Just picked up an old Lima 2-8-2 steamer. Do not know anything about them. Looking for someone that can give a little info on Lima products. HO scale.
Thank you
Lima is an Italian model railway manufacturer with quite a long tradition. Their focus was on the Italian market for many years, but beginning in the late 1960´s, they started to make European and US locos and rolling stock. Unfortunately, the quality was not up to standard, earning them a reputation of making “cheap toys”. Their main sales outlet in Germany was discount stores. Lima as a manufacturer is not existing any more. Hornby in UK acquired the brand name, but production is in China. Some of Lima´s staff have founded a new company, called ViTrains. There are producing a limited range of products for the Italian and the UK market.
More info you can find here
I owned a Lima diesel engine once and they suck! Can’t pull very well, noisey, and run poorly through switches.
My only experience with Lima was in 1975, when I bought two Lima diesel engines. They had the typical oversized wheel flanges that were common for the day. Only the front truck had metal wheels and picked up power. The rear truck had a “pancake” motor mounted directly to it and had plastic wheels with traction tires.
They were so poorly built that the throttle had to be turned up to over 50 percent before they would even begin to move, and then they took off like a rocket and were practically uncontrollable.
The wire that ran from the front truck to the motor was so thin that it overheated and melted within a couple of weeks because the poorly designed motor placed too much load on it.