Got a nice boxlot of locomotives and a box car in a "good ol' boy" type trade that included this HO scale Bachmann Santa Fe 4-8-4 "Northern". At first glance it appeared the only thing missing was the bell on the front of the smoke box...
...but on closer examination, I noticed that the feed water pump detail had been gnawed away in a previous life. It was done to make room for details cast onto the cylinders that aren't found on a Northern locomotive normally. The other side revealed a valve detail that was bent down by the running boards. Hmmmmmm...
....ahhhh...another clue...the trailing truck sports wheels that are almost half the size of a Northern's truck. Not only that, the truck is metal whereas the truck on the Northern model is plastic---AND---it's too far forward by about 18 scale inches.
The red brakeman's lanterns were really flashing in my inner rivet counter's eye's until I sought refuge in HO Seeker's excellent online archive of locomotive models and deduced that it was a Northern shell applied to a UP Overland model drive unit. This was later confirmed by its previous owner and with that, my alter ego Sternly Hardcase, a.k.a. "Rivet Counter Man", was driven back into his dark lair, before he got a glimpse of my Tyco locomotive collection.
UPDATE: My CSI work apparently didn't extend to noticing the missing eccentric rod on the other side...sigh...guess my fall project will be melding my other Northern with this one. It'll work...honest...pics to come...
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