Restoring A $1 Lionel "Freight Station"

Please pardon my break from blogging for Christmas vacation.  I have been doing some railroading but it's been almost all O Gauge.  My son and I have an O-Gauge train that we setup each Christmas and this year we tried to turn our train-round-the-tree into a little layout.

To that end I wanted us to have a proper train station so I pulled out a box I purchased last year at the swap meet put on by the "Will County Model Railroad Railroad Association", an excellent club with a long layout and well worth a visit.

The whole box was only $10 and filled with about 8 nearly-complete, slightly damaged, O-scale buildings and a working Lionel transformer!  In the box were the parts for a station. I forgot to take a picture but it looked something like the one below only much more poorly assembled and missing all the doors and one small wall.  

A quick break here to offer a bargain-hunter top-tip.  Look for boxes of "junk" under the tables at train shows.  They often contain items that the dealer just wants to be rid of.  Don't be ashamed to bargain and negotiate.  You're the one with the money.  Further you are even more likely to get a great deal when you can buy items in a scale or niche the dealer doesn't specialize in.  My $10 box of old O stuff came from under the table of a gentleman who was primarily dealing in newer HO  items. 

My apologies to the original photographer for forgetting were I got the picture above from.

On the base, it has markings for "Lionel", "Mt. Clemons MI." "Made in West Germany", "48043" and a logo for "MPC".   The plastic is extremely thick and the yellow sections are separate panels.

For those who want the same building, this kit appears to have sold by Lionel as "Lionel Freight Station" with yellow wall inserts (like above) as 6-2787 and with tan inserts as 6-2783.  Also as "Passenger/Freight Station 6-12784" with green walls, tan inserts and a Brown roof.  Who knows maybe there were others...   

I pried everything apart and spent an evening in front of the television sanding and scraping old glue away.  The next day my son and I sprayed the accent panels red (his choice of color).  Then I simply cut, scored and spray painted some balsa for the missing doors and wall.  All the paint used was cans of spray paint from Menards.

It's a basic job, but we're going for toy-train quality here, not fine-scale modeling.

The roof was already grey but it got a coat of grey to hide the glue stains.

Keen eyed among you will notice the roof halves are not perfectly matched. It came that way and when I attempted disassembly the roof began to crack severely so I just left it as it was repaired the crack and trimmed off the alignment studs on the inside so it could rest evenly on top of the building.

After assembling and before adding the balsa parts, it looked like this.  Except for the decorative bit on the front (originally white) the tan is the stock plastic color.

It was then a simple matter of gluing the balsa parts in and placing the roof on top. After that I sprayed the whole thing with a coat of matte varnish which adds durability, cuts a bit of the shine of the red paint and has the added benefit of fogging the windows which helps disguise some of the many glue marks left by from the original owner.

Looks pretty good now.

Unless you were looking for it you probably wouldn't notice the replaced wall or the cracks where the triangle panel shattered and was re-glued.

The red entry doors look like they should...

...and the freight entrance does too.

And there you have it. A charming little station sitting pretty under the Christmas tree.

Not bad for a buck and a little elbow grease!  

A one buck station was an extremely lucky find, but an affordable O scale station is not out of reach.  Vintage O scale kits can be outrageously expensive, but I've noticed that kits that are missing a piece or two are drastically reduced in price as are later runs of kits that may have been produced over several decades. The "Freight Station" seems slightly less common but theres no reason a similar kit in similar condition couldn't be found for $10 or less.

Good luck and good building.

Karl