Lionel UP Excursion Cars

The  "City of San Francisco" dome is the blunt end observation of the 4-car set:

Rusty

Cool. I wonder if it'll have a regular coupler on the end to connect to the theater car.  

Trainlover9943 posted:

Cool. I wonder if it'll have a regular coupler

As compared to what other kind of coupler?

on the end to connect to the theater car.  

Hot Water posted:

Trainlover9943 posted:

Cool. I wonder if it'll have a regular coupler

As compared to what other kind of coupler?

on the end to connect to the theater car.  

 

A dummy scale coupler. 

The ship dates for these cars/sets has been a frequent subject of comment but as far as I know the latest word on it came from Ryan K. of Lionel in the thread linked below. This certainly means not this month and his best guess was "Spring" of this year which I think means not before May or June at best (note that none of these cars or the theater car is even in the Lionel shipping schedule yet):

https://ogrforum.ogaugerr.com/t...94#70411412225882694

Theater car control: Well, I thought it would have to be Legacy but from another one of Ryan's posts it looks like instead it will be a standalone app of some kind that will allow the user to view/record the video:

https://ogrforum.ogaugerr.com/t...26#70974704679030726

No idea about the power car sounds but yours is a very good question indeed. Frankly I would expect purely manual on/off and volume controls.

P.S. Regarding the observation car coupler, I think it would be easy enough at this stage in the manufacturing process to put an ordinary size coupler at the back of this car so it would link up without any difficulty with the Theater Car. But in line with what I see as the general scrimping on new passenger car features they might not change from a scale dummy coupler or provide a larger dummy in the box to use for this purpose. I hope to be proved wrong though.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see. 

Trainlover9943 posted:

I guess we'll just have to wait and see. 

Yeah, but at least it's clear that the UP excursion cars are being made; they've been a long time in the pre-production stage and I wondered if they were going to appear at all.

Also, if you look at the first post from Ryan I linked above you'll see that there are some other improvements being made over the first run of the ABS cars, in particular in the height of the cars over the trucks.

And it's definitely wait and see so far as how much interior detail these cars have, which is something that matters to me.

Very true. I'm excited for these cars.