New York - 2nd Floor Layout - The Buckage Collection
If the photos in this section look familiar, there is a good reason. They were all used, albeit in somewhat cropped form, in the American Flyer Model Railroad Handbook which was a part of the American Flyer Pike Planning Kit. This book is available for online viewing at Carl Tuveson's website at the above link. Some of them were also cropped for inclusion in the 1951 catalog. Scans of those photos can be seen in the catalog section of this website.
I am greatly indebted to Clay and Charlie Buckage, who purchased these original photographs from the collection of Richard Kughn, the former owner of Lionel Corporation, and who generously offered to share them with other American Flyer enthusiasts through these web pages. These scans were masked for their inclusion in the Model Railroad Handbook mentioned above, but their high resolution enabled me to remove these markings to show the full frame of the photograph. Also, some of the shots are crops that I created from the larger high resolution images.
From the stamp on the back of the photos, the photographer was James Pickands II, 341 State Street, New Haven 10, Connecticut. The best estimate as to when these photos were taken is 1950. Since some of the shots were used in the 1951 catalog, they had to be taken before 1951. Because diesel locomotives are shown prominently, they had to have been taken no earlier than 1950, since that is when diesels were introduced into the American Flyer line. This is probably the best representation of how the layout looked in its early years, though some differences can be seen between these photos and what I believe to be an even earlier stage shown in the Boys' Railroad Club TV show which was broadcast in 1950. Major revisions of the layout were done in 1953 and 1956 and these can be seen in other sections of this website and in some of the articles cited in the Bibliography.
You now have the chance to take the tour of the showroom layout that you probably never had the chance to take when you were young. Your time machine is ready and the dial is set for New York, 1950. Enjoy.