Coupon car

@HSD68 posted:

Have been picking up a few cars that I missed from the 70's and 80's.

Just unpacked a Gold Medal reefer that I bought.  It is brand new and when I pulled it out of the box, it still had it's coupon for the M&StL box car.

Does anyone else have cars with their coupons?

Harold

That is cool, nice find!

Mark

While I never got into the billboard reefers, especially the ones with the coupons, your story reminds me of another coupon promotion that Lionel did in the '70's.

In the Sunday Comics one week was a coupon from Lionel stipulating that for every three Lionel/MPC logos from rolling stock boxes sent in with the coupon, you would get a free 9700 series boxcar.  It didn't take my 13 year old mind long to realize that some boxes had up to four logos on them!  I told a couple of buddies about the promotion and we proceeded to trash all of our Lionel boxes.  I ended up with enough logos to get 24 boxcars.  One friend ended up with another 24 and another ended up with 12 boxcars.  Several weeks after we sent the coupons and logos to Lionel a couple of large boxes arrived.  Sure enough, there were 24 boxcars, however, there were many duplicates.  I only had about eight different road names in my haul.  The other guys were in the same situation, but we soon discovered that each of us had cars that the others didn't have.  After some horse-trading I think I ended up with about 16 individual road names.  I took the remaining cars to a train meet and sold them for five bucks each.  My uncle thought I was nuts for selling them at that price.  I told him my reasoning was that other than postage, I had no overhead in these cars.  I wanted them to move fast so I could take my profits and buy some cars I have been looking for.  I was able to expand my collection substantially with that promotion.  Oddly enough, I never saw that promotion run again.  Go figure?

Tom

I have a New Haven  double door box car with a hole in the side of the box where the coupon was.  They never ran the car but cut out the coupon!

Wasn't very smart of Lionel back then to destroy a box for a coupon. They should have had the dealers give the customer a coupon at the check-out counter when they purchased a qualifying car.