How about Madison Hardware packaging the 746 N&W steamer with four Canadian Pacific cars (3 domes and the observation car) as a set in the original boxes, including the CP boxes? The cars even had the correct car numbers on the silhouette window strips.
I purchased the above set along with a bunch of postwar engines (2240 Wabash AB, 2329 Virginian rectifier, and others). I'd met the seller, a TCA charter member, at a train show in Florida; I was in the area on a business trip from Chicago. We hit it off and I bought a car or two from him. He told me what he had at his home and that he'd been planning on selling it all. We made arrangements for me to visit him for a week-end which I did; saw what he had and purchased a fair amount of it. He later visited his son's family in the Chicago area that Christmas and we all got together for dinner. A real gentleman; sadly, he died a year or so afterwards.
Back to the set. The gentleman had been purchasing from MH for years and all of his trains were mint. The set had the 746 in OB. The cars were an altogether different story. MH had sent them to a painter/modeler shot the 746 would be more marketable if the CP aluminum cars were painted Pullman green and the CP tape, top and bottom, was removed. Those cars were butt ugly.
The set was broken up. I kept the 746 long enough for my brother to see it, and he reminded me how I had gotten all of childhood trains. On his next b'day he got the 746. As for the cars, I thought about removing the paint and tracking down some new CP tape to recreate the cars to what they had been. I never could become comfortable with undertaking the paint removal, so I sold the cars and boxes to a buddy who did so. Whether he found NOS tapes or used repros I don't know. He was a very active buyer/seller of postwar Lionel and he sold the cars shortly after he reworked them.
Although I did not buy the 746 and cars from MH, I found the story the gentlemen told me to be very credible based on the boxes and window strips, and the fact that I had heard that the CP set was a flop at the time it was released by Lionel. Sorry, I didn't take any pictures of the set.
Carl
