The early morning sun etches the details of Berkshire Type 2-8-4 Locomotive No. 736. Made from 1950 to 1968, it enjoyed the longest production run of any Lionel locomotive from the post-war period. The prototype Berkshire locomotive was so named because it was tested on the Berkshire Hills of the Boston & Albany Railroad.
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Lionel ’s 2-6-2 Locomotive No. 2025 (1947-1952) was based on the Pennsylvania Railroad’s 4-6-2 Class K-4 Pacific locomotive. (Lionel’s version left off one of the prototype’s leading truck axles.) Like many another once-premier passenger-hauling steam locomotive, this one has been reduced to performing menial tasks such as picking up milk cans at a country station.
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Modeled after the New York Central’s Class J-1e “Hudson” (reportedly Joshua Lionel Cowen’s favorite locomotive), Lionel ’s 4-6-4 Locomotive No. 773 was first issued in 1950 in celebration of Lionel’s 50th year of producing electric trains. Prototype Hudson locomotives once hauled such crack passenger trains as the 20th Century Limited and the Empire State Express. Although no Hudson locomotives survive today, they are memorialized in the hundreds of 773s owned by O-gauge toy train collectors.
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First introduced in 1938, Lionel ’s 2-6-2 Locomotive No. 1666 was a scaled-down, economically-priced version of Lionel’s pre-war No. 700E “Hudson” type steam locomotive. Revived after World War II, it continued to be available until 1947. Unlike its big brothers No. 700E and No. 773, it was intended to run on 027 track.
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Lionel ’s 2-6-2 Locomotive No. 2026 was available in 1948 and 1949 and again between 1951 and 1953. Although not based on a specific prototype, its boiler shares some similarities with the No. 1666’s boiler. Its 2-6-2 wheel arrangement classifies it as a “Prairie” type locomotive.
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Produced from 1950 to 1951 and again in 1953, Lionel’s S-2 Steam Turbine Type 6-8-6 Locomotive No. 681 was based on the S-2 Turbine built for the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1944. Because it proved inefficient to operate, only one prototype S-2 was ever made. In contrast, Lionel made thousands of S-2 Steam Turbines during the years when the sales of O-gauge steam locomotives were at their peak.
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Lionel Switcher Type 0-4-0 Locomotive 1615 (1955-1957) is a typical example of the small, compact 0-4-0 steam locomotives that once were used to assemble and disassemble trains and move rail cars around. (The tender’s deck slopes to increase rearward visibility.) Unlike road locomotives, these switchers were not intended for moving trains over long distances, although they sometimes did make short transfer runs. On branch lines and on switching and terminal railroads, they were often the only motive power.
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Those who have been following the Marx Photo Album thread know that I’m a Marx fan and collect Marx locomotives, cars, and accessories in order to photograph them the way that railfans once photographed real steam locomotives and first-generation diesels back in the 1940s and early 1950s.
For a few years, I briefly owned a few Lionel die-cast locomotives which I also photographed on the assumption that the major toy train magazines would be more interested in photos of Lionel equipment rather than Marx.
Almost all of these locomotives have now been sold. (For sentimental reasons, I did keep the Polar Express set since I’m a big fan of the book.) I still have the Lionel die-cast locomotive photos that were taken before they were sold and will be sharing them one per day until they’ve all been posted.
This thread is for ALL Lionel photos, so please feel free to post yours, too.
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I have very few postwar pieces. The two that are best are these. First is a #3520 Operating Searchlight Car. When I bought it, it was missing pieces and did not work. I made repairs, and now it does work, at least intermittently (sorry about the derailed truck).
Second is a #41 Army Gas turbine loco that my brothers had when they were boys in the '50s. You can see the commonly broken window struts. What you can’t see is the broken out screw holes on each end, which means that the cab is just sitting on the chassis. It runs well, but the E-unit needs to be repaired. The eyelet holding the lock-out lever is very loose, and the vibrations of running the motor make it lose contact.
I need to get it repaired, but I don’t have any local–or even reasonably close–service stations anymore.
By the way, the prototype for this engine is in the National Museum of Transport in St. Louis.
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In the spring of 1936, famed industrial designer Raymond Loewy streamlined Pennsylvania Railroad K4 Pacific 4-6-2 locomotive No. 3768 by covering its exterior with a sleek, bullet-nosed shroud. Dubbed the “Torpedo,” Loewy’s streamlined K4 locomotive headed up the PRR’s flagship passenger train The Broadway Limited.
Lionel rushed to develop a die-cast replica of the K4 Torpedo and had it ready in time for Christmas: Nos. 238/238E, a 4-4-2 locomotive in O gauge, and Nos. 1688/1688E, a 2-4-2 locomotive in O-27.
Probably Lionel’s most popular locomotive in the years leading up to the United States’ entry into World War II, many thousands of K4 Torpedoes were sold each year.
The example shown here is the 1997 Lionel reissue that was made using the original tooling.
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Hey, I’ve got one of those! Let me tell you folks, it’s a beast!
The only thing I didn’t like about it was there was no way to turn the smoke off, and man does this thing smoke! No biggie, I installed an on-off switch for the smoke unit, problem solved.
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@Eric1946, Nice pictures. I have to look in my father’s collection, he was a big Lionel fan.
Al
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1666- one of my most favorite
Class K-4 Pacific 2-6-2 Locomotive No. 2025
(Lionel’s version left off one of the prototype’s leading truck axles.)
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Around the time of World War II, the TRU-VUE Company of Rock Island, Illinois released Sandy’s Railroad, a 35mm filmstrip with 14 stereo (i.e. 3-D) images showing Lionel equipment being operated on a rather elaborate model train layout by a model railroader identified as “Sandy McDonald” and who, we must assume, built the layout.
(A forerunner of View-Master, the Tru-Vue Company manufactured 35mm stereoscopic filmstrips that fed horizontally through a special bakelite viewer. When held up to light, the images on the filmstrip appeared in 3-D.)
The copyright year on this subject’s title card has been blacked out for some reason. The date August 1946 is printed at the filmstrip’s end. According to TRU-VUE authority John Waldsmith, this is the date when the filmstrip itself was produced, so the images have to date from some time before then.
Viewed today, Sandy’s Railroad provides a priceless record of Lionel locomotives and other rolling stock released prior to 1946. (Knowledgeable Lionel collectors should be able to identify the various items shown.) The images also document what a typical model train layout looked like back when many of the buildings, trees, tunnels, and trackside accessories had to be scratch built or built from kits.
Although they can’t be presented here in their original 3-D, here are the 14 images along with their original captions.
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Because this train is much too small to hold an engineer, Sandy must stop and reverse it from the control board.
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