I spoke of this engine in the past but never posted pictures. Thought some of you would find it interesting. Nice little artifact from the past.
The metal of the side skirts are printed on the back with the Vernors bottle caps. I’m guessing this is early 40’s just prior to WWII.
Sweet find! Hafner of course did this a lot as a cost-saving measure. They’d buy other companies’ defective or surplus printed tin, then print their toys on it.
Marx did it too (reusing its own defective sheets, and sometimes using sheets from elsewhere) but Hafner seems to have done it even more often. It makes sense, being a small company with a lot of competition, for them to have done everything they could to save a few pennies.
The same happened with accessories. Including tinplate sheets that were originally lithograhed for some other Hafner product. My Glen Ellen station roof has Overland Flyer cattle car tinprinting underneath.
Colin Duthie (NZ) - (Seems Hafner was exported to New Zealand too, but not in a big way. Hornby was the big brand here.)
When I was a kid in Japan in 1952, I remember getting tin-plated toys with American beer-can labels visible through the windows.
That sure is neat. I have a Girard station that re-used some tinplate you can see from its ‘innards’ - I recall there was a CTT article about this a few years ago.