Having fixed up the cattle car, my Kalamazoo boxcar turned up ($25 - someone else bid against me,) and I won a Kalamazoo 4-4-0 ($55) to pull my little Civil War train.
This 4-4-0#1 (red) turned out to be a disaster. It didn’t run, and even after taking the motor apart, it still didn’t work. [Very nice high-class 7-pole motor, btw.] I think the windings are shorting or broken. So I went looking for another, which I found in an auction where it wasn’t labelled ‘g scale’, just ‘HLW’, and it was missing the front truck ($57.) The red wheels on the old 4-4-0#1 turned black, I swapped bell, and a few other bits, and here it is on the plinth that came with the $5 cattle car.
The Hartland 4-4-0 uses the same molds as they came from taking over Kalamazoo, but it’s a much nicer model. See-thru wheels, and metal wheels on the tender with pickups on 2 axles.
The Civil War train was started as someone on FB offered me a set of 4 LGB flatcars, with metal wheels and Kadee couplers, and including a load of a mortar and cannonballs on each one.
On the right is a Lionel flatcar (1/24th scale?) that also came in an auction. I looked at it, and decided it should join the train. A few cannons on carriages seemed appropriate - but they were $15+ in brass (ship model accessories.) Then I discovered there are astounding numbers of parts for building blocks - including cannons for $1.50, crates for $0.25 each, and ‘cannonballs’ for a few $ that are 8mm black slingshot ammunition!
The Kalamazoo boxcar is considerably smaller than the cattle car and most other boxcars, but in 1850 boxcars were small. The train is ‘standard gauge’ so the HLW 4-4-0 looks like a proper engine, not narrow gauge.
And here it is, running today in the freezing cold at Jerry’s SC&M.
And besides the plinth, the ($5) cattle car came with a cow/steer. You can see it peering out of the cattle car.
