I noticed tonight that Charlie Ro's website has yet another new shipping date for this lowly, simple Lionel boxcar, 6-27092:
It was catalog'd back in 2012 Volume 1, which means late 2011. I've lost count as to how many times Lionel has missed the published delivery ETA -- at least a dozen times by now... easy. And I can't help but wonder if the car will EVER be produced. I'm hoping to add a bunch of these to an intermodal train of similarly-logo'd rolling stock (by MTH). Latest slippage has an ETA to Charles Ro's store of 6/10/2015, although the Lionel online shipping schedule still indicates a date of Dec 2014 -- which was two ETA's ago on Charlie's website.
I can understand slippages for an item that is unusually complicated. But as far as I can see, this boxcar is pretty basic... and I don't even think there's any exotic, new tooling to speak of here. So I'm completely baffled why it's taking nearly 4 years for Lionel's manufacturers to schedule production of this boxcar. That's worse than the delay for aluminum passenger cars! Perhaps Lionel should just have MTH produce the car, since MTH has had no trouble delivering their Gunderson style cars with containers decorated in a similar CSX paint-scheme.
David
P.S. For anyone so interested, I noticed that the Lionel E8's have also slipped two months out. Their new ETA to Charlie's store is now 5/10/2015. I guess 2015 is shaping up to be "business-as-usual" for toy train shipments.