Mix and Match

A collection of older pieces was recently added to the inventory.   This group of models was obtained from a widow (with the help of her son).   It turns out that the husband had passed away over 20 years ago.  This man built his collection to contain representative pieces.  His focus was one reflecting engines he had seen in his daily life, with a sense of variety so that he would have representations of different wheel arrangements.

I was surprised today by a kind message from a visitor that the tender for one engines was incorrect, in this case a Southern Railway 4-6-2.  Upon further review we discovered that another engine had the wrong tender.   Could it be?  Well, of course, the tenders for the 2 engines had been swapped at some point.  But, until I sat down with this woman, these engines had not been out of the boxes for the past 20 years.  These two engines had been patiently waiting for an understanding person to come along and correct an error of a generation ago.