Tender Trap 13 - Auction Antics

 What is the Tender Trap? It's what happens when someone places the tender of a toy or model locomotive backward because it "looks right that way." Usually, to do so, they have to ignore the connectors that are specifically designed to work only when the tender's facing the right way. 

So to insist on placing the tender backward, ignorance isn't enough -- you have to deliberately ignore the evidence in front of you.

I'm willing to give a pass to some folks who fall into the tender trap. If you don't know that much about steam locomotives -- or toy trains -- then you don't have a point of reference for which way the tender is supposed to go. And for some toy trains, such as Marx, the couplers are the same on both ends, so there's no external clue as to proper connections. 

But none of that is in play with today's examples. These are photos from an auction house website -- an auction house that specialises in vintage toy trains. Surely their highly trained and experienced staff would know how to properly display a toy locomotive and tender.

Apparently not. You can see there are different couplers on either end of the tender.

Nope. Not right here, either. 

This one's really obvious. Obviously wrong, that is.

Here the wrong coupler is too short to reach the locomotive's pin. Did anyone wonder what that long thing was sticking out from the tender?

Only one of these couplers can physically connect to the locomotive. And it's not the one placed closest to it.

Here's the thing. These are not errors I expect knowledgable staffers to make. So if they don't know which end is which when photographing these items, how can I trust their catalog descriptions?

This was one auction I passed on. Because of what I saw, I couldn't trust what I read.