@RickO posted:There are plenty of Legacy locos with back drivable gearboxes with the traditional worm and axle gear setup. I suspect the extra gears are to allow better low speed performance or get the best performance out of the motor/speed control being used in a particular loco.
I'm not familiar with Lionel's latest gearboxes, so I assumed that all the Legacy backdriveable gearboxes were the same. All of my steam except one locomotive is MTH Premier with the large worm/wormshaft gearbox that's pretty bullet proof. Any of the Legacy stuff I've seen first hand has had that little intermediate gear setup.