# Lionel 225E Rebirth



## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

I picked up what I thought was a decent Lionel Prewar 225E at a train show not too long ago. It had a couple issues I knew about, one being that it had the wrong tender, and secondly the lead truck was pretty well destroyed. I ordered a new truck and recently ordered a replacement tender of the proper type for it (a 2235W die cast tender). When the truck arrived, it moved oddly side to side as though it was dragging. Upon closer inspection, I realized there was a wad of epoxy located behind the cowcatcher and under the pilot deck. Upon even closer inspection I realized the whole engineers side corner of the pilot deck was reconstructed out of epoxy and there were signs of cracking on other parts. One marker light was also slightly bent, which tells me this thing hit the floor hard and nose first at some point.

The next bit of fun came about when I ordered a replacement steamchest/pilot casting from Ebay. While the Epoxy doesn't look bad, I figured it might not hold up well in transit to the various train shows I like to operate my stuff at and wanted something more solid. I found a part listed as being for a 225E or 226E (which is correct), but to my dismay it turned out to be a pilot for a 726 Berkshire from the postwar years. Lionel reworked the tooling from the 226E to create the Berkshire, so the pilots are nearly identical except for some differences in the mounting. The Berkshire pilot has a much thinner back edge than the 225E pilot for example. I also learned that Lionel's drilling of screw holes was less than precise originally. My solution, since I was stuck with the wrong part, was to clamp it into the milling machine at work today during my lunch break to adjust the screw hole locations. I also had to mill a shim block to fit in the rear of the casting to make up for the 1/4" space that was filled as aasting on the original pilot. While not perfect, it's doing the job and should be much stronger than the epoxy repaired pilot. I'll keep the original as a backup, but the locomotive looks a little happier now. It just needs the tender to arrive this week now as well as a good cleaning and lube job when I have some more time.


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

The "new" tender arrived today to complete the picture. I'd like to eventually get a nice set of passenger cars for it to pull, but for now it'll look nice with the cars from my 224E freight set.


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## BWA (Jun 16, 2012)

Nice job, nice to see an old clunker get put back together into running shape...….


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## Guest (Nov 20, 2018)

You did a real nice job on her, Jake. She looks very good.


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## Dieseler (Jan 29, 2014)

Those baldwin wheel motors in those engines run very nice .


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## tjcruiser (Jan 10, 2010)

Great looking loco, Jake. Glad to read that you're rebuilding her back to near-original form. Enjoy!

TJ


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