A wrong made right...

[Anonymous]

Mark, I had some old Lionel tinplate stuff that was given to me when I was a kid, which I promptly repainted, because I thought that it would look better in red than in the original paint (I can't even remember what roadname was on it). I don't even know what I did with the stuff. I probably gave it away to the Goodwill or something. It's too late to undo what I did, and I can never reclaim what I had. It would probably be worth a fair amount today. Oh well, live and learn (at least I gave the stuff away before I knew it could ever have any value, so I didn't really experience any real loss).

[Tracklayer]

Some of you may recall a topic I posted the other day entitled Regretable Modifications. In it, I confessed that I had modified a Kato engine that I later very much regreted doing. Well, I thought I'd conclude the story tonight and tell all. Once upon a time there lived a guy named Tracklayer (Mark) who owned an N scale Kato 2-8-2 Mikado Western Pacific #310. It was a beautiful little engine that ran like a Swiss watch, and didn't have a scratch on it. One night this stupid idiot decided that this engine would look much better as a Southern Pacific. So without doing much research, he just dove in and completely repainted the entire loco simigloss black and put Southern Pacific decals on it... The next day, he began looking at what he'd done, and realized he had really -----d up a very nice looking and expensive little engine. So he put the engine away in storage where he wouldn't have to look at it, and for two long months it made him sick every time he thought about it. So, this past Monday morning, he got the engine out, pulled up some very good pictures of the original on the web and sat out restoring the loco to what it once looked like-decals and all, and though it was pain staking work and took many hours to do, he finally managed to complete the job successfully...

Though the story has a happy ending, the moral of it is - if you feel the least bit that you might regret it later, then don't do it in the first place and you won't have to go through what I did!... All I have to offer as an explination for what I did is that I must have had several hours of temporary insanity and nothing better to do. ([V])

Tracklayer (Mark)