Saturday, September 26, 2026
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Still Running / Odds and ends

Original boxes, original smoke pellets

A postwar Lionel set with its original boxes, led by a 2026 steam engine of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Not the one in the story.
A postwar Lionel set with its original boxes, led by a 2026 steam engine of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Not the one in the story. Photo: JJ W, CC BY-SA 2.0. The real one is in the original post.

Out it comes every Christmas season: the Lionel set Grandpa bought in 1952, run these days by a third generation. Every original box made it, and so did the bottle of smoke pellets, with a few of the little white pellets left inside. On sets from those years you drop a pellet down the stack onto a small heater, and the engine puffs smoke as it runs.

Retold from a post on r/BuyItForLife. Read the original

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