It has been 44 years, since that fateful day and the same amount of time for me to finally figure out which train set met it's fate as a result of my sticky, icky, childhood hands...
It was the Lionel 463W...
http://www.postwarlionel.com/463.html
And this is it's story...
My drunk Uncle gave or sold my dad his son's Lionel train set, and took it home to me.
Being a silly kid who was more used to the plastic of the 1960s vintage Sears Lionel train sets, I was very intimidated by the large, heavy, and older set, complete with it's smoke smoke pellets (omg they look like pills...I might eat them! SO, lump them into the same category as "Ralphie" shooting his eye out with a BB Gun, suffocating in deep snow drifts, and model train trestles plunging every locomotive to its doom!), and scary looking transformer with big plastic orange and black handles.
Yeah I know...I must have been a loony kid.
Sooooo, the "first" thing that happened was, my father told me to "wait"....and I didnt...I grabbed the locomotive out of the box and took one step....I was totally unprepared for how heavy it was...and I dropped it! "Ooooooohhhhhh fudge......", only just like Ralphie, I didnt say "fudge" I said the big kahuna!
That resulted in a short but intense tirade from my usually very calm and pleasant father, who heaped a string of profanity so heavy upon my head, that the words are still floating above Lake Ronkonkoma Long Island NY.
Thus, as I sat there on a chair forbidden to touch any trains, i watched my dad pick up the front boiler plate that fell off, and the locomotive off the floor.
After a joyous realization that nothing was broke, on the track they went.
I was totally unprepared for a true postwar 1945 growler of a vintage Lionel motor, and cupped my wimpy hands over my ears, then proceeded to scream "sparks!" "sparks!", as the locomotive produced a large quantity of sparks from it's dirty rollers(?)
In an attempt to shift the attention away from my dropping of the locomotive and the potential of the sparks to be a result of my carelessness, over to my drunk Uncle who was not present to defend himself, by declaring it was HIS FAULT.
"That drunk knows nothing about Lionel Trains! He "sabatugied" it!", I shouted in my NY drawl.
My father looked at me with a skeptical frown...I then proceeded to "Plan B" and declared "Well since it is obviously not working right and broken, can I take it outside and play with it in REAL DIRT like Lionel does in their show room pictures"?
Note: For some odd reason, I had concluded in my 7 year old mind that the realistic scenery I saw in the Lionel Showroom layout pictured in the lionel owners manual could only be REAL DIRT.
So before, my father could say no, and was distracted by my mother, I ran outside with just the freight cars.
In my glee of finally having a REAL layout with REAL dirt just like Lionel, I failed to see my father approach.
A verbal assault and hard spanking later, I helped my dad clean the freight cars off, as my mother pronounced DOOM upon the poor trainset.
"Take that train set back to that drunk brother-in-law and tell him to sell it to feed his family, instead of drinking his money away!"
Thus, it came to be...that either my father returned it to him, or gave it to one of my cousins...I never found out...as it was a subject not to be brought up....as the shame and guilt of dropping that locomotive and playing with the freight cars in the dirt was to haunt me for years.
Yet...somehow...the wooden barrels from its gondola car survive to this day, as does the transformer.
Unfortunately, the power cord is all rotted...but those wooden barrels live on in the boxes containing my 2 Lionel Sears Sets my Dad bought me the previous year.
The end...and closure...