Sometimes a collector can have a great deal of fun, not so much by acquiring a vast number of trains, as by playing with the ones he already has. The eight-wheel automatic coupler cars made by the Louis Marx Comany just prior to World War Two are a case in point. These six-inch tinplte cars have pleasing proportions and their styling and lithography give them a classic thirties look.
Possibly the high manufacturing cost of the scissor coupler plus the onslaught of World War Two prevented the company from realizing the full potential of these cars, for Marx made only (arguably) eighteen to twenty different outline types, although the color and road name variations of some of the outlines seem endless to collectors.
When I first began collecting prewar
Marx, I noticed that the 550B wrecker crane was the only car with a
working hook and crank and it seemed to need a companion piece,
Accordingly, when I acquired a number of empty frames with no upper
bodies, I built a metal shovel car to compliment the wrecker.
Re-cycling a junked Marx engine cab seemed right in line with what
the Marx Company itself liked to do with already- made extra parts,
and the original thirties crane looks right at home now with its new
working partner.
Every freight consist pulled by a prewar Canadian Pacific-style engine ended with an ordinary 556 caboose - a solid, respectable car, to be sure - but sometimes a little variety heartens the soul. Taking another empty frame, I came up with a fifty-window lighted bay window caboose with working doors. The bay window is not an add-on; each side of the caboose is one single stamped -out piece, bay window and all. As far as its compatibility with Marx's classic 556, this cream-colored car with its red roof and cupola seems to fit in fine.
In both instances I continued to be struck by the appealing results one could achieve with a little imagination and a lot of work using the eight-wheel, one-way frames. They seem to have a particular suitability to more complex designs - designs which carry on and even enhance the original classic thirties look
I also became aware of a number of cars Marx could and maybe should have made but never did: a tanker for the Army set, an observation car for the eight-name wine colored Canadian Pacific passenger set, a green tender for the green Commodore Vanderbilt engine. None of these cars would have had one-way coupler frames, but being involved with designing, cutting, bending , and painting metal for Marx-type cars directed my attention to the whole array of that company's tinplate line.
In building the bay window caboose I tried to carry on the well-known Marx tradition of using re-cycled lithography, a process which has produced many a surprise scene inside a great number of Marx cars. Accordingly, on an interior side of the caboose, I painted Olive Oyl holding a blue mercury engine and being chaced by Bluto, who claimed he'd spotted it first (see Classic Toy Trains magazine, March, 1993). This idea worked so well that from it sprang the idea of drawing and painting Sunday Funnies newspaper characters from the same time period (late thirties) and populating an entire layout with them. The result, some of which are shown here, have been both fun and satisfying.
The idea of placing a hidden surprise figure in each car continued to be appealing. On the next car I built - the blue and yellow tool car - I placed, inside the forward chest itself, a railroad security guard named Barlowe. On the opposite side I placed a gentleman of slender means named Bi ngo. If one lifts either lid, Barlowe or Bingo will pop up automatically. To me, th ere is great satisfaction in knowing that Barlowe and Bingo are separated by a double wall of carbon steel and even should Barlowe chase Bingo for the next thousand years or beyond, Barlowe will never catch him.
Regarding the building of the cars themselves, I first built each
car from thin cardstock until the proportions looked right,, then
unfolded the card stock and traced its outlines onto a sheet of flat
carbon steel. I used a slightly heavier gauge steel than Marx
used..All windows, door openings, and tab and slots were cut prior to
bending. No soldering was used anywhere - the cars are built the way
the Marx Company would have built them . Bending was done in a
variety of ways: where rounded forms were desired, male and female
oak dies were hand cut. The pressure necessary to crisply bend heavy
sheet steel was hard on these wooden dies. Very few survive.
Humorous moments sometimes occurred. The bay window section of the red and cream caboose was particularly hard to pressure bend. After a number of attempts involving a book press failed, I used the downward motion of a service station's hydraulic lift. I can still see the incredulous expression on the burley mechanic's face as he stared at me holding my little pieces of tin and my little wooden blocks. "That there's for a toy train?" he repeated over and over. "A TOY TRAIN?"
The red and yellow shovel car took five weeks to complete. The bay window caboose required eight weeks. The blue and yellow tool car, with nine removable steel tools, two hidden riders, a lighted cab, doors which open and close, and a complex color scheme, required three months. Fully half of this time, in all three cases, was drying time for the paint.
The cartoon characters I selected and drew were/are favorites of mine since childhood. Most should be readily recognizable. My then-fourteen year old son did not recognize the Asp (from Orphan Annie) although he knew who Punjab was, and regrettably, he did not recognize Rudolph Dirk's classic Katzenjammer Kids, one of the oldest strips in existence (1897), credited with being the first to use talk balloons, and still, to my mind, one of the funniest strips of all time. All the rest, from Popeye to Little Orphan Annie he recognized immediately.
A good deal of careful research was devoted to ensure that these figures were drawn in the original thirties style and that their dialogue and clothes were consistent with the originals found in The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (Blackbeard and Martin, Smithsonian Press, Washington, 1977). The twenty cartoon characters and the station house shown here required about two and one-half weeks to draw and paint. I used colored inks and watercolors preceded by india ink on paper and cardstock. I freely acknowledge that I like the cartoon characters and trains equally well and feel that the two complement each other nicely. I humbly salute the gentlemen of yesteryear who created both cartoons and trains - they were pioneers and artists all.
I hope you have enjoyed my atempt at classic thirties-style fun, variety, and humor in an increasingly electronic world. God bless you all, happy collecting, and I'll see you in the funny papers.
If you have questions or would like further information, email Lee Reynolds.
