Rocco posted:I believe this is a second attempt by Lionel to see if modern freight will sell. The argument in the past that the Mechanical Reefers did not sell because the tooling/trucks on the cylindrical Hoppers was off and no one wanted to take the risk of buying them until the saw this was corrected. between the SD70's being issued and this I think this is another attempt to see our interest. If both sell well I would expect that they may be more inclined to invest in some new modern freight cars. I intend to buy both.
--Rocco--
The SD70's have a good selection of roadnames available. The UP "Spirit" will most likely be a sell out.
This run of cylindrical hoppers is where everything is pretty much right.
The first run was highly anticipated, but wound up with the double whammy of hi-pants trucks and out of gauge scale wheels. Nobody was happy.
After that came the tsunami of fantasy NS cars, still with hi-pants trucks but at least with hirail wheels. There were a couple of prototype decorated cars, but I think the overload of the NS fantasy is what did them in. My observation is the prototype paint schemes sold well.
And we never will know the real reason the 57' mechanical reefers were cancelled the way they were (on the date they were to start shipping, not shortly after the order deadline past.) Retribution, perhaps?
There seems to be some interest from the scale side with this newest run of hoppers, so we'll have to see how things go.
Rusty
