This is outstanding news! When I spoke to Ryan at the Amherst Train Show in January, he had indicated that Lionel was moving in this direction. For those of us who have been beating the drum for the last couple of years regarding Lionel's decision to move away from utilizing die-cast sprung trucks and couplers with hidden uncoupling tabs on their scale freight cars, it is great to see that Lionel is listening to its customers. That said, using the thumb-tack couplers was only part of the issue. Hopefully, Lionel will also return to utilizing die-cast sprung trucks, as they provide much better tracking. Like others on this thread have indicated, it will be great to be able to purchase Lionel scale freight cars again.
Finally, I noticed that on the Santa Fe Limited 18" passenger cars, the new catalog indicates that they contain "die-cast sprung six-wheel trucks." Hopefully, that bodes well regarding the utilization of sprung trucks on their scale freight cars as well. We shall see...
