Southern Pacific Dummy Trade

Dummy Southern Pacific Loco, Color is Dark Grey, red on the ends, with white letting. road no. 9725 Perfect shape nothing broke. Coupler are fixed position. Says no. 418 on bottom High Speed Made in China. I have never seen one like it. It also fits N Scale track perfect.

I guess I'm the Dummy.. not the train

 

These dummies have been around for a while. I'm with sootower, give it the heave ho and be glad you didn't get scalped to badly.

For awhile every friend and family member was giving me these thinking it was a great and awesome gift. You just have to wonder sometimes who's fooling who? Eventually, I did find a dummy to give them to and after months of possession he finally figured it out and yelled unfair. Too late...it was a gift and his problem now. No returns all sales final and that includes gifts.

Just let it go it don't mean nothing.

Have fun!

 

Those 'things' are not really N scale... in fact they are about 1:144 scale and were given away as part of a Readers Digest promotion over 15 years ago. There are four pieces of rolling stock which were part of that promotion as well. Someone that worked with me found one of those 'dummy diesels' at a flea market for $1.00 and bought it for me as a gift. I graciously accepted and thanked him for thinking of me. He actually thought it was a powered unit... God bless him for his ignorance... and the vendor for not trying to swindle him by mis-representing the product.

 

I've been gifted with these twice. When the givers come to my layout, I make sure they are somewhere on the layout, usually in a back corner. Most of my friends are not into model railroading, so they don't know what these dummies are.

Many people have been fooled by these engines, so don't feel bad. When I received my first one, I was fooled--and I've been around N scale since 1972. I don't get Readers Digest, so I did not know of the promotion. I remember being puzzled: boy, it's awfully light for an engine! And it's really crude--did Lima (the N scale manufacturer of old) suddenly come back into business?

Threads on this subject invariably turn into a food fight. I always remember this: if you haven't been burned by this particular engine, you've probably been burned by something else. Like the Lima FP-45, in my case.