I just noticed that it seems my old Lionel HO thread wasn’t carried over from the old forum.
I wanted to make a new thread, to be able to share some of my collection and maybe inspire others to share.
My area of collecting is exclusively Postwar (1957-1966) and MPC (1974-1978), though I also would include the “Railscope” from 1989-1990 if I owned one. I’m not really interested in the products that Lionel offers today in HO, just the classic stuff from the postwar era, and items made in the MPC years that used updated postwar tooling.
I will probably post infrequently, as I only get around to photographing items and editing videos now and then.
I just finished editing this feature- Lionel/Rivarossi items are pretty tough to collect, I only have a few. While I mostly prefer to collect trains made by Lionel themselves, the Rivarossi pieces are well made and the challenge in finding them makes them entertaining to look for!
I don’t have the best looking Western Pacific C-Liners in the world, but they do run well.
This lovely new piece arrived in the mail for me today.
Lionel offered its 4-6-2 pacific from 1959 to 1966. The model was produced using dies that originated with John English, patterned after a USRA light pacific. Several pacifics were cataloged over the years, with typically subtle differences between them.
My latest acquisition is the elusive 0637 pacific. You won’t find it in any of the catalogs, because it was not a cataloged item. Unless anyone can verify whether or not the 0054 Canadian Pacific switcher was ever produced, it also holds the distinction of being the only uncatalogued locomotive from the entire 1957-1966 run of Lionel’s postwar HO.
To my knowledge, it is unknown what outfit(s) the 0637 pulled, but based off of the design changes that occurred to cataloged pacifics over the years, the characteristics of every 0637 I’ve seen pictures of would date it to some time in 1966.
@Flintlock76 I don’t think the C-liners are quite as good as new, but they’re pretty good.
Something I didn’t really go over in my video, is that my 0503 power unit actually had a slight bit of zinc rot. A pretty mild case, the motor truck wasn’t falling apart, but there were some very faint cracks, and a slight warp. Enough to cause one of the brass gears to disengage sometimes. I was worried the casting was toast, but was able to to make a shim that brought the gears back into alignment and haven’t had problems since. I really didn’t want to have to import a €42 replacement casting from Rivarestore if there was any way of avoiding sinking a bunch of money into it.
The 0637 is very similar in appearance to the other Lionel pacifics, with a few subtle differences. Lionel started adding the white stripe on the running board with models introduced in 1963, and continued through 1966. The little brass bell on the boiler is unique to the 0637 and some 0647 examples.
Wayne, you might be surprised. Especially when in very good condition, Lionel/Rivarossi pieces are very collectable to Lionel HO collectors. Nice examples with good original boxes and inserts can be worth quite a bit.
That said, my examples lack boxes, and have many cosmetic flaws. I believe I spent around $45-50 on b]my A-B-A set of C-Liners, all told. Maybe I overpaid, maybe not. Looking at completed eBay listings, A dummy A unit in only marginally better shape than mine sold for about this much earlier in February. A complete A-B-A set with no boxes sold for over $170 last December. Personally, I would never pay these prices, especially not for the WP road name.
Ultimately, a train is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. But for me, part of the fun in Lionel HO is that it is, at least for now, a somewhat niche market- the collector base is far smaller than that of Lionel O gauge, and most Lionel collectors do not know much, if anything, about it- nor do they have any real interest in collecting it. For these reasons, depending on how high-grade you like your pieces, it is still quite possible (with a little patience) to build up a collection of Lionel HO equipment for, at times, considerably less money than one might need to spend in O gauge.
The 0637 is mostly done at this point. One lingering issue, is that the smoke unit is very leaky. This seems to be a common issue, as I think pretty much every single one of my smoking Lionel engines has had it. Imho, the smoke unit design is kinda crappy- mostly for this reason.
While I could try to make an entirely new rubber gasket for the smoke unit, I did find that cleaning everything thoroughly and carefully gluing the gasket in place seems to work ok, at least temporarily. I’m not sure I could even make a good replacement gasket.
Note that, afaik, Lionel didn’t issue exploded diagrams for HO products introduced after 1961 (and only some of the items introduced before then), so there is no diagram for the 0637. However, the smoke unit assembly remained more or less unchanged from the 0635 introduced in 1961. This scan comes from the Olsen’s Toy Train Parts diagram archive.
Will keep folks posted on how I get on, hopefully I can take care of that leaking problem nice and easy.
Lately I’ve had a rather interesting project in- a friend via the internet asked me a little while ago if I’d be interested in repairing his Lionel 0642. I have one myself, and it’s one of my favorite Lionel HO engines in my collection.
Over the past week I was finally able to make some good progress on it, and it’s almost finished. His ultimate goal is to do a DCC conversion, so it can be run on train club layouts. Because of this, rather than just a repair, I’ve also made some modifications to the locomotive to help simplify the conversion process when the time comes. One of these changes was to swap the original Lionel 1960s “U” magnet motor for a shiny new can motor.
Low speed performance is pretty comparable to the original motor, but far less power hungry and quieter too.
I haven’t properly documented the conversion process, but it was interesting. I modified the collector assembly so that the chassis is completely isolated. I’m happy to report that this went quite well.
Here’s a pic of the chassis with the new motor, part way through the process:
the new motor is much more efficient than the original, and probably a little more powerful.
Here’s a picture from when I was working my way through figuring out the collector.
not shown are a piece of paper insulation, and a plastic screw, that were also involved in the assembly. The design worked out quite well, and I would probably do something similar if not identical if I ever have to do this sort of conversion again.
