I have a 700E with outside third rail pickups. My Dad used to run it at the Stamford CT club back when it was outside third rail. There is one pickup installed between the first and second drivers and one between the trucks on the tender.
Were the outside third rail pickups an option offered and delivered installed by Lionel, or a special conversion kit offered by Lionel, or was it produced by
an aftermarket supplier?
2 Likes
Welcome aboard Larry! And that’s a VERY good question!
I’ve never seen or heard of a 700e with an outside third rail pickup but I wouldn’t stick my neck out and say Lionel never offered the option. Hopefully someone has an answer for you.
Welcome aboard! 
As far as I know outside third rail shoes were an aftermarket thing. Wether or not they could be purchased as a kit created by someone or had to be made by the operator wanting them I don’t know.
Considering that Cowen considered the 700EW to be the masterpiece of his lifetime, I think he would have offered a two rail version if he had wanted to. As it is they developed “T-Rail” 72" radius (?) or “Special Model Maker’s” track, as Lionel called it in the catalogs, in order to operate it. Obviously they could have easily gone that direction, but I suspect the 2-rail O Gauge market was so severely limited in 1937 that they didn’t think the return would validate the expense. Most scale detailed models in those days were most often created by heavily modifying Lionel models.
John Armstrong’s Canandiagua (sp?) Southern model railroad and the one built by the B and O Society of Model Engineers in Cincinnati are great examples of outside third rail layouts.
Doing a little more digging, I found a note here on classic toy trains from 2023 stating “the 700 E was designed to run on inside or outside third rail T profile track, so it could compete in the O scale model Railroad market”
I’d post a photo of the pick ups, but I haven’t figured out how to do that here