Okay, okay already! I know your heads are about to explode! Nobody seriously cares about the collectibility of MTH trains, do they? Maybe Tony Lash who owns two of everything MTH and Lionel have ever made since 1980 does, but few if any of the rest of us do. Nonetheless, I, the great bearish one, am suddenly intrigued. If you're a collector-head, please read on, I need your input.
So here's the mystery: At a Colorado Toy Train Group (CTTG) auction last month, I bought a Premier El Capitan set, plus a two-car add-on set, a 60' sleeper and diner two pack, that adds to the four cars in the single-boxed El Cap set for a beautiful 6-car streamliner consist. That add-on two-pack set was stock numbered 20-6122. The sleeper is named "Laguna" and the diner, "5122". The cars have aluminum car bodies with fluted sides, red and gold "war bonnet" trim strips above the windows carrying "Santa Fe" in gold on a gloss red background, mirror-finished car tops, and traditional post war style black and white passenger silhouette window insert strips. So far, so good.
At York last week, I bought another two-car El Capitan add-on set with stock number, 20-6121. There is a piece of mysterious white tape on the box end-flap, about 3" by 1", right next to the lithographed stock number, 20-6121 and hand-lettered in red felt marker, "Production Sample 9/8/97" Inside the box are two 60 scale-foot cars with the same name/number as the ones in the 20-6122 set! In other words, same sleeper name and diner number, but different MTH set stock number!
I logged onto MTH's railking.com site and used the product locator tool to search under both sets' stock numbers to see what the strange case of different stock numbers for the same car sets could be all about. The result confounded me. According to MTH's system, the 20-6121 set consists of sleeper "Polacca" and diner, "1475"! So why did my box labeled 20-6121 contain "Laguna" and "5122" instead? Did someone at Trainworld where I bought the set innocently mix up cars that had been on display and put them into the wrong boxes? Did MTH's "Production Sample" set uniquely not include the correctly designated "Polacca" and "1475", or perhaps the entire run of both 20-6121 and 20-6122 sets contained all the same named and numbered cars, "Laguna" and "5122" with the possibility that "Polacca" and "1475" were never produced for some logical industrial or marketing reason. Do any of you have the 20-6121 set with the cars that MTH's records say should be in that set, Polacca and 1475?
Hopefully some of you collector-oriented brains out there, can explain to me why I have a duplicated set of cars with set stock numbers that are different. Did I inadvertently buy a priceless collectible masterpiece, "Production Sample 9/8/97" with the wrong cars in it, or did someone at a train store just mix them up when they put display merchandise back into the boxes?
Where's Ed Boyle when we need him?
PerplexedBear
