This story has no great informative value, so if you don’t like long postings, now’s the time to bail out. I just wanted to present an experience that only train collectors could appreciate.
I got my first Lionel set in 1951. I don’t know how Dad ever afforded it, since he was an undergrad at the time, and working part-time at night, but somehow he did. Santa brought me that 2026 that Christmas.
He graduated the following year, got a job in another town, and we moved. The Christmas layout expanded drastically after that, with a wooden train platform, wooden buildings (courtesy of my grandfather), accessories, more cars and – incredible luxury! – switches.
But along with the Christmas train-set boxes stored in the attic, there was another box. It contained a strange, old-fashioned olive-green locomotive with a sheet-metal body and three metal passenger cars in the same odd green paint. The couplers were like nothing I’d ever seen before – no knuckles here, just complicated contraptions of levers and catches.
In fact, it was a Lionel 252 prewar electric and its original cars, though I didn’t know that at the time. Slowly, I came to understand that it had been Dad’s own train set from when he was a boy. I never found out when he’d brought it from my grandmother’s place.
I might have gotten more use out of it if it had actually been in running order, but it wasn’t. When I put it on the rails and applied a little voltage from the 1033 transformer, it would hum ominously and perhaps spark a little, but it never moved at all. So I just put it and its passenger cars on a couple of lengths of Marx 027 track on my layout and pretended it was a siding.
At some point, Dad removed the 252’s trim parts, on the grounds that such a small kid as I might pull them off and swallow them. In later years, even he admitted that this had been a rather stupid move. In the first place, even at my youngest, I’d never shown any interest in eating toy-train hardware. And in the second place, he "pu
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