Hafner 1010 engine w/ Vernors bootle caps

[pbjwilson]

Not long ago I purchased a Hafner 1010 engine from e-bay. It's black with chrome skirting. The reverse side of the skirting is printed with Vernors soda bottle caps. So the tin used for the skirting was recycled from Vernors.
Was this common practice in the prewar days, to use recycled tin.
Or, is this a rarity or maybe just oddity.

Anyone else have tinplate with printing on the reverse side?

Curious about your thoughts and info.

[wrmcclellan]

pbj,

CTT has had a couple of articles exploring Marx's use of recycled litho tin in their products, but it was typically litho's of their own stuff - not from another company. Interesting find!

Regards,
Roy

[lionelsoni]

When I was a kid in Japan (1952), most tinplate toys there were made from American beer cans.

[Anonymous]

Your engine dates from the early 1940's during WWII just before the government banned all metal toy production. Metal was scarce and in high demnd at that time and so Hafner used bottle caps, beer cans, paint cans, and any other kind of cans you can think of to make their trains. These are unique and rather hard to find and are in demand from collectors.

[pbjwilson]

Thanks for the responses. The engine's in really great shape and the Vernors bottle caps are really cool.

Got this engine on e-bay. The picture was rather blurry and there was no metion of the bottle cap printing.

Only paid $10.00 plus the shipping. And it runs nice too!

[Anonymous]

You sure got a great deal, Paul! I always check any Hafner trains on ebay to see if they have any recycled tin. I may have even looked at yours and passed it by. All I have for Hafner with recycled tin is a caboose with some faint black striping on it's plain tin crossbrace, which certainly is no where near as interesting as what you have.

Speaking of recycled tin, a friend of mine had a Sakai (Japanese from the 50's) O gauge F unit. It has a battery compartment for a horn like Lionel's F3's and inside the battery compartment was the lithography for an HO Santa Fe Warbonnet F unit.