Lionel Dead Rail (Battery Powered) Sets

They did a few of these last year (Thomas, Barbie, and North Pole), so those are available now.  I think the most exciting thing for this year's batch is the addition of bluetooth, allowing you to run it with the cab3 bluetooth or base3.

I picked up the Thomas set for the novelty of it last year, and it is pretty neat.  It navigates my o gauge layout without any issues.  Based on my experiences, I only see two issues:

1) Wheels are all plastic, so they won't activate anything that uses an isolated rail.  I noticed this with my non-derailing switches pretty quickly.  On the flip side, there isn't anything to short out when it derails, especially if track power is off!
2) The pulling power isn't terribly impressive.  You could certainly put any old O gauge cars behind the engine, but it'll stall out or slip pretty quickly.  There is at least one thread on here discussing this limit and some potential ways to address it.

It makes sense to keep things tame like this if you're trying to optimize for run time.  At this price point, I'm sure they will be successful, which will hopefully result in the dead rail concept moving up the product lines.  As-is they're practically Lionchief.  It seems like a pretty small leap to beef up the motor driver and accommodate a larger battery so you can start putting it in die cast stuff.

I wonder how hard would it be to modify one of these upcoming bluetooth boards for a bigger motor drive.