A very enlightening thread. Thanks to those who have shared the information without the over dramatized posts. It's is certainly a shame that folks have to mess with a new product other than what they chose to detail.
I couldn't agree with that more. But, looking on the bright side, you can make a lot of passenger cars of this kind if you want to - although the coupler problems are really inexplicable from a manufacturer of Lionel's standing. I'll say no more about that until my UP sets arrive and I have had a chance to check them out.
Some while ago, Lionel (in the person of Mike R.) said that the second issue of 21" ABS cars would be more "prototypical," inside and out, than the first run. That won't be fully borne out until we see the UP Excursion cars, but looking at the interior photos posted above it seems that it might just turn out to be right. Mostly.
My first thought on seeing the observation car interior photos John R. posted was that they were no different/better than the first run of these cars - meaning that the interiors are one piece moldings with no separately applied parts such as tables/seats. The coach photos posted above suggest something different as they are nicely detailed and there's room to fit passenger figures if you want to.
There's a lot you can do with interiors of this kind, including the lighting of the interiors and the external (marker, drumhead and tail/hazard/Mars) lights, especially on the observation cars. My favorite Lionel passenger car train is the 6-31755 Texas Special set, which consists in total of 7 21" aluminum cars based on K-Line tooling. That means that the interiors of the cars are "generic" K-Line including numerous holes in the interior floors so that the factory could glue in seats and other features using only one plastic floor piece.
Lionel has done away with that in these new cars but the basic design, including the bar, is similar. I took the Texas Special 21" observation car and made it into a "Bar Car" with three distinct sections; (1) smoking, (2) drinking and (3) stud poker/art appreciation. Here is the overall picture of the finished product, and I should note (to avoid doubt) that the whole exercise is whimsical as I doubt people of the kind I have represented would ever have been allowed on board in the real heyday of this train:
You'll notice that the middle of this interior includes a semi-circular bar similar to that in the new cars. I dressed this up with railings, a wine rack and a bartender serving up a cocktail, and of course a gigantic Lone Star beer cooler:
I used basically the same passenger figures as John R. plus some MTH Railking ones (and a few of the original Lionel passengers) without cutting them down. So here's the tail section (smokers) of this car:
The Tiffany standard lamps have LEDs in them and function when track power is applied:
Amidships is the lounge section populated with drinkers. All the drinks are quarter scale (1/48th) 3D printed dollhouse stuff. This group was put together by accident when the gal in blue slipped sideways when I was gluing the figures in place - and the goldfish bowl she is staring into is total whimsy:
The forward end of this car includes the card players, their drinks and the art (railroad poster) gallery:
The standing passenger depicted above is looking at a poster of the car's namesake, Stephen F. Austin, together with his dog/hound. The glass partition was built especially to provide a space for the poster although the prototype had something roughly similar.
This project all started with an effort to replace the window strips in this set, which became occluded because the factory used a glue that was incompatible with the plastic. Sound familiar? You bet; this kind of manufacturing gaffe is NOT new.
Then I decided to change the rear lighting in the car, which had no bulbs for the markers or tailight. I discovered from looking at some blueprints that the tailight on the prototype was actually an oscillating Mars light, so in went a simulator module to represent that. Anyway that's what I got from the blueprint, rightly or wrongly, and so I included that light feature. I like light features almost as much as I do smoke. Here's a video of the end result (kindly ignore the Gene Autry soundtrack):
You'll notice from the video and photos that the passengers, or at least the standing ones, are too tall for the interiors so only appear at waist level through the car windows. That is because the interiors of these aluminum cars are actually closer to S (1/64th scale) than O (1/48th scale). The new cars appear to accommodate O scale figures better, at least if they are sitting down. That is an improvement.
Now what about those couplers ???
