I am way behind on my reading, and just recently in my big stack of magazines got to the July 2021 issue of The Train Collectors Quarterly. I must have glanced at it when it came, but I was excited to find not one but two articles related (mostly) to Lionel OO!

The first article is by Chris Dicianna, describing how he built a layout in the style of what Lionel might have built in 1940 as a dealer display. Early in the article he explains,

00 trains** have remained a very small segment of the train operating and collecting hobby, and many collectors are not familiar with them. Although the trains are very collectable, most people have never seen a Lionel 00 gauge train in operation.

**In the Quarterly they always use 00 as numbers instead of OO as letters. I’ll maintain their style in the quotes.

At the 2019 York meet he had been struck by seeing an operating Lionel OO layout, and got inspired to build a display layout of his own. In building it he decided to only use materials available in 1940, including the use of vintage wiring.

The base of the layout is 6X4 foot. He wanted to run 2 rail and 3 rail Lionel trains, and accomplished that with 3 rail track but wiring the outer loop so that it could be toggled to run powering the outer rails for 2 rail (a neat trick!). As to the inner loop, he used four of the switches to make the visual pattern “DOUBLE O,” perfect for an OO display layout.

In closing he states,

I enjoy watching two or even three 00 trains operate on this layout. Lionel’s brief effort into 00 trains produced what are, in my opinion, some of the finest model trains of the first half of the 20th Century.

And there is a video of the layout in operation on Youtube! The video is below, and the featured image above is a screenshot from the video. Enjoy!

Continue to Part II