Here's yet another tinplate project from my early days in the hobby: my sole piece of Girard Joy Line. This was a Louis Marx set back when Mr. Marx himself was an employee of the Girard company, probably from the very early 1930s.
I had bought a large boxed lot of ratty trains on eBay for almost nothing (which happened to fit my budget as a broke college student) and was immensely pleased to find this uncommon Joy Line set at the very bottom. I dug up these "before" pictures from my archives so you can see that the whole set was in appalling condition. Many of the cars were badly rusted and the lithography was beyond hope of saving. The locomotive had all the boiler trim and motor components but was missing a wheel and the matching side rod.
I happened to have a busted up old Hafner locomotive and I managed to scavenge a wheel and drive rod from it and get them to fit on the Joy Line motor. I think I sourced the remaining missing wheels and axle from another rustbucket Marx car that was in the box.
It took an entire weekend but I dismantled the entire set tab by tab, ground off all of the rust and flaking paint and finally repainted and reassembled. I had a bench grinder at this point so I was able to get through all the rust and give everything a fresh coat of paint and oil.
Here's what the locomotive looks like today. Pretty sharp!
Here's a view of the Joy Line motor. You can see that I left some of the faded original paint on the bottom of the locomotive. Astonishingly, the original motor is intact and functioning-- all I did was add the one missing wheel and clean everything else. It has the original armature, commutator and pickup (those tiny brass pickups are often found broken). The back drive wheel is made of hard rubber which really helps the locomotive's operation.
Here are the passenger cars. I ended up painting the roofs red since I already had the aerosol can for the locomotive's frame. I have since discovered that Joy Line did make red-roofed cars, they are one of the rare and expensive variations that I will probably never find a real example of. Good thing I already made my own!
Check it out on the tinplate loop on my layout!
