Years ago, I traded my Dads old American Flyer O guage train set. It had the 1218 stepple cab engine, 3 passinger cars, (Millwalukee Rd) , but also had a Southern box car, American Flyer tank car, a Seaboard Air Line gondola,American Flyer stock car, and an American Flyer caboose.
I also had the transformer for the set, but no track. Apparently acording to the stories I’ve heard, one of his sisters accidently stepped on the O guage track flattening it. However I was able to run this on some freins Lionel sets before I traded it off for HO scale.
Question is, the only 1218 sets that I can find are the passinger sets. Were the freight cars added on to the set, or did A.F. make a deluxe mixed set? By the way, all cars fit into the origional box.
Appriciate any help on this. Ozzie
The 1218 was cataloged from 1921-1926. The most common consist (indeed Flyers most common consist for most of their sets) was a passenger set. I’ll have to check my catalog cuts to see if the 1218 came with a freight set. Flyer did make huge passenger/freight train sets in the late 1930’s as department store specials but to the best of my knowledge they didn’t do this before that time period.
The presence of the Seaboard gondola and the cattle car would strongly suggest your set is a passenger set with later add ons. The stock car was cataloged from 1921-1932 but it was a shorter car than the passenger cars and it was never offered in a cataloged set. Flyer never made a Seaboard gondola - that would have been Marx. The lithoed gondolas made by Flyer that would have matched the length of the passenger cars would have been either a green or orange PRR, a NYC, a CB&Q, an American Flyer Lines, or a Nationwide. Depending on what the tank car and the caboose looked like they could either be contemporary with the passenger set or not. The Southern boxcar would have been made during the same time period as the passenger cars.
If you want more information on Flyer and on the various items you listed you might want to look through the Pre-war American Flyer thread by Northwoods Flyer on this forum (at the moment it is over on page 3) it is 30 pages long, has an index on page 27 and has pictures and brief histories of everything you mentioned (Seaboard gondola excepted).