When announced I ordered Jupiter, 119, their matching sound cars, and a set of the the Woodruff sleepers. Well, my passenger cars just came in today, so I took them out for a look. Hopefully they aren't too dark. First is the box. They put the famous photo of the transcontinental completion as the background.
The manual is for both the locomotives and the sound cars.
First ones I opened are UP's the cars look the same, only the number is different. They do not have lights. THe windows are not clear, but you can see the shadow of the sound equipment in the sound car, and you can tell there are some seats in the other car.
Some nice detail on the cars. The trucks are not sprung. They have okay heft for being mostly plastic. Here are a couple videos of the car's sound. I didn't record the crew talk, but it's just like all other Lionel crew talk, with radio beeps and all. (Let me know if the videos don't work.)
Next up are the CP cars and the Woodruff cars. The CP cars are two different cars, while the Woodruff cars are like the UP cars and the only difference is the name. Here are three of them.
This is the CP sound car. Notice the right side of the car the coupler link. That will only connect to the tender of the locomotive.
The other CP coach.
One of the Woodruff sleepers.
Here is the tongue and slot link couplers for all the cars except the locomotive end. (I'm not sure why this one is on it's side. I did open it in Paint and rotated it then saved it again, but the forum keeps putting it on it's side.)
I will have to do some tweaking of the bars as the one on the back of the CP coach is high and kept popping out of the sleeper as I moved them around. Speaking of the link couplers, the sleepers did come with the locomotive link bar so you can swap one car out if you didn't get the sound cars.
Overall I am happy with them, I'll have three cars behind each locomotive. All 6 behind both locomotives if Lionel made it so you can double head them. The only negative I can think of is that the sounds from the cars will not match the locomotive as far as the chuff lining up with the wheel rotation. Would have been nice if Lionel had added a wire or IR pair to send the chuff signal. I really hope Lionel offers some more passenger cars at some point (Would be nice to have more than 3 cars per train when I run both locomotives at the same time.). I would love it even more if Lionel made some period freight cars to run with these for mixed trains, or even just freight trains with the locomotives.
Now comes the hard part, waiting for the locomotives to get here!
