quote:Originally posted by Charlie:
PaperTRW/Todd: Can you give a little background as to how/who or the decisions involved in the Lionel "PS" series of cars?
These PS series cars (PS-1, PS-4 etc). are really fine scale cars with three rail trucks. Was there to be more of the scale series? Are or were these cars considered successful from a sales standpoint? Any background information would be great.
Thanks
Charlie
Charlie, there's not any great story associated with the PS-1 in particular, but I'll give a little background on the Standard O freight cars in general that I managed in the early 2000's.
Sometime in mid-2000, the "Product Guys" - me, Eric Shreffler and Ken Sylvestri - met at Ken's house to plan the 2002 product line. Lionel had already shipped the "new" 8000 Gallon Tank Car and the Cylindrical Hopper, which apparently were nothing more than copies of the Intermountain and Atlas cars. When the topic came around to new freight cars, Ken wanted to do new cabooses (Bay Window and Extended Vision) and I had suggested two others - a stock car (not modeled by Lionel previously in Standard O) and a longer "mill" gondola, as the existing Std. O gondola was quite the oddball.
Ken kicked-off the cabooses just before his departure in late 2000. In early 2001, Eric and I were placed in charge of the product line, and we needed to get to work quickly on how we were to shape the remaining 2001 - and beyond - product lines. Fortunately, a nice bit of good luck landed in our laps, in the form of Brit Richard Webster, formerly of Kader. One of Richard's first tasks was to put together a group of designers in China that would work exclusively for Lionel and be independent of the production partners there. Some of these guys were the same ones that designed much of Bachmann's successful On30 and Large Scale lines, and were the same ones that would later design FasTrack. Working closely with Richard and his designers, we started work on the stock car and what became the PS-5 Gondola.
First up were the trucks - I wanted new trucks from the ground-up, and gave Richard one of the "thumbtackless" postwar trucks (like on the passenger cars and bay window cabooses) with the suggestion that it would be nice to lose the thumbtack. The resulting design (while admittedly overbuilt) accomplished all the features we laid out: no thumbtack, scale size, needlepoint axles AND truck bearings for low rolling resistance, a real working "sprung" suspension, and absolutely bullet-proof coupler operation.
We chose those particular stock car and gondola versions simply because we had quite a bit information in the Marketing Library on them. Pullman-Standard seemed to feed a lot of information to Lionel over the years, and as a result we had builder's drawings for most of the PS Series. We spec'd a similar laundry list for the new cars: scale size, etched brass for things like roof walks, wireform for piping, and die-cast metal for stirrup steps, ladders and underbody details. We handed-down one more guiding principle: if a decision came down to "scale/more fragile" versus "oversized/more sturdy" for a particular part of a design, they were to take the oversized/more sturdy path. After all, we saw it that Lionel was a toy train company that happened to make a scale line of trains, and not the other way around. We didn't quite accomplish everything on the first few car designs - there was plastic underbody detail on some, if I recall correctly - but we upgraded everything to metal within a year or two.
The PS-5 Gondolas were first, followed by the PS-1 Boxcar (6- and 8-foot door variations), PS-2 Hopper (two completely different versions) and the PS-4 Flat Car. We never really had plans to do the PS-3 Open Hopper, as the design was something of a prototypical orphan, with only a small number of roads purchasing the design. These releases were intermixed with several other new freight car designs through 2004 - the Milk Car, Tank Train, Steel-sided Reefer (and variants), Double Door Boxcar, Offset Hopper, Aluminum ACF Hoppers, I-12 Caboose, PS-4 Flatcar with Trailers, Hot Metal and Slag Cars, and probably one or two others that I can't recall at the moment. While I was the guy ultimately responsible for these cars, proper credit also goes to all the folks mentioned above, plus Dana Kawala, Todd Eib, Matt Ashba and Bill Leto who carried the torch in later years. Project Managers Steve Greening and Lionel Grange made sure we didn't get too crazy. And while I'm dropping names, I should note that Dick Maddox, Bill Bracy and John Brady gave us just about complete free-reign so that we had the support and resources necessary to complete the task. In return, we gave them the sales dollars and margins necessary so that we could do it all again the next year.
So that's the short version of how the freight cars, including the PS-1, came to be. I've got to say writing this was a pleasant trip down memory lane, and I'll admit I still get a kick out of seeing something with which I was associated at a local show... "Hey, I had something to do with that!"
Regards,
Todd Wagner
