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After multiple emails explaining that “Yuletide” is not spelled “Yueltide”, guess what? Lionel STILL produced what would’ve otherwise been a perfect Christmas set with the designation “Yueltide”!

Way to go! This is the exact reason why my preorders have tapered off. Am I going to keep the set, admittedly yes. I love the set, but this error is simply inexcusable.

Hallelujah, Holy Sh@t, where’s the Tylenol?!

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@N'awlins posted:

After multiple emails explaining that “Yuletide” is not spelled “Yueltide”, guess what? Lionel STILL produced what would’ve otherwise been a perfect Christmas set with the designation “Yueltide”!

Way to go! This is the exact reason why my preorders have tapered off. Am I going to keep the set, admittedly yes. I love the set, but this error is simply inexcusable.

Hallelujah, Holy Sh@t, where’s the Tylenol?!

You’re from NOLA, right? Maybe Lyonell was trying to spell Y’alltide in keepin’ with your friendly way of talkin’?

Last edited by Mark V. Spadaro
@Jeff T posted:

That's exactly how Lionel keeps getting away with these blunders...

Happy Yueltide to you!

Indeed. However, this is my last burn from the Big L. Although I will likely buy from Lionel in the future, my pre-ordering days are over.

Couple this with the fact that it used to be "If you want it made, pre-order it." That's a myth. I suppose very rarely this happens, but pre-ordering in no way benefits me. If I pre-order a product, I place myself at the mercy of an unpredictable delivery schedule, and although I can appreciate product being delivered in the same calendar year, the avalanche of new product from October to now is simply dizzying.  Pre-ordering has diminished my excitement and anticipation for product. Maybe I'm alone in that thought, but it's where I am in my collecting evolution.

So just for the heck of it i googled "Yuel" to see what possessed someone to spell it that way. Apparently Yuel is an anime character in some fantasy game that, as someone now over 50, is beyond my comprehension.  So some "kid" in the graphics department was playing too much of this game on their phone at the same time they CAD'ed the design drawings...

@452 Card posted:

Their quality control is in the toilet. And yet, people keep buying. Absurd!

I hear ya, but ..

Absurd?  Have you taken the time to understand the people who keep buying?

  Clearly not.

Thank you kindly for insinuating that those of us who put up with the problems are idiots for doing so.  What are we thinking?

Admittedly a spelling error is one we can't fix.  But everything else, everything that is fixable, doesn't irritate us like it does you.  We're tinkerers, and good ones at that.  Our hobby has taught us this very important skill.  We take it as a personal challenge to fix those problems, and we wear the experience as a badge of honor.  Note that we are not justifying poor quality control, but merely tolerating it.

And as you have seen from our actions, we keep buying regardless.

Perhaps you should call the Better Business Bureau and report your frustrations to them.  They might, and they should, listen, while the rest of us don't.

Mike

Last edited by Mellow Hudson Mike
Admittedly a spelling error is one we can't fix.  But everything else, everything that is fixable, doesn't irritate us like it does you.  We're tinkerers, and good ones at that.  Our hobby has taught us this very important skill.  We take it as a personal challenge to fix those problems, and we wear the experience as a badge of honor.  Note that we are not justifying poor quality control, but merely tolerating it.

FWIW, while I rate myself as above average as far as fixing things, it still irritates the crap out of me to get new stuff out of the box that I have to fix!  I don't think my stand is all that unreasonable.

Good initial catch, N'awlins, and good work writing to Lionel about the error. It's a shame it was not heeded. From the pictures, the set looks outstanding, less this error.

I don't recall reading about that mis-spell on the forum when the catalog was released; doesn't matter at this point. There's strength in numbers, and had I known I certainly would have sent an e-mail to Lionel's CS dept. I am wondering if Lionel would produce another run of shells to correct this mistake? They've done this before with the scale PE cars that were made in the wrong bluish hue.

Last edited by Paul Kallus

CJACK made a most compelling point: the "feel good" era of government schools has eliminated the correction of any spelling or grammatical errors up until what grade??? I don't even know, since my grandsons, still in Grade 6, have zero red marks on mis spelt (lol) things I see that they bring home.

I did have some fun once, though, when my daughter brought home a very poorly worded homework assignment. I corrected it in red pen and sent it back to school with her. I did get an apology from the teacher, but what the hey??? Or is it what the hay??

Back to Lionzell for a moment: considering that citizens in many foreign countries wrestle with English, they do tend to spell phonetically, but also wrestle to find a direct cross-over in terms of grammar.  Anyone been to Quebec? It's "throw the horse over the fence some hay".

I once did a cooling project for a brand new GE MRI. The condenser, as with any condenser, should never be located under the drip edge of a roof. The condenser was manufactured in China. The instructions read this exactly:  "do not locate in area of monsoon".

Rolled up, I say cut them some slack, but precious little. Think positive: they may have inadvertently tripled the resale value long after most of us have gone to the big waiting room in the sky. Ever heard of a double-struck coin??

I’m admittedly not a patient person.  Couple that with a very limited ability to fix electrical issues buried inside sometimes impossible-to-access engine housing and you get someone who most definitely is “irritated” (to put it mildly) when you unpack a brand new train only to find that there are “fixable issues” that must be addressed.  Especially if the brand new product costs several hundred or a couple thousand dollars.  

Whenever I read threads like this I’m reminded of all the posts and threads asking “is the hobby dying?”   Stuff like this doesn’t help.  Will spelling errors or plain carelessness when it comes to graphics put train manufacturers out of business?  No.  But the overall attitude of “it might work out-of the-box but then again it might not. Ah, don’t worry.  You’re a tinkerer.  You can fix it”…..That kind of attitude in my opinion is a major turn-off for those who are new to the hobby or thinking about diving into the world of trains.  

This was a little bit off-topic from the original post but some of the responses to people with valid quality-control observations really mystify me.  Maybe if I had the ability to yank out and replace a board with one hand while rewiring a tether to a steam engine tender with the other I’d feel differently.  I wish I were the type that looked forward to the next “new-product repair challenge” presented by my latest purchase.  Unfortunately I am not.

@mike.caruso posted:

Maybe if I had the ability to yank out and replace a board with one hand while rewiring a tether to a steam engine tender with the other I’d feel differently.  I wish I were the type that looked forward to the next “new-product repair challenge” presented by my latest purchase.  Unfortunately I am not.

Even I do those tasks serially, it's much easier to do them with both hands!

I understand that spelling of words sometimes get lost in translation from English to Chinese, but can't Lionel in the USA send a text or email with a picture of how they want the spelling and location on the locomotive to their Chinese manufacturers? Seems like Lionel doesn't care since their major competition MTH isn't nearly as much competition anymore since they sold off a lot of their tooling to Atlas, which isn't a major player in O Gauge either, and most other companies are either out of business or greatly reduced their O Gauge offerings. Lionel figures they're the big dog, and if you want something you're going to buy from them no matter how poor their quality control is now. Mike Wolf's MTH competition made them improve their products before. If someone else doesn't step up to push them again don't plan on things getting better again from Lionel. You shouldn't need to have to fix things on a brand new item, then worry when you do need a replacement part, they haven't already discontinued having them available. 😡 Their top of the line $1500-2000 locomotives shouldn't end up being a shelf queen 2-3 years later when you can't get boards or parts for them.💀

Gary, this mistake was evidently made by Lionel as N'awlins pointed out to them in the 2023 catalog (unless the Chinese or Vietnamese are making their catalogs in addition to their trains). I've yet to read a review of these cars, and have no idea of their overall quality; the spelling mistake is a minor one, and they did get Aurora Borealis correct . What's sad however is that N'awlins suggestion was not passed on the right person(s) prior to production. Many of us are over-worked and over-whelmed with our myriad responsibilities - today's unspoken yet true adage is "do more with less" yet IMO there's no excuse for not heeding a customer's catch of a catalog mistake - notwithstanding that fact that someone at Lionel should've caught it.

Last edited by Paul Kallus
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