Oddball Catalog Illustrations

Interesting. Didn't know the saw mill was originally considered with yard lights. I believe Lionel's HO track cleaning car bears a strong resemblance to the preproduction O model. 

Thanks for sharing. 

I love these kinds of things, about the reality versus what was promoted in the catalogs and such. In some ways, it wasn't much different than today, where in this BTO world products that were supposed to be produced either aren't, or the production model ends up being different than the original offering on the website and so forth. Catalogs often showed cars with color schemes or road names that didn't end up produced, features on operating cars mysteriously changed (in part because they found trying to make a reliably operating car the way it was promoted was impossible), and so forth. I saw a catalog of the Lionel Burro Crane showing it pulling a string of about 10 cars, anyone who has had one knows they couldn't pull more than a couple. 

Here's an ad from 1950 promoting the new O27 passenger set:

Pay particular interest to the "Alco's."

Rusty

Not an illustration, but a photo from the 1995 Lionel catalog.  The Goodyear ACF hopper behind the Rio Grande diesel and the Union Pacific gantry crane were never listed in any modern era catalog and were never made.