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Description
I just remembered about this restoration project I did during the fall. I happened to find the pictures I had taken of it so I put this together to show all of you.

Some months ago I found a large box of assorted trains one slow day on eBay. Included inside was this lovely old Girard Joy Line set, complete with engine, in rather poor condition. Joy Line trains are somewhat scarce, being quite old (early 1930s) and very low-end trains that tended to be played hard and destroyed. I bought the lot for a pittance and after determining the set was potentially salvageable I began to dismantle the cars.

Despite some troubles with the paint (the Rustoleum Red I used was AWFUL, took two entire days to fully set and made a humungous mess when I tried to work with it) I was able to do a reasonable job in saving the set. I was even able to salvage the tender, which I wasn't certain could be saved due to severe rust damage to the frame. I repainted the cars red and black because a) orange is an ugly color that only looks good next to blue in the Lionel logo, b) I already had red for the locomotive and c) red is actually the rare color variation for this set.

I lubricated the motor, replaced the missing wheel with a Marx part and found that to my immense surprise, the 80-year-old mechanism still worked! It can pull all of the cars in the set, albeit with some difficulty, on a nice wide-radius curve.

These pictures are kinda old and I have made some minor improvements since then. If you look at the engine, you'll notice that one of the driver wheels is incorrect and does not match. I have since replaced it with a Hafner wheel that is a very close fit to the original (you can't easily find parts for Joy Line trains so you have to make do with the best fit).

Description
I just remembered about this restoration project I did during the fall. I happened to find the pictures I had taken of it so I put this together to show all of you.

Some months ago I found a large box of assorted trains one slow day on eBay. Included inside was this lovely old Girard Joy Line set, complete with engine, in rather poor condition. Joy Line trains are somewhat scarce, being quite old (early 1930s) and very low-end trains that tended to be played hard and destroyed. I bought the lot for a pittance and after determining the set was potentially salvageable I began to dismantle the cars.

Despite some troubles with the paint (the Rustoleum Red I used was AWFUL, took two entire days to fully set and made a humungous mess when I tried to work with it) I was able to do a reasonable job in saving the set. I was even able to salvage the tender, which I wasn't certain could be saved due to severe rust damage to the frame. I repainted the cars red and black because a) orange is an ugly color that only looks good next to blue in the Lionel logo, b) I already had red for the locomotive and c) red is actually the rare color variation for this set.

I lubricated the motor, replaced the missing wheel with a Marx part and found that to my immense surprise, the 80-year-old mechanism still worked! It can pull all of the cars in the set, albeit with some difficulty, on a nice wide-radius curve.

These pictures are kinda old and I have made some minor improvements since then. If you look at the engine, you'll notice that one of the driver wheels is incorrect and does not match. I have since replaced it with a Hafner wheel that is a very close fit to the original (you can't easily find parts for Joy Line trains so you have to make do with the best fit).