Cylindrical hoppers 3.0

It's a decent selection of roadnames (B&O, BN, UP, CSX, PC, EL) and none are "fantasy" cars as far as I can tell.  Might have been nice to throw in a CP Rail with the Multi-Mark as a nod to our Canadian friends:

I'm encouraged about the new trucks, I've complained often about the height of the old truck (right) and that it was probably one of the reasons a lot of Scalers looked the other way. 

It remains to be seen if the old Flyer scale wheelsets are compatible with this new truck, if conversion wheels will be available from Lionel or if I continue to use AM or MTH trucks for conversion.

Rusty

OK, the catalog's up.  We can now post away with reckless abandon:

Rusty

I believe this is a second attempt by Lionel to see if modern freight will sell. The argument in the past that the Mechanical Reefers did not sell because the tooling/trucks on the cylindrical Hoppers was off and no one wanted to take the risk of buying them until the saw this was corrected.  between the SD70's being issued and this I think this is another attempt to see our interest.  If both sell well I would expect that they may be more inclined to invest in some new modern freight cars.  I intend to buy both.

--Rocco--

banjoflyer posted:

And this car is impossible to find.

 

I'm glad I bought one when they were released.

Mark

I received an empty box!  They were out already when I called to report it.

Brendan

Rocco posted:

I believe this is a second attempt by Lionel to see if modern freight will sell. The argument in the past that the Mechanical Reefers did not sell because the tooling/trucks on the cylindrical Hoppers was off and no one wanted to take the risk of buying them until the saw this was corrected.  between the SD70's being issued and this I think this is another attempt to see our interest.  If both sell well I would expect that they may be more inclined to invest in some new modern freight cars.  I intend to buy both.

--Rocco--

The SD70's have a good selection of roadnames available.  The UP "Spirit" will most likely be a sell out.

This run of cylindrical hoppers is where everything is pretty much right.  

The first run was highly anticipated, but wound up with the double whammy of hi-pants trucks and out of gauge scale wheels.  Nobody was happy. 

After that came the tsunami of fantasy NS cars, still with hi-pants trucks but at least with hirail wheels.  There were a couple of prototype decorated cars, but I think the overload of the NS fantasy is what did them in.  My observation is the prototype paint schemes sold well.

And we never will know the real reason the 57' mechanical reefers were cancelled the way they were (on the date they were to start shipping, not shortly after the order deadline past.)  Retribution, perhaps?

There seems to be some interest from the scale side with this newest run of hoppers, so we'll have to see how things go.

Rusty

LOL I feel like Charle Brown

”All I got was a rock”

Brendan