This kind of steam locomotive, with two small wheels jutting out front, three big wheels driving the beast, and trailing one small wheel, is called a Pacific. I wish I could remember why. There is a locomotive known as an Atlantic that has two driving wheels in the middle, which isn’t really germane to the topic so I don’t know why I’ve mentioned it other than to clutter your mind with choo-choo trivia, as mine is.
A Pacific is a steam engine made to pull trains very fast. Locomotives with smaller wheels, say about fifty inches in diameter, are made to pull very heavy trains. Big wheels, like the sixty-nine inchers on this Pacific, pull the train farther down the track each time they roll over, so they were well-suited to pull passenger trains. I’m all about passenger trains.
How the LoCo Acquired Pacific 520
After spending the whole day, morning, noon and well into the evening, at an estate auction, we went home with and lamp, a potato digger and My Darling B scored a very pretty serving platter and matching gravy boat, but the most amazing find of the day, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating one iota here, was the model choo-choo kit I spotted the moment I walked in the door. I mean, just look at it! It’s complete! Every single one of the original parts is in there! And it even had a matching tender to go with it! OhmygodohmygodohmygodohmyGOD! My inner child wet himself when he saw this!
But finding is not the same as having when at an auction, a lesson I’d learned to my crushing disappointment more than once. This kit might sell for as little as fifty bucks to the luckiest buyer, who would probably then go ahead and post it for sale on e-bay, the ungrateful jerk. Or, it might go for as much as two-hundred bucks if someone thinks it’s worth a ton of money because it’s made of cast metal and might get him on Antique Road Show.
Sometimes it doesn’t even take a real bidder to launch the price into high orbit. I watched a nifty little drama as an auctioneer quickly ran the bid up between three people, only two of which, it turned out, were actually bidding. The third guy was looking at the auctioneer and nodding, true enough, but he was on his cell phone, saying yes over and over in response to the guy on the other end. Every time he said “yep,” or “uh-huh,” the price went up five bucks. Then, halfway through the bidding, he turned and walked away, still nodding and saying “yep,” the other two guys who were bidding against him watching slack-jawed.
Worse still, in the five minutes after I found what I was quickly beginning to think of as my choo-choo, three or four bozos pried the lid off the box and went rooting around in there, shoving parts this way and that while I stood by, seething white-hot anger at them, not only for not recognizing how many tiny little parts in the box could so easily get lost by doing that, but also for not realizing that was my damn choo-choo in there, dammit! Get your damn paws OFF it!
Ten more minutes of that and I knew I would be a nervous wreck. And it was going to be a lot longer than ten minutes, because there was a huge pile of junk to auction off. But then I saw a way to speed things along: The auctioneer held up some little nick-nack and said he had an opening bid of five dollars for it. Opening bid? Watching him, I noticed other bidders grabbing his sleeve, pointing at other little worthless bits of junk and telling him, Hey, I’ll give you five bucks for that. Ahhhh, so that’s how it works! When he came close enough I waved him over and offered him five bucks for the box full of model train junk.
“What’s this? Bowser?” he asked, prying open the box and rooting through the parts. A brand name is an alarm bell to collectors, so they like to shout it out to get the bidding going. “This is pretty old, isn’t it?” I told him you can still buy kits from Bowser but apparently my poker face wasn’t pokerish enough. He held it up to start the bidding hollering “Bowser! Bowser! Bowser!” so loudly I thought model train geeks would come running from the farthest corners of the planet.
But somehow my luck held. Almost nobody was interested. Maybe it was too early. One guy on the other side of the crowd bid a couple times, but he had either a low threshold for financial pain or a teeny tiny wallet, and I crushed him like the bug he was. I took this little gem home for only twenty bucks. Stole it, practically.
It’s a kit that requires a lot of attention, as you can see. It comes in about a million tiny little parts, and a lot of those parts have to be prepared before you can even begin to put them together. For instance, the body of the boiler is a single piece of cast metal, but the process of molding it leaves a seam right down the middle, a sharp edge where the molds didn’t quite match up.
Pacific 520 in the Paint Shop
It’s coming along, in fits and starts, but it’s coming along.
The loco’s received three coats of maroon paint at this point. It looks a lot more like chocolate brown, though, doesn’t it? That’s okay, I like chocolate, too. Chocolate or maroon, whatever, is the livery of the Lost Continent Railway, which never existed but, maybe someday, will have a terminal and a servicing yard and a circle of track in our basement. Maybe.
The sides of the tender will eventually receive a coat of maroon, too. The top of the tender, and the locomotive smokebox (the front end), will be black. The firebox will remain silver. They usually were a sooty silverish color.
I was going to finish the locomotive before I started to put the tender together, but sharp eyes in the crowd will notice that the main connecting rod isn’t bolted to the driving wheels, and that the trailing wheel under the cab seems a little wonky. I’ve found that a few screws critical to construction are missing from the kit, and I wanted to find out if I would have to order any more parts. I couldn’t just sit around waiting, though, so I started building the tender this week, and whenever my eyes got tired from squinting at teensy-tiny parts, I would get out a brush and paint for a while.