Office of Steam Forum for Model & Toy Steam Gas & Hot Air Engines

Inge....great engine.  Nice, clean, and it looks
like it was never abused.

It sounds like there is a complex back-story.
Give us the delicious details, photos, and
videos.  Inquiring minds want to know!

Congrats,
Wayne

The rest of the story - This guy was a former member of St. Croix RR live steamers and showed up one day when I was there and said he had a 1" Little Engines Pacific to sell. I already had one, but had to at least check out his. His had been sitting for 20 years, pistons stuck. I was trying to avoid project stuff, so I passed on it, but he showed me his small collection of stationary engines that he had built from casting kits, which included this Cretors. We made a deal on those and I was happy.  6 months later I couldn't get his Pacific off of my mind so I went back to make an offer on it.  He agreed but said " I want my popcorn engine back, I regretted selling it the moment it went out the door"  I agreed, so he got the Cretors back, and I got the Pacific, which by the way, has been the flagship engine of my "fleet". This all happened several years ago. I recently went back through his area in central Wisconsin to look at a model T Speedster.  I did not get the Speedster, but did stop at my friend's house on the way home. His health is failing, and I bought a bunch of his machinist tools, and the Cretors was sitting there on his bench among a pile of stuff, I don't think it had been moved since I dropped it off years earlier.  I made him an offer, his eyes lit up, and we had a deal, win-win. Sometimes things work out, no Speedster (yet), but I got the Cretors back!

I wonder why a serial no. was put on it, and in the 70,000s no less--did they make that many? I just finished restoring this one from 1908:

I wonder why a serial no. was put on it, and in the 70,000s no less--did they make that many? I just finished restoring this one from 1908:

The serial no. he put on it is his birth date.

BTW ( I think I posted this before) here is an actual steam powered Cretor's popcorn wagon in operation with its original boiler and engine. This was at the North Iowa model steam gathering a couple years back.
https://youtube.com/shorts/mBIBpTJRf7A

A great story.

Congratulations on buying the Cretors twice.

Great to see a Cretors running in its natural habitat. I'm told the serial numbers run into the 40,000s and the steam engines were made into the 1930s. First two digits of the number represent the year they were made starting in the 1920s.