I find it amazing that the majority of the posts are about colors, ribs and other scale issues. I understand how much enjoyment there is in exact scale and maybe I missed something but aren’t most of us still using the way over scale couplers and huge wheel flanges not to mention 3rails? I believe the real love we all started with was running and watching our trains make their way around our layout. Most people can’t begin to see and notice the little details from a few feet away especially in motion.
To me the real issue after a 100 plus years of making trains is the reliability of things like couplers, lights, trucks, windows gearing wheels, center pick ups and being able to at least match the colors of a whole set of your own products. This should be a given. These trains are not being made one at a time in a garage by a person who does this part time, it’s a big business with what appears to be more demand than available product. The pricing is ridiculous and the way the dealers and customers are being treated is even more ridiculous. Many of us with great anticipation open our new boxes hoping this time everything will work and if not hoping it will be easy to fix what ever problem happens to be there. Just about everything we buy needs work and that’s wrong. The idea that we shouldn’t expect everything to stay together and work as it was intended because we aren’t paying that much is an opinion from very few who must have a ton of money to burn and not from the majority of us who know that paying over $2000 for a set that needs work is outrageous.
I’ve been dealing with China mfg. for many years in other hobby products and know these are way overpriced. Look how cheap a die cast metal toy car is. OK so it not as complicated so how about a jet engine for a model airplane that cost the same is my new train and the engineering for the electronics and overall mechanics far exceeds what we are getting. I’m sorry but Lionel and MTH both need to get there act together. Who out there recently got there new Hystler logging train set and bought some extra cars for it? How did you feel when you opened the boxes for the cars to find several of the screws had fallen out. How did you like that the add on set of log cars are A completely different color than the ones that came in the train set. Or when you found out you can’t tighten all the loose screws without making the couplers bind. By the way non functional couplers at that price. OK MTH lovers how many just got their Premier Canadian Christmas cars for the loco that showed up 3days before Christmas? All that stuff was promised in November. By the way this was the first MTH product that only had one minor fix, an led fell out of one of the side marker lights on the passenger car so good work MTH, just wish I had them in time for the holidays.
Bottom line I don’t think Lionel or MTH will Pay any attention if we’re upset about ribs or smooth, 1946 or some other years numbering lettering or any other scale details. Not even about BTO and time frames but we should make it quite clear that every box we spend our money on should have a product in it that dependably does what we are lead to believe it should do. We used to be able to walk into our LHS and look over the things before we bought them but the way the companies treated the shops they killed most of them and are doing great damage to the Hobby.
Unfortunately I want these so much I’m going to do everything I can to fix them and Lionel probably counts on many of us thinking the same way along with the large number that just collects and never runs. So we will continue to get stepped on and now in a way I’ve become part of the problem.
