COMING TO THE READY TRACK. Too much grippe, too many lower back pains, too many drab overcast days, stacks of bluebooks, stacks of homeworks add up to little time for the railroad and little energy to work on it. But relief is on the way, and look what K-Line Trains are doing in O Scale.

Pay no attention to that out-of-scale track.

North American railroads didn't have many tank engines, as the distances between water tanks tended to exceed the capacity of the tanks. This locomotive, employed in commuter train service on the Riverside line of the Boston and Albany (now a branch of the Green Line streetcar network), is the guts of a J-1 Hudson in a package capable of running around on a short tail track, and offering the crew a clear view when running bunker first.

In British nomenclature, this engine would be classed 8P (it's too big for the British loading gauge, despite that short stack and those flat domes.)