The Railroading Phoenix
New Member
Hello, I recently acquired a Prewar Marx 597 Commodore Vanderbilt, specifically the black electric version with brass plates and automatic reversing, likely made between 1938 and 1941, judging by the cars it came with and the prewar motor unit in the locomotive. That being said, I'd like to swap the original single-reduction motor unit for a postwar double-reduction unit, as the "fat wheels" on the single-reduction unit prevent it from running on my layout. I do have a double-reduction motor unit, but it's in a smoking 666, meaning that to install it in the Commodore Vanderbilt, I'd need to both remove the smoke unit and ideally swap the rods over, as I'd like to put the prewar motor unit into the 666 so I can resell it, and I'd need the longer rods to operate the smoke unit bellows. I would assume that the former is easy enough, but the latter looks more difficult; it appears that after the rods were originally installed, the ends of the pins they ride on was mushroomed to prevent them from coming off, and I don't know if it's even possible to remove them. If it's not, I'll probably try to find a cheap 400, 490 or 1666 I can yoink the motor from, as I'd hate to effectively ruin a smoking 666 just to harvest its motor. Also, the headlight bulb doesn't want to come out, and some of the 6-inch tinplate cars it came with have some surface rust in a few places, and I'd like to deal with that before it gets worse, but I don't know how to do that without ruining the beautiful lithography, any tips/advice would be greatly appreciated, same with dealing with the very bent axle one of them has
