As I mentioned in my last post I'd taken up with collecting Marx
trains and I managed to collect quite a few of them too; - actually it
was a huge amount, - an embarasingly huge amount (blush).
Well it was fun for a while playing trains the Yankee way, but
eventually I came to realise that my heart really wasn't in it.
Basically to cut a very long story short I've sold off all the Marx,
Lionel, Ives, American Flyer etc etc I'd managed to hoard away and now
I'm back with my beloved Hornby trains again. Fortunately I hadn't
been silly enough to get rid of my small Hornby collection and it was
like Christmas all over again when I took them out of the storage
boxes where I'd carefully packed them away.
I was overjoyed when a friend told me that he wanted to quit all his
Hornby trains in favour of collecting Lionel. I ratted around in all
my storage boxes and gathered everything I could find that had
'Lionel' written on it and much swapping of toy trains was undertaken
between us with the final result that both of us ended up being very
pleased with our newly aquired trains and rolling stock.
I've actually decided that the best way to avoid the expense involved
in purchasing locomotives is to build replicas from galvanised steel
and tinplate. I was fortunate to come across a body someone had built
after the style of a Hornby No:1 4-4-4 tank engine. It had a few
faults, but it was very soundly constructed in a heavier gauge sheet
steel than the original Hornby locos and it has proved to be a very
sound basis on which to create a nice large tank engine for my new
layout. I will confess to making the rebuild somewhat S.E.C.R. like,
but I'm happy with how it's all coming together.
The mech is one of the later Lionel DC four coupled items that use a
can motor instead of all the heavy AC gubbins, but I did replace the
original cast alloy wheels with a set of cast iron wheels rescued from
the sad remains of an old 1950s Lionel 'Scout'. These DC mechs are
very free running mechs and are a lot less trouble to run as they
don't need hideous amounts of amps like the AC mechs and reversing is
soooooo simple (I hate 'E' units).

Anne.