After watching eBay for over a year for one of these in good condition at a reasonable price, I finally lucked out.
I took a new approach to bidding on this one. My old approach was the way eBay recommends, which is to determine the most you’re willing to pay, then bid that amount, and let their automatic bidding handle the rest. But that method favors sellers and eBay, not buyers (It jacks up the price as bidders fight all week long.). This time, I determined early on that I was willing to pay no more than about $70. But I didn’t bid on it until five seconds before the auction ended. I also didn’t add it to my Watch List. Auctions that have more bids and people watching tend to get more views, and potentially more bids, and I didn’t want to encourage that. The bidding gradually reached $28 over the week, and after I won, I could see that two others placed bids in the last eight seconds, but at $34.00 and $36.99, they were too low to beat my $72.37 max bid, and they didn’t have enough time to bid again, so I won it for $37.99. Score!
The engine and tender are in like-new condition, possibly never run, and it has the original box with minor wear. I plan to replace the horn hook coupler with a Kadee knuckle coupler soon, and will someday use this model to practice some painting and weathering. The firebox and smokebox on the prototype were often painted in a graphite color, so I might do that. I don’t think I’ll strip, paint, and re-do lettering like I’m going to do on the Model Power Shifter, but I’d like to paint some details, possibly tone down its shine with dullcote, and do some weathering. It’d be nice if I could tone down the bright and shiny wheels, but I’m not sure what my options are there. I’ll look into that further some day. The lens on the headlight sticks out pretty far from the end of the molded plastic fixture, so I’d like to find a way to replace the lens with something more realistic.
All of the tender wheels are metal with power pickups for the directional backup light, so that would be one modification out of the way if I ever wanted to convert it to DCC down the line. I knew from memory that the backup light was directional, but I had no recollection of the engine’s headlight being directional, too. Ironically, even though it has a functioning backup light, the pilot has a dummy coupler, so you couldn’t pull a train backwards anyhow.
