Paul Wasserman sent me these pictures of a blue and chrome hafner streamliner from the late 1930s. This is a windup train made in Chicago. They aren’t rare, they are just an interesting part of American History.
The 1930s was the period of the Streamliners. The Diesel loco had been perfected enough to drive a large train, and the square corners of the 1920s gave way to the sleeker, faster look of the 1930s. All the real railroads had streamlined passenger sets.
The union Pacific started the streamliner era with the City Of Portland. All the toy train companies made copies of UPs neat train. An easy way to create new train sets that looked different was to change the color. For example, Lionel and American Flyer offered their City of Denver sets in Green to mimic The Illinois Central’s Green Diamond.
Hafner made Blue and Chrome sets like Paul’s as copies of the New Haven’s Comet passenger train. It’s just a regular Brown and Yellow UP set in Blue and Chrome disguise.
What is the story of this train? We don’t know. We’ll probably never know.
The set was made to be Brown/Chrome. (At Lionel one car made the wrong colors would have ended up in the reject bin. Flyer might have made up the set to sell it. Flyer had make-good people who worked in the service department who made up rejects into sellable “shopworn” merchandise when they weren’t doing repairs. )
I’d assume three runs to assemble each set – one for each car type. The head end cars with motors. The center cars. The observations. Then each type would be packaged into outfit boxes to make sets. The observation and center cars may be assembled with same set up. The locos have different rivet placements and might have a different set up?
One man walking around the factory could easily make up a brown and chrome set, but a set would never have been accidentally made because it would be too coincidental.
I’d say the only things we can KNOW are 1. this was PURPOSELY MADE AS A Brown and Chrome set and 2. someone painted the Brown parts Blue AFTER it was assembled. If this was done in the factory or later we can’t tell.
If we were postwar American Flyer collectors, we’d assume it was painted after leaving the factory. S gauge collectors with their 2-rail trains lack imagination.
We started with postwar Lionel and it’s extra rail so we can think a bit better.