I prefer the thumbtack. I do almost all manual uncoupling, and the tab that I have to push back is a pain. The older design is much easier to use, which is the paramount consideration for me. Having accepted the 3rd rail and the lobster claw for the same reason, I can accept the thumbtack.
Probably the only thing worse is Atlas' new coupler. I don't see anyway to uncouple it manually. It is buried under the truck where you can't see or reach it. It looks great, but if you can't uncouple it without an uncoupling track???? Very disappointed.
Art
irish rifle posted:Ray Lombardo posted:So all the folks here who previously professed admiration for Mike Regan now think he is full of it? I thought he provided a thoughtful explanation in the link above. If I am Lionel management, the only thing I can conclude from this discussion is that there is a certain clientele that I cannot satisfy and I move on.
Ray - This has nothing to do with Mike Reagan. Everyone would agree that Mike is a great guy. This has to do with a really bad decision by Lionel. The corporation owns the decision.
Probably the only decision from corporate was "reduce costs." Everything in the production cycle has a cost associated with it, from the largest casting to the smallest bend in a piece of handrail wire.
No individual employee or former employee does. You don't take a significant step backwards in the quality of the design of something as important as your trucks and couplers on your scale freight and passenger cars which is unsatisfactory to significant numbers of your loyal customer base and "just move on."
Significant numbers? Are there any hard numbers to support this statement? Sure, there are folks upset on the OGR board, but there's other folks out in the world who aren't on this forum who may or may not be happy with the change. If Lionel had to rely solely on the OGR forum members as their entire customer base, they'd probably be out of business by now.
Rusty
Companies that follow such a philosophy see their sales plummet and some go out of business. None of us wants to see that happen to Lionel.
C W Burfle posted:So all the folks here who previously professed admiration for Mike Regan now think he is full of it? I thought he provided a thoughtful explanation in the link above. If I am Lionel management, the only thing I can conclude from this discussion is that there is a certain clientele that I cannot satisfy and I move on.
Yes, an explanation was provided. That does not mean that Lionel's customer base has to accept the new product. It's Lionel's job to satisfy their customers, not the other way around.
So Mike Regan did it? ...... I guess everybody and anybody can make a bad decision once in a while. People can still admire the rest of this work
No, you are correct. The decision need not be accepted. We are all adults. That being said, recall that the sense of the original complaint was along the lines that this was purely a cost move, that it was thoughtless, etc. If you read Mike’s explanation and accept it at face value, clearly there was a rationale here to improve the product. (Again, unless you think he was full of it and lying.). Maybe folks disagree with the new look or the decision process and want something else and again, that is fine, but the sense of the comments here criticizing it don’t appear to acknowledge that Lionel’s decision was not purely a callous, cheapen the product move. We see this problem all the time today in the age of the anonymous internet - people readily resort to insults. (To be clear I don’t take your post as an insult. I am talking about other posters relative to Lionel.)
At the end of the day, I don’t want to argue with people on the internet and I really have no dog in this fight. Most of these newer box cars and what not are too expensive for my taste and our storage tracks and shelves are full. My response was merely motivated by some of the constant negativity here from some quarters in what should be a fun hobby. It was also motivated by me spending some time trying to make some older MPC pieces from my childhood run halfway decently and thinking to myself that we have it pretty good today.
Have a great day everyone. We are on the road this morning but when we get home this afternoon my boys and I will run the trains and have a good time.
Those decrying what they perceive to be a bad business decision by Lionel might want to look at what happened when Canon abandoned their old lens mount and introduced the EOS system. It totally obsoleted every SLR lens they had ever made up until the change. Talk about change!
Needless to say there were howls of rage and pain in the industry.
All water under the bridge now and, in long retrospect, no one can reasonably deny it was a good, albeit very painful, decision for the company.
I have to wonder if people swore off buying anything Lionel when the tinplate hook and loop couplers were supplanted by the present claw?
Change is hard!
I dont care why they did it, i think the new type are crap and I will now be very very very selective of the rolling stock I buy from Lionel from this point on because they arent good looking and not complimentary to a $100 to $120 freight car.
Grampstrains posted:I may be wrong but I thought the truck change was to make it easier for installing Kadee couplers. I think those folks are a minority. It would be better just to make a different truck available for those who want to change couplers.
So for use who convert to Kadee, we would need to invest another twenty bucks on top of a 80 dollar car just so I can convert to a better coupler? I don't think so.
We may be in the minority but are numbers are growing.
So I have to spend $40 to put decent trucks on my $80 car so you and 8 other people can save $20? I’ll just save my money altogether and not buy anything. I have so many trains already.
Matt Makens posted:I dont care why they did it, i think the new type are crap and I will now be very very very selective of the rolling stock I buy from Lionel from this point on because they arent good looking and not complimentary to a $100 to $120 freight car.
Matt - Could you be a little more clear in your position?😀 Seriously, I couldn't agree with you more. Until this decision is reversed, I will fill out my collection of freight cars with old new stock. Fortunately, plenty is available.
Mr. Makens nails it again.
On a side note. For those who think these cheapo plastic and die cast non functioning sprung trucks with ugly thumbtacks were Mike R.s idea.
Mike R has been gone for some time yet Lionels bad ideas are still running full force.
I think they just wanted to produce a cheaper truck and lucked out with the Kadee coupler" convenience" excuse.
Having a good guy like Mike R to validate it makes it seem like a good idea...then Mike got outta dodge.
Besides, Lionel has so many gross errors with regards to 3 rail scale. What's the point of Kadee capability anyway?
Certainly scale guys would want nothing to do with the new SP/NYC ESE style passenger cars. Kadees won't fix that.
Fortunately ,there is plenty of Lionel scale rolling stock with the quality 3 rail truck and coupler assemblies on the secondary market.
As is almost always the the case, the market will decide this issue.
I have never been particularly interested in using a decoupling track. If you are not either, but are set in wanting to retain the claw, perhaps because you run 0-36 curves, there is yet another option. Dremel off the accursed tack! The tab for manual uncoupling is still there. Unfortunately, the tack is press-fitted and removing it will not be reversible. AFAICT, the only function that tack serves is to retain uncoupling capability with a magnetic track uncoupler. If you don't use uncoupling tracks, you don't need the tack.
Have any of you "never leaving my claw" fold even tried these new trucks? Ever seen how well they roll compared to the old? Ever tried running with a mix of Kadee Standard Series couplers and claws? They play pretty nicely together. The E series, with concealed springs, do not. Kadee vs claws is not a zero sum game! It's not a matter of "either/or." But, after you see your new Lionel PS-1 car with Kadees, you might become rather dissatisfied with those claws you thought you loved so much and start converting over totally! Don't think because you run smaller radii than 0-72 you can't run Kadees either. That's what the extended shanks are for.
All I suggest is try it! You might change your mind.
Forumites on both sides of this issue can posture all they want, the market will decide the future of this change. If, like some postulate, a sufficient portion of Lionel customers hate the new truck and stop buying because of it then sales of freight cars will go down. If, like others postulate, the vast majority of Lionel customers won't care about the change then sales will stay flat. If, like still others postulate, the Kadee users flock to Lionel for easy conversions then freight car sales might even go up.
Lionel has made the change. Deal with it. If they see a negative impact on sales that makes it worthwhile to return to the older design then they will. If not, the new design will stay. All the internet talk, letter writing and so on will not influence Lionel to change. REAL decreased sales might. Anybody remember "New Coke"?
Rusty Traque posted:irish rifle posted:Ray Lombardo posted:So all the folks here who previously professed admiration for Mike Regan now think he is full of it? I thought he provided a thoughtful explanation in the link above. If I am Lionel management, the only thing I can conclude from this discussion is that there is a certain clientele that I cannot satisfy and I move on.
Ray - This has nothing to do with Mike Reagan. Everyone would agree that Mike is a great guy. This has to do with a really bad decision by Lionel. The corporation owns the decision.
Probably the only decision from corporate was "reduce costs." Everything in the production cycle has a cost associated with it, from the largest casting to the smallest bend in a piece of handrail wire.
You may well be correct, but none of us knows for sure what Lionel's reasons were. What we do know from Ryan Kunkle’s candid statement to me at the October 2017 York Show is that Lionel conducted no market research with their customers or distributors before making this decision. As someone who has worked with sales organizations my whole career, I find that shocking on something this important. One might even say, that’s no way to run a railroad!
No individual employee or former employee does. You don't take a significant step backwards in the quality of the design of something as important as your trucks and couplers on your scale freight and passenger cars which is unsatisfactory to significant numbers of your loyal customer base and "just move on."
Significant numbers? Are there any hard numbers to support this statement? Sure, there are folks upset on the OGR board, but there's other folks out in the world who aren't on this forum who may or may not be happy with the change. If Lionel had to rely solely on the OGR forum members as their entire customer base, they'd probably be out of business by now.
Fair question. I am not aware of any hard numbers to support it, nor am I aware of any hard numbers to contradict it. And while I agree with you that O Gauge Forum members do not speak for the entire Lionel customer base, they provide a good random sample of the diehard Lionel buyer group, so in my humble opinion, Lionel should stand up and take notice of their views. No one is suggesting that Lionel (or any other manufacturer) should rely solely on their views.
Ultimately, Lionel's sales numbers for their new scale freight and passenger cars will reflect how this decision fares with their customer base. I will be very surprised if they do not decline in a meaningful way.
Companies that follow such a philosophy see their sales plummet and some go out of business. None of us wants to see that happen to Lionel.
Rusty - you make some good points. See responses above following yours.
"O Gauge Forum members <snip> provide a good random sample of the diehard Lionel buyer group"
I was a professional statistician for my entire working career and I can categorically state that OGR Forum members don't represent a good random sample of ANYTHING.
Bob posted:"O Gauge Forum members <snip> provide a good random sample of the diehard Lionel buyer group"
I was a professional statistician for my entire working career and I can categorically state that OGR Forum members don't represent a good random sample of ANYTHING.
Boy, do I agree with THAT!
Bob posted:"O Gauge Forum members <snip> provide a good random sample of the diehard Lionel buyer group"
I was a professional statistician for my entire working career and I can categorically state that OGR Forum members don't represent a good random sample of ANYTHING.
Hmmm. My apologies to most fellow posters here, as we are getting very deep, but I need to respond to this post. Touche', my friend Bob. I was a Mathematics major in a well-respected university, with a statistics concentration. I also practiced as a chief employment lawyer for many years for a major U.S. corporation, and did standard deviation analysis to see if disparities in the numbers were "statistically significant," or an anomaly. If they were statistically sifgnificant, a presumption of discrimination could be made. I never said that the view of the OGF posters was a "statistically significant" sample. No one could say that without knowing how many Lionel trains collectors and/or operators understand the issues regarding the Lionel trucks and couplers and have an opinion about those issues, and nobody has those statistics. I carefully chose my words. As we do not have those statistics, what I said was that the O Gauge Forum posters' views were a "good random sample," and I stand by that statement.
Mr. Irish Rifle, esq., (apologies to casual readers of this thread)
When you joined this forum, was it your choice to do so or did you receive an invitation? If you, like every single member here, chose on your own to join the forum as opposed to being randomly selected to participate then there is NOTHING random about the sample of individuals here. Likewise, opinions on the new Lionel trucks were not requested from a sample of forum members. Those members who felt strongly enough to comment and had the time, inclination, etc. to do so made the comments. Note that there are no posts in the thread saying that the trucks are equally good and either one is fine. Later comments in the thread often were made in response to earlier comments and were thus conditional (in the statistical sense) on those earlier comments and not independent of them. There is thus NOTHING random about the comments either.
Bob posted:Mr. Irish Rifle, esq., (apologies to casual readers of this thread)
When you joined this forum, was it your choice to do so or did you receive an invitation? If you, like every single member here, chose on your own to join the forum as opposed to being randomly selected to participate then there is NOTHING random about the sample of individuals here. Likewise, opinions on the new Lionel trucks were not requested from a sample of forum members. Those members who felt strongly enough to comment and had the time, inclination, etc. to do so made the comments. Note that there are no posts in the thread saying that the trucks are equally good and either one is fine. Later comments in the thread often were made in response to earlier comments and were thus conditional (in the statistical sense) on those earlier comments and not independent of them. There is thus NOTHING random about the comments either.
Bob - with all due respect, your post is hyper-technical and makes absolutely no sense. Additionally, it in no way contradicts what I said in my prior post, which responded to a misleading characterization you made of it. FYI, I was not just referring to this thread, but the multiple threads on this subject that have appeared on this board over a number of months. When you have reviewed those threads on this subject, which you obviously have not, you will soon see that what you said in your last post is factually inaccurate. No need to respond or apologize though. Let's agree to disagree and move on, in respect to our fellow posters. Thanks.
New trucks still suck
Matt Makens posted:New trucks still suck
Nope, they're great!
Terry Danks posted:Matt Makens posted:New trucks still suck
Nope, they're great!
Yup, a great step backward!
Weather or not you use/like/worship Kadees or traditional knuckles, this should be concerning because Lionel degraded an aspect of their product in the minds of a significant* portion of their user base. The choice is not a necessary compromise, but one forced artificially by the manufacturer as this and many other threads have suggested many other designs that would accommodate both with much better accepted aesthetics.
*I purposely used significant because because it dosen't necessarily imply most, all or similar quantities that derail discussion from the point.
Statistically speaking, my opinion is factual evidence of an unhappy customer.
Regardless, still not a random sample as Bob correctly asserts.
Purple socks
How’s that for random
LOL, reading the back and forth on whether the OGR audience is a random sample reminds me of my school days. I have a university degree in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics.
Is OGR a good random sample for Lionel enthusiasts? We have a reasonably sized population of "O" gauge enthusiasts in my area. I am only aware of one other person participating here.
I don't buy newly made trains of any brand. Don't know about the other guy.
Never ending post –
For many of us, we really are at a point of saturation. I get a kick out of all the dealer specials from time to time. A bunch of stuff nobody wants for the most part. We aint got nottin to buy as I generally say because the suppliers haven’t made it yet. Unless I see new freight car tooling being offered, I‘ll just sit back and relax. So long story short, there are no must haves at this point in time.
Kadee coupler people are in the minority category in the big picture. I guess chunky wheel flanges, shinny axles and a fat middle rail doesn’t bother them but lobster claws do? I never understood throwing all that money and time into the 3RS concept.
So here we are with the inferior so called improvements waiting for the next big change to happen. If companies can equate poor sales to the recent changes they made then maybe future products, if any will be improved upon.
Lets face it, there just isn't an overwhelming demand for O Kadee items. IMO, I still believe Lionel’s truck and coupler changes were either about lowering cost or forced upon them. Overseas supplier changing their production business to other more lucrative products as they have been known to do. But that's just a guess.
Personally prefer the cars without thumbtacks, but can see the operationally utility if you use uncoupling sections. Overall, reminds me of the controversy in Gulliver's Travels between the little enders and big enders (where you crack your eggs). Respect the passion but find it a little over the top in this situation. The rolling stock being made today is so much more attractive in terms of decoration, compared with 20-30 years ago, my perspective may be a little different. As mentioned, not buying huge amounts of anything, so my vote with my dollars isn't going to make much of a dent one way or the other in Lionel's plans.
As for this forum being any kind of random or identifiable sample of the entire market, got to agree with those who say, "no way." It's entirely self-selected, which is the exact opposite of random or truly identifiable sampling in population studies. Information, yes, but no way of knowing what it really means.
I went to my local dealer to check out the new trucks. I don't like them. They are also half plastic now as well. Only the sides are metal. The springs are for decoration. It is no longer a working sprung truck. I voted with my wallet and did not order any new rolling stock. Lionel can keep these new trucks.
SIRT posted:Never ending post –
For many of us, we really are at a point of saturation. I get a kick out of all the dealer specials from time to time. A bunch of stuff nobody wants for the most part. We aint got nottin to buy as I generally say because the suppliers haven’t made it yet. Unless I see new freight car tooling being offered, I‘ll just sit back and relax. So long story short, there are no must haves at this point in time.
Kadee coupler people are in the minority category in the big picture. I guess chunky wheel flanges, shinny axles and a fat middle rail doesn’t bother them but lobster claws do?
Correct! Because the lobster claws are UNRELIABLE. Have you missed the monthly posts/threads about "How can I get my couplers to stay closed?", or the "Why do you have to slam them together in order to get them to close & latch?"? From modeling in HO in the mid 1950s, to currently modeling in 3RS, I can only recall two Kadee coupler failures in HO, and only one since I've in O Scale/3RS.
I never understood throwing all that money and time into the 3RS concept.
And there you have it!
Yep we've pretty much beat this one to death. I would hope there would be a way to maintain the newer hidden tab coupler / truck style and still make it easy for the Kadee folks to convert. The logic defies me but then again... What more can really be said here? I think we have reached saturation. Vote with your dollars, write Lionel, or do both.
Attachments
Images (1)
