PLUG COMPATIBILITY. In my working life, I have shifted data from printed pages to punch cards to magnetic tape to 5 1/4" floppy disks to 3 1/2" semi-floppy disks, and earlier this semester I prepared one of the latter with some data for a graduate assistant whose computer didn't have a floppy drive. As I understand it, information exchange uses a memory stick, which sounds somewhere between erotic and gross. (Put your memory stick in my USB slot?!)

Now consider this year's Cold Spring Shops virtual Christmas card. Those are Lionel 252 and Lionel 253 manual reverse electric locomotives leading two different early period 603 Pullmans and an early period 604 observation car. (Lionel later used the numbers 603 and 604 on somewhat more ornate and slightly larger cars.)


The track is a 1950s vintage O-27 circle (same eight segments to a full circle) and the locomotives have series-wound universal motors that will run on battery power, juice from a dynamo hooked up to your farm's windmill, or stepped down house current, here by a Lionel Type W tap-changer transformer wired to feed 11-17 volts to the track in 1 volt steps. (The transformer also has a 17-22 setting, but that's a good way to send the trains to the floor.) The motors produce a distinctive aroma of ozone and hot 3-in-1 oil that ought to be part of everybody's Christmas.

But we were talking about plug compatibility. I could take this train to the layout of a contemporary Hi-Railer with the O-72 broad gauge track and the low-profile third rail, and it would run. For that matter, somebody could bring over the Lands' End Flyer or the O-27 Polar Express (Amazon reviews) or the Thomas, Annie, and Clarabel set and they'd respond to the Type W and stay on the track. Play value in eighty year old toys.

Some of the equipment is unusual. The orange 252 with terra-cotta frame and the orange 603 with black roof are well-documented. The 253 and the bright orange 603 and 604 appear to be Lionel repaints of green cars, using the 1930s apple green for trim (and an attempt at streamstyling?) But I have seen no documentation of these cars in the collectors' books.