Lionel Train Restoration | From Rust to Running

Taking toy trains from trash-worthy to train-worthy is often easier than you think. On this episode of Toy Train Tips and Tricks. And hello again, this is Mike. And I recently acquired this collection of filthy cars and a rather rusty and filthy twitcher. If nothing else, I was looking at this for some parts that I could salvage. But before I write these pieces off as junk box fodder, even pieces in such rough condition as this can often be made to run again. So I'm going to run this through the pieces and see what we can do to clean and resurrect these pieces. So follow along with me as we go through the process here. My first step is I'm going to work on cleaning these shells, including the locomotive here. So for the locomotive, I'm going to need to take this one screw off. There we go. All right, slide forward and up. Lots of rust. This should be cleanable. And yeah, this one has had a rough life. But we've got the reverse unit. It moves. I'll give it credit for that. The wiring seems to be intact. The brushes don't seem to be in too bad a shape. The gears, the wheels do turn. And this is one place where the nylon gears will be an advantage over the metal because they're less likely to be rusted in place. And this one, unlike a lot of 8770s, actually has regular rower pickups instead of the little nubs that some of them had. Coupler's broken off, but the remnants of the coupler is here. And that's very common on these basic switchers. So this one I'm going to wash just as is. That's with that. And I haven't decided the 6014 here. I don't think this is the original frame. Notice the bar-end trucks. I don't think any 6014s came with bar-end trucks. I may be wrong. I'll look it up. But in any case, this end of the shell, not only is it cracked here, but it's in pretty bad shape. So I may swap it for, speaking of junk box, this 6014 here, which needs to be repainted. But the only damage here looks like somebody dropped a soldering iron on the corner. But the rest of this shell is intact and they're easy to swap out. So I don't know if I'm going to try to resurrect this with the crack. I am going to go through the process of washing this and show you what I do with that. For this next part, I normally do at a sink. But for the sake of the video, I just have a container of lukewarm, slightly warmer than room temperature water with a little bit of liquid dish soap in here and a medium nylon brush. You could probably use a toothbrush. It'd probably work just as fine. Let's start here with the hopper car. You want to be careful around the lettering. You don't want to hit the lettering too hard because sometimes the dish soap can soften it up a bit. But as you can see, this is coming off pretty easily. All that grime that you just saw on there, it doesn't take much. All right, let's go inside. So these spots down here, I'm having trouble getting the brush down in there to get that dirt. So I'm actually going to take this over to the sink and I'm going to try to use the water pressure from the faucet to get down in there. And I'll be back in a minute. Okay, even the water pressure didn't get all of it. So now I'm going to get in here and try some cotton swabs and see if I keep it down in these corners. Looks like they put actual dirt in here as a load at one point or another. And then a good wipe with a cotton cloth. And that is a great improvement from where we started. All right, let's see what we can do with this boxcar. Same process. Get it into that roof wall. The dirt likes to hide in those crevices on the roof wall. Okay. All right, that's a good first round for the white. The white is a lot harder to clean than the other colors, but I'm going to let that dry and I may come back for another round with some other products. Now let's look at our switcher. Again, very gentle on the striping and on the lettering. A significant improvement already. All right, looks like a totally different locomotive, doesn't it? And all of that just from soap, water, and just a little bit of scrubbing with a brush. Okay, so this boxcar frame, there's a lot of rust on it, but it looks to me like it's mainly surface rust, not a lot of structural. So my first step with this is everybody's favorite, WD-40. And I'm just going to spray it down and wipe it with a cloth. See what that does. If there are some more serious rust spots, if there's stuff that really doesn't come off, then you move to the next step, which is evaporust. But I bet a lot of it will come off with this WD-40. So I'm just going to soak it down. There we go. And rub it down and see what happens. Okay, that's a significant improvement. Now, if this were a big time collectible car, I would probably come back, sand it down a little bit, hit it with evaporust, and maybe even repaint it. These 6014 cars are pretty inexpensive. And you know, and it shows a little bit of wear and tear from its former life here. So I think that's good enough to get it layout ready. So it's a much improved car from where it was. That's good for now. Now the locomotive I'm going to take differently. As far as the frame and such, the rust on that, I'll probably hit it with the WD-40. But first, I want to get in here with these electrical components. You don't want to use WD-40 on your electrical components because it is not a conductor. So instead, I'm going to hit some electrical contact cleaner in here and see what I can do to clean things up. And then I'm going to hit the test track and see if it will move. I like the CRC-226 for this. It says it's a lubricant, but as it says, it improves electrical properties. And it has a bit of a rust converter in it as well. So it will clean it, get the parts moving, and help convert some of those rusty spots and deoxidize them so that they will conduct electricity and help prevent further corrosion. So I'm spraying this down and I'm going to let it sit for a while, except spin that motor around, get it working in there. And yes, I will come back later and look at the brushes and lubricating the armature shaft. But for right now, I just want to get it moving and get this in there so these electrical parts are doing their thing. I'll come back in about 30 minutes, and we're going to put it on the test track and see what happens. OK, so let's see what we've got. Power and we've got nothing, nothing at all. OK, so I know I've got power to the track. I've got the voltmeter over here showing me I've got power to the track. So let's start checking the wires. All right, well, let's start poking around with the voltmeter and see if we can see where we go astray. OK, I've got power to the frame and I don't have power going to the hot. OK, let's move the unit and there's nothing going on there. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I should have a dead short right there. OK, so let's try to trace it down. All right. And I didn't realize my camera had stopped during this part. So I'm reshooting this full disclosure. So what I did, I checked all of the wiring connections and everything seemed to be connected fine, but it still just wasn't working right. So I concluded that there was just so much gunk in here that it wasn't getting the power to the motor properly. So I took and I ran a jumper from the center rail and I just started jumping the brushes and I started to get a spark. And after about three or four tries of sparks, I started to get movement. So then I just poured up the power and the movement started and continued. And after a few moments, we were running under our own power with the reverse unit and all. So it was just a matter of getting things running. So that is often the case with, you know, these old neglected motors. Just over time, there can be so much dirt in there that it just doesn't want to do anything. But once you get it going, it works itself out rather quickly. So then it was just a matter of lubrication at that point. And we were ready to roll on to the next. So now back to the video sequence as it happened. One thing I don't like about these MPC motors is that there is this adjustable screw here on top of where the armature shaft is. Now this is meant to help adjust the tension and get it set right. What I find is once it's undone, it's hard to get it back in exactly the right position. But this replaces that thrust bearing that you find on post-war models. So anyway, I don't like to undo this unless I absolutely have to. So I am going to try, and sometimes I can do this and sometimes I can't. Yeah, I'm going to reach in and you can just, with these long needle applicators, you can get in right there to the armature shaft and make sure and do both sides and then spin it around to help make sure that everything spins freely in here. Yeah, and then yeah, spin it around a couple times by hand. All righty. So there, and then using the same applicator, I'm going to get both sides of each roller to help them spin more freely. And then I'm going to go ahead and do the dummy axles. Same thing, just to help them a little bit. Get that bearing on the inside as well. Spin those through. And then the gears are going to get a coating of some plastic safe grease, just a bit. OK, now as for the rest of this rust, I am going to go back to the WD-40. But this time, instead of spraying it on here, I'm going to spray it on a rag because I don't want to get WD-40 on any electrical components. So I'm going to wet down a rag and I'm going to go after the rust that way. All right, now I'm probably going to go back and give the shell another bath. There are some nooks and crannies there that I didn't completely get off. And if I wanted to completely restore the frame, I could take everything apart, sand off the active rust, and hit it with a coat of some black spray paint. But the goal here was to show how quickly these can be turned from rust bucket into operating locomotive with not a whole lot of effort at all. It's just a matter of getting in and just cleaning them up a little bit. These things can take a lot and still keep running. And so you can't see it from there, but the headlight does still work and the E in it. OK, for the white plastic, another trick that I have found that works pretty well, you know, the labels off of this, this is soft scrub, soft scrub. You have to be very careful because it can take the lettering off as well. But again, these are inexpensive cars that even if I do take the lettering off, I would probably repaint it anyway. But just to show you how it works here on the white, I'm going to take a rag here, shake this stuff up. OK, and I'm just going to be on the spot on the roof here. And you see right away, it's taking all of that black gunk right off. I don't know. I think that's paint. I don't know if it's going to do anything with that, but it certainly works well. All of that gunk and grime that's gotten down into the white plastic over the decades. Let's do the doors first. And then, I mean, you could even do this with Q-tip with the soft scrub, but look how it's going right up to it. And all of that gunk is coming right off. And then when I'm finished, I'm going to give this a good clean water rinse to make sure we get all of that cleaner off of there so it doesn't do anything. Turn it right in there and then just lightly around the letters. Look at that coming right off. All right. And so after my clean water rinse, the boxcar looks like this. Much, much better than it was. And obviously, it didn't take the paint off. It didn't take the rust stains off. But still, that is a vast improvement over what it was. Meanwhile, I also did another rinse on the NW-2 shell. And OK, I haven't dried it yet. But again, that has gotten pretty much all of the gunk. So they're not perfect. But you can see that with just an evening's worth of work and supplies that you probably already have laying around the house, you can get these cars and even locomotives up and layout ready in a matter of a couple of hours, one evening's work. So I do still need to replace the cutler on this. And I haven't decided whether I'm going to keep this broken shell or swap it out with this junk box find. And again, on a budget for less than $30 including shipping, here I have another functioning locomotive and two cars. Not a bad deal in today's market. So whether you're on a tight toy train budget or whether you just enjoy bringing these classic trains back from the dead, I hope this episode is giving you some ideas on how you can try your hand at taking some of these trains that were often overbooked and bringing them back to life and use on your layout. And that's just one more way that we can keep the trains running. And we'll catch you next time with more toy train tips and tricks.