Priming the Lionel 610 passenger car

After the cooking pot treatment, there was still some yellow smuck, predominantly on the inside of the passenger car. This was removed with a brass scraper and a brass bruss (dremel tool). The outside of the car can be brushed most easily and the tin really starts to become glossy. The picture shows the car halfway the brushing treatment.
Several metal tabs were already gone or flimpsy. Thin brass strips of a L-profile (3 mm width) were cut and soldered on the inside of the passenger car to replace missing tabs. The excess of solder was sanded off. Some existing trabs were reinforced with solder.
Then the car was thoroughly cleaned with white spirit and primed with a standard light grey primer for non-ferro metals. Finally the car starts to look good again. Now, I only have to choose the final colours...

Stripping paint from pre-war Lionel cars

There are many ways to strip paint from pre-war metal tin toys, including: sand blasting, sanding, immersion in white spirit or ammonia and cooking in detergents. The latter method is by far the easiest. You basically take a big pan, fill it up with water, add some normal detergent without bleaching agents and let it come to boiling temperature. Then you immerse the Lionel parts in the pot and let is stand for at least 30 minutes on low fire and occasionally stir the mixture. Afterwards you take it out, rinse the item with hot water and lightly sand the places where some paint had remained. In the corners usually some paint is left, and I use a brass scraper (brass is softer than tin-plated iron) to gently remove the left-overs.
The photo's show the 610 passenger car in dissembled state, in the cooking pan and out after two rounds of cooking. The trouble with this car was that it had been redecorated and a more modern paint which was less easy to remove. It formed a thick sticky yellowish gel and I sanded it of with hot water and a kitchen sanding sponge.
Good luck and mind that the water is really dark coloured after cooking the first time, do not stain your clothes or kitchen with it.
Regarding the alternative methods:
1) Sand blasting works great, but you need to set up your compressor and blaster / cabinet everytime. If you got a permanent set-up, that is great, but otherwise it is a lot of extra time
2) Ammonia immersion works, but stinks and the exposed metal parts get slowly discoloured
3) Sanding is great and there are nice mini-sanders for the hobby available, but it is a lot of work!

Looking for Lionel

Whenever, we want to see how a pre-war Lionel car exactly looked, web search engines offer often little help. For instance, type in "Lionel 1664" in Google and wait what comes. Usually, the vast majority of the links shown are auction sites (Ebay etc.) with often outdated offerings which can not be retrieved and observed anymore. Followed by a few Frenchmen, Quebecois and a singer named Ritchie. This is rather annoying. Simultaneously, there are much useful websites of train enthusiasts, professionals which offer sharp pictures of Lionel train objects, however, these are not easily found with conventional search engines. Moreover, these sites are usually far from complete, but combining them would improve their coverage. Hence, I thought that it would be a good idea to start with list of links to those "hidden" sites on the web which offer precise pictures and to let it grow organical and indexed on the Lionel number.

Here are the first links:
TG for much useful information of Terry Gibbs

SW for 804, 805, 806, 807, 831, 2653, 902, 1682

GTE for the great Glancy train exhibition that includes: 400E, 400T, 607, 608, 656, 2817, 3814

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1688E