Quote Originally Posted by Sandhouse View Post
Sandhouse, could you provide the catalog numbers of the Alcos and Passenger cars?

I guess this thread is hopelessly jacked to toy trains, but that's still intimately associated with Detroit department stores at Christmas. And I've always wondered about this train set. It doesn't appear in the published antiques guides.

It contained powered and dummy Santa Fe Alcos both numbered 218, the three "President" coaches Nos. 2521, 2522, and 2523 [[no numbers on the gold-foil labels, just the names McKinley, Harrison, and Garfield), a whopping KW transformer, and an oval of Super "O" track with a passing siding and a pair of powered switches. A weird combination for a department-store special, but I'm confident it came in a single brown box and wasn't thrown together by Sears personnel. I don't know if the 218 had a horn. I've got two pairs of these, one with and one without a horn, and don't know which came in the set.

I also don't remember which Christmas I got it. I want to say 1964 for various reasons, chiefly because I associate it in memory with the Sears Macomb Mall store, which Wikipedia tells me opened in 1964. But it could have been as early as 1962, which means my dad would have stopped at the Sears Gratiot store on the way home from Hudson's. That would have been a bit out of character, but he would have done it to pick this up for his kid, who always wanted a passenger train. Of course I yearned for the 4-car $100 sets at the back of the Lionel catalog, but these were out of the question. I believe this set cost less than that, which made it irresistible to my bargain-hunting dad, even if it did come from Sears instead of Hudson's 12th floor. I suspect he was steered to it by a family friend at the Sears Macomb Mall store. My guess is this set was put together of slow-moving items as the Super "O" line was about to be phased out, and the Lionel operation was collapsing in 1964.

Like a lot of kids from 1955-65, I distinctly remember the reflections of Christmas-tree lights on these fluted aluminum train cars. In fact, it's under the tree in the next room as I type this. Horn still works, too, if you tickle the adjusting screw just right with a narrow screwdriver. Beep! Beep!
I have seen this set before but without the KW. I hope you do not use the Super "O" track anymore, as the track is brutal on any piece of equipment with roller or slide pickups. You might try the archives of the Train Collectors Association, they may have more information on the set.