As a person among many friends who has a couple of the recent LEGACY light/heavy Mikados (among other LEGACY locomotives with this gearbox design), this is quite disconcerting to me. I really hope this gets brought to attention at Lionel, because this could easily be a fatal error in designing future Lionel product.
We did manage to get driveshaft replacements for the Century Niagara years later, so I guess it's not impossible, but I'd rather not wait a decade or so later to fix a locomotive if something goes wrong without paying a premium price.
