Lionchief Hudson's are here

Is this the one with the spoked drivers?

Yes. It is the newest release

Cant wait to see the pictures. I was thinking about getting one are the front marker lights really that bad? Curious to see.

I picked one up also. I wanted something to pull some of the Lionel Lines 2400 cars and wanted an engine with "Lionel Lines" on the tender. I didn't mind the larger tender. These come with real coal loads which wasn't cataloged. The only thing I saw that was not as cataloged was the darken drivers. Other then that, it's a great locomotive. Here are some additional photos.

@toddstrick posted:

The tender appears scale size while the locomotive is not.

I suspect that ls the tender for the Lionmaster hudson. It's still semi scale, but larger than the traditional 4 axle tender.

@Ian Y. posted:

Cant wait to see the pictures. I was thinking about getting one are the front marker lights really that bad? Curious to see.

No.  They're fine.

Is this the same tooling as the Lionmaster Hudson?

@BradFish1 posted:

Is this the same tooling as the Lionmaster Hudson?

No it is not. It does not really look like a NYC hudson boiler at all and it is shorter than the lionmaster too. I wonder what happened to the lionmaster tooling it was nicely done.

I remember hearing the tooling for this style of semi-scale hudson was loosely based on one of the santa fe hudsons, but I can't recall if it was the 3450 or 3460 class.

Looking at the tender body, it looks just like my MTH PS1 era 12 wheel tender,  Right down to the rivets.  Except this one has the red/clear inserts in the tail lights.

@iguanaman3 posted:

No it is not. It does not really look like a NYC hudson boiler at all and it is shorter than the lionmaster too. I wonder what happened to the lionmaster tooling it was nicely done.

There have been a multitude of requests for Lionel to rerun the Lionmaster Hudson and this time catalog a “Lionel Lines” version.  So far, nada, and with these Lionchief versions just arriving, doesn’t seem likely it would happen anytime soon.

Can anybody owning and running this loco, comment on whether or not it has speed control? Thanks.

@Mark V. Spadaro posted:

Can anybody owning and running this loco, comment on whether or not it has speed control? Thanks.

I thought speed control was a given with LC+2. Are you specifically concerned that these might've shipped without?

@raising4daughters posted:

I thought speed control was a given with LC+2. Are you specifically concerned that these might've shipped without?

Yes; this feature is not mentioned on the Hudson web page; I haven’t seen the Hudson box’s end flap. I have a LC2.0+ GG1 where it is mentioned on the web page, but not the end flap.

@Mark V. Spadaro posted:

Can anybody owning and running this loco, comment on whether or not it has speed control? Thanks.

Yes, Lionchief plus 2.0 has speed control natively. Most steam engines have the optical style tachometer same as legacy as this tach is ALSO used to generate the chuff signal. The one exception was the docksiders, they used back EMF for speed control and an optical flag setup on the drive axle. That is the only steam LC+2.0 engine I'm aware of due to size and space that used back EMF. The previous released K4 and Berkshire LC+2.0 engines again, used a legacy style high count optical wheel and encoder.

Thank you, Vernon. As usual, very helpful.