ON THE RIGHT TRACK
by Anita Rafael
America’s romance with railroading began in the 1840s with a jaw-dropping awe for the smoke and steam belching Iron Horse and it lives on among collectors of electric toy trains and model railroads.
His father had to buy him more than one toy train before the railroad bug bit Newporter Brian Pelletier. He ruined his first Lionel locomotives trying to chug the die-cast cars through the mud in the yard. He swapped his second railroad, a set of American Flyers, for some larger German-made LGB scale cars. He buried those in the mud, too. When he was a little older, his father bought him his fourth set – a Lionel O-scale work train that he spent hours building into a detailed model railroad laid out on a 4 by 8 sheet of plywood in the dining room. It is a sweet nostalgia for those boyhood moments, he believes, that make old trains one of America’s most popular collectibles. Fifty years later, he is still buying train sets.
“The toy train thing,” as Pelletier calls it, “appeals on so many levels whether you’re a child or an adult. First, it’s fun to play with the mechanical parts and pieces. There’s the historical interest, and there are all the creative projects. I remember making paper mache mountains and tunnels out of soggy strips of the Newport Daily News, and assembling bridges and highways for the train to go over and under.” Every layout had to have a Main Street, he recalls, lined with Plasticville buildings and houses.
A friend of Pelletier’s, Tom Gunzelman of Portsmouth, not only recalls the three Lionel train sets he had as a kid, he still owns every car. “I just saved it all,” he says, “because I had a big layout in my basement that I worked on for years. It was an L-shape made of two sheets of plywood.” Today, Gunzelman, a retired Naval Underwater Systems Center mechanical engineer, is at the controls of a nearly 800-square-foot model railroad with nearly 400 individual circuits on which he runs 8 separate O-scale trains. He crossed the line, or the tracks so to speak, from having a casual interest in his boyhood pastime to becoming a serious collector when he was in his 40s. For the last 20 years, he has been buying both old and new cars and sometimes couples a 1950s Union Pacific tanker or Santa Fe boxcar to his just-bought locomotives for a trip around the tracks. When he shops for vintage trains, he is on the lookout for rare factory prototypes of cars that may not have been listed in the original manufacturers’ catalogs.
Both Gunzelman and Pelletier belong to the Train Collectors Association, a national organization with local and regional chapters that provide members with a forum to exchange information, buy and sell trains and accessories and hang together for railroad talk. With no false modesty, the website of the T.C.A, headquartered in Strasburg, Pennsylvania, claims that it is one of the “largest and most prestigious collecting societies in the world.”
“It’s mostly men,” says Pelletier. “Very few women. Little boys had their trains, and little girls, at least back then, played with dolls.” (Not all the boys were so little. Crooner Frank Sinatra, for example, was all grown up when he had separate building on his Palm Springs estate for his model railroad layout.) Novice collectors should resist the impulse to buy handcrafted railroad cars because the value of a one-of-a-kind train is purely subjective. In other words, what one connoisseur may see as priceless workmanship in an artistically painted caboose might be merely a handyman’s project to another train buff. To start building a classic model railroad, beginners might want to look for Lionel sets made before 1970. Why is that vintage important? Because many aficionados say that in 1969 the era of the "real" Lionel trains abruptly ended.
HO scale trains (1:87) and N scale models (1:160 ) make up about 90% of all toy railroading activity. A major advantage of N scale is the small amount of space needed to set up en entire a railroad system – you need twice as much room to build an equivalent HO layout. O trains (1:48) are sturdy enough for indoor layouts that will be handled by children. Other popular scales include: Z-1:220 (very miniature); OO-1:76; S-1:64; Standard-1:26.59; and G-1:24. The term "gauge" when used correctly refers to the distance between the rails of the track, not the size of the cars themselves.
Joshua Lionel Cowen and Harry C. Grant founded the Lionel Corporation in 1900 in New York City. Every Christmas morning by the early 1950s there were literally millions of orange and blue Lionel boxes being opened by excited little boys and their happy Dads. By that time, Lionel had become the largest toy company in the world, but they sold their product dies and the brand name to General Mills in 1969. General Mills changed the designs and manufacturing dramatically, introducing stamped steel and plastic parts into the formerly all-metal trains. In subsequent years, the brand was resold several times, and today, production is outsourced to Korea and China.
Shop persistently, and you will find postwar-era electric model railroads in every price range from a few dollars for individual cars to thousands for complete sets. However, getting one with all the instructions for operation and maintenance is not so easy. Try contacting other rail fans for copies of these important manuals, even if you are not planning to power up the trains.
The best thing to do with model trains is to store them in a cool, non-humid environment (to avoid melting and rust) and to keep them dust–free. Never store your collection in newspaper because the chemicals in the ink and the paper can stain the finish. Plastic wrap, or anything with a petroleum-base, can leave wrinkled impressions on the painted parts of old trains.
If you already have a collection, or discovered one in an attic and are wondering what it is worth, model railroad clubs can help you find resources where you get an estimate of its value. The one thing no appraiser will ever be able to put a price tag on, however, are those precious memories of the hours spent watching a long line of Pullmans loop the track. No timetables, no distractions, and on certain winter days – no school.
“I remember the big snow storms of the 1950s when I stayed indoors,” Pelletier says, “and played with my trains all day on the dining room table. I had a Lionel S-2 steam locomotive, a transformer car, a crane car and a work caboose.” Voicing the innermost feelings of countless collectors like himself, he glances across the table and says, “I wish I had those now.”
