Maxrailroad posted:Hi everyone. The new MTH 2016 Volume 2 catalog has finally been released. I think they hit a home run with the new premier diesels. ...
Max, I would agree. I've pretty much gone to MTH recently for new high-end diesels. My last Lionel Legacy diesels were their ES44's done up in ABS, because I grabbed them "on sale". But I didn't pre-order any of Lionel's SD60E's due to the unnecessarily inflated price tag. Seems the new price for Lionel's Legacy diesels is now $650 MSRP ($550-ish street price). Whereas MTH has held the price on their Premier diesels this year to $500 MSRP, which gets us down to around $435-ish street price (although MTH is requesting dealers advertise a $450 MAP).
The AC4400CW's will likely be very popular items... I've only done a quick first-pass through the catalog, but the CSX and NS liveries are very tempting.
Earlier this year, I was debating whether to pre-order Sunset/3rd-Rail's EMD E8 diesels in the early "as delivered" Canadian Pacific livery or wait to see what MTH might deliver. Looks like I made the right decision by going forward with the Sunset diesels, since MTH didn't catalog E8's this year. And if they did, they most likely would have done the later CP paint scheme that has been issued several times already by both MTH and Lionel. So I think it was worth the premium to pre-order Sunset/3rd-Rail E8's, with both units powered.
I'm not pre-ordering any big steam this year. But it is nice to see MTH still giving enthusiasts an alternative to paying Lionel's stratospheric Legacy steam locomotive prices in 2016. I still prefer Legacy Railsounds over PS3, but the performance gap is really narrowing... and I find myself not hesitating to purchase an MTH Premier steamer if the product happens to call my name these days.
I mentioned this in another thread, but it's worth repeating here too. When visiting MTH's booth at York, I noticed the coal nuggets in the steam tenders really stood out as being larger than I recall any importer using on prior production runs. It's a minor thing, but I really NOTICED it.... and I liked it too.
I was glad to see Scaletrax featured prominently in the catalog -- which is always nice to see. More or less gives us a feeling of encouragement that Mike is still behind the product line. Of course, MTH needs to execute on the delivery of #4 and #6 turnouts to make it real for the audience that is most likely gonna select Scaletrax in the first place.
All in all... a very nice catalog. No big pre-order list for me, but a nice catalog nonetheless.
David
