. He had two other engines, one from 1976 and one from 1981, and both of them could run. We ran those two engines for about 30 minutes and we were all smiles. There was something magical about seeing the trains and the layout coming back to life.
With two running engines, I wanted to get some accessories lit up. A layout always looks so much better with lights on it.
David’s Lionel 1666 locomotive comes back to life
As I was wiring up lighted accessories, I didn’t even notice David had turned the power back on one of the loops and was pushing the engine around on the loop. Then I heard a sound and looked up to see him doing exactly the same thing with his engine that I did in 1986 with my dad’s engine. Something about toy trains makes us all 12 again, no matter how old we are.
And a split second later, the engine found its fountain of youth too. The motor roared to life and the locomotive took off like a rocket. David, Erik and I all made a beeline for the transformer to cut the power. One of us arrived on time and we averted any derailments or any other catastrophes.
We found a speed that worked to keep the train going around in circles without losing momentum, and we gave it a chance to run for a good 30 or 45 minutes to get used to running. After these machines sit for so long, sometimes the best thing you can do for them is to let them run a while. When they are used to sitting, they want to sit. But once they get used to running again, you’ll get tired of watching them before they get tired of running laps around the track.
Finishing up
I came back over about a week later with Dan to see the layout, see the trains running, and help them figure out what they had. This time I brought reference books instead of a toolbox. Dan recalled some details Erik didn’t, and shared stories of going to Hobby Station in Kirkwood every year where they would get one more car to add to the trains they ran on the layout.
Before I’d arrived, Dan had taken the opportunity to try out his childhood Lionel LASER train set on the layout, but he told me he couldn’t get the engine to move. I took a look at it, and didn’t see anything obviously wrong. When I put it on the track and applied a small amount of power, it lit up and made enough noise to convince me the motor was trying to run. And then when I turned up the voltage some more, I heard a familiar sound.
That sounds like a DC motor trying to run on AC, I said.
That got David’s attention. “You mean direct current? As opposed to alternating current?” he asked.
Exactly, I said. Lionel switched for a while as a cost saving measure and it confused everyone then, and it’s been confusing people ever since, I said. Wiring up a layout to use either AC or DC power is possible.
Three generations bonding
And one thing I noticed was when the trains were running, it didn’t matter what age or generation was in the room. They all liked seeing these old machines running again.
There isn’t much of anything trendy about Lionel trains these days. I have the search engine results to prove it. But even though they aren’t trendy anymore, they do have a timeless quality about them.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
Love this! – My dad was into trains in a big way, of course having Lionel sets among everything else. He’s been gone four years, and we have cycled the trains away to those that wanted them.