Thanks for the info

Hello all
             Long story short my FIL has a lot of pre and post war Lionel trains, tracks, controllers etc...I'm going up this weekend to start taking stock of the items and to photograph them. The end game is to sell them in the simplest manner. What is the best way to determine the value of this trains etc...?

Thanks

I agree with what Train Larry said, but one thing you can do is take a straight piece of track and put it on your work bench. Run your 736 back and forth to see if it runs correctly. Put the same amount of cars behind it. The point to this is to see if your problem is your engine or your track. Problems with engines can a lot of time be solved by taking an exacto knife blade and "VERY CAREFULLY" clean out the garbage in the slots between the 3 sections of your armature facing. Take your brush plate off and clean it good with carborater cleaner, replace the 2 brushes and, lube the armature shaft slightly where it goes through the brush plate and re-assemble. In most cases you will see a big difference in how your engine runs.  Barry

Hey guys, My son  asked for a few model trains. He's been doing well in school, and I agreed to buy him a few train sets.

I am not familiar with the hobby and did not know how expensive it can get. He asked for a blue comet, an apple green something or other, or a great northern train (an orange and green combination). When looking these trains up I realized they are Lionel tinplate trains made by MTH. Also, I realized buying the blue comet with the passenger cars would be more than 2k, which does not include input controls and the train tracks.

Are there high quality options of these sets that are less expensive? Does the blue comet model come in a set that includes the passenger cars and the tracks? Because even if I were to spend 2500 on the locomotive and the passenger cars, then I would be somewhat stuck on the tracks and the controller to get him.

Any help or any direction at all, would be a hugely appreciated!!

Hello all! I am writing in regards to my Lionel #8403 Chessie System steam locomotive. It is the blue engine with tender. I have several questions. 1: When were these originally sold? The underside of the boiler says Copyright 1983, is this the year production began? 2: Is this considered an MPC era production? 3: The main reason for writing, the smoke unit in this engine was completely melted out and I could not get a part number off of it. I bought a similar looking unit off ebay, brand new, but this one had an electrical contact that opened and closed with the air piston. The original did not. Now, my issue is that there just isn't much smoke coming out of the unit. If you put the loco in neutral, and full power the throttle, then put the loco in motion, there are 3-4 good puffs of smoke. It seems that the amount of power to the smoke unit is not enough to produce good smoke while running slow enough to not derail. Do smoke units, even though they look the same, have different power requirements? I'm only getting very faint whisps of smoke while in motion. I am using Lionel smoke fluid.

Also, does anyone know what the part number would be for this engine? I want to find exploded diagrams, but no where have I looked have I been able to look up diagrams using the engine number, 8403.


 Thanks for all your help!
  C.J.