Nice video. In addition to the Hiawatha, it shows off some interesting features of your layout.
The Lionel Hiawatha set is a very attractive train with a mixture of good and not-so-good features. On the positive side are the striking first impression it makes, the generally excellent operating characteristics, and the clamshell doors in the front that open, like the prototype, to show the smokebox front. The interiors also are very attractive; I'll leave it to the rivet counters to examine prototype photos and drawings and determine how accurate they are. And, the Hiawatha was the first Lionel locomotive I ever owned that smoked decently!
On the not-so-great side: The colors are much too deep and saturated in comparison with the prototype. For some reason, Lionel chose to model 4-4-2 #3 together with a set of 1939 cars. The Milwaukee Road did build two sets of cars with #3 and #4. These cars did not have the maroon stripe, but they had square windows rather than the arched windows of the first two trainsets. I would have preferred that Lionel modeled these cars rather than the later ones, which were built to go with the streamlined 4-6-4 Baltics. The combination as Lionel offers it is not incorrect; the railroad did run trains this way. The railroad added a maroon semicircle on the tender to carry the maroon stripe onto the tender. (See photo below.) Lionel should have painted this semicircle on their tender to make the combination more prototypical. I plan to do that on mine but I have not yet found the time due to other priorities.
Another problem is the horn. When the Lionel Hiawatha came out, there were a lot of complaints that it had an air horn rather than a whistle. In fact, the Hiawathas had both a horn and a whistle; the horn was generally used at high speed and the whistle for yard movements. However, Lionel used a two-chime horn sound. Recordings of the correct Leslie Tyfon single-chime horn are easy to find; this was just sloppiness on Lionel's part. Moreover, Lionel had the technology at the time to do a switchable horn and whistle; the Daylight from a year or two earlier had a dual setup.
Finally, the Hiawatha's short wheelbase gives it a tendency to "hunt" from side to side at high speed. This really isn't Lionel's fault; standard 0 gauge wheel spacing is a sloppy fit on the track and any short-wheelbase engine is probably going to hunt at 100 scale mph.
Apart from the high-speed wobble, my Hiawatha has been excellent in operation.
Seeing the video brought back memories of an incident when I was running the Hiawatha at our toy train museum. The train was blasting along at about 80 smph when a switch flipped under the baggage car, switching the back half of the baggage car and the rest of the train onto a parallel track. The train tootled happily along on two tracks, until the baggage car encountered a bridge abutment between the tracks. Fortunately there was no damage, and we all had a good laugh and put the train back where it belonged. We spiked the switch and the track gang replaced the switch machine a couple of days later.
Photo of 4-4-2 and ribbed cars, showing semicircle on the tender to terminate the stripe.
