Originally Posted by John Clifford:
While looking at ebay I stumbled across an MTH repro of an Ives
Olympian set who's passenger cars looked identical to my American Flyer President Special passenger cars but in different colors. To further confuse me I have an MTH repro Ives
Olympian set whose passenger cars are completely different but these are Ives passenger cars and not American Flyer cars. So are either of these a figment of MTH's imagination, or were the Olympian sets made both ways?
Thanks for any help.
John.
John,
As you can see from the link to the liveauctioneers, Sirus Varney made a reproduction of the Ives Olympian sets, which were based on the American Flyer passenger car bodies but used Ives trucks and couplers. Using these same dies, RichArt later produced their own reproduction Ives Olympian set. In addition, with some new tooling, RichArt created three new passenger car bodies based on the AF passenger car bodies including: a baggage car (4 baggage doors but no small windows), an REA car (4 baggage doors with small windows on one end of the car), and a RPO car (4 baggage doors with small windows on both ends of the car).
In addition to the three unique body styles, RichArt also applied some unique paint schemes and unique brass plates to some of their Ives passenger sets. I have a complete eleven car set of these unique RichArt cars, which are painted in Milwaukee's classic tri-color orange/black/maroon paint scheme. Each of these cars has a RichArt unique "THE MILWAUKEE ROAD" or "RAILWAY EXPRESS AGENCY" brass plate installed above the small windows rather than the standard Ives Railway Lines plate. In addition, RichArt installed unique car name (all different) and car number (all different) plates below the windows in place of the standard Ives plates. I normally run these cars behind one or both of my RichArt BiPolar Cascade engines, one of which is painted in Milwaukee's tri-color paint scheme while the other is painted in the original Brooks-Stevens-designed Olympian Hiawatha paint scheme.
I also have a unique seven car set of these RichArt passenger cars, which are idential to their reproduction Ives orange/black Olympian cars but have "THE MILWAUKEE ROAD" brass plate above the windows instead of the standare Ives plates. Dick Mayer made these for me to go with the unique CHIPPEWA 1134 Ives locomotive, which he custom painted (and signed) for me based on photos of The Milwaukee Road's Chippewa locomotive that I sent to him.
In November I will be bringing both of the above sets to Milwaukee where I will be running them on the SGMA layout at Trainfest! See you there!
