Lionel legacy crewtalk and towercom

No offense to you Matt but I find your thread kinda funny. What I gather here on the forum is that most folks despise the crewtalk especially in steam locomotive. I believe Lionel took the hint and went with generic crewtalk as a result. For me I can take it or leave it, however, I do find the railroad appropriate accents and phrases on the older Lionel stuff comical. I.E.  my  B&A switcher,"fifty twee heeya, we're awf to da clam bake"

From Jon Z CTO of Lionel at the Legacy User's Group meeting at April York...  Jon's response in RED.

• I'd like to know what plans Lionel has for Crew talk and Tower Comm? The dialogue has been dumbed down a bit. I'd really like for Lionel to get back to unique cab#'s and some more meaningful dialogue in the sound set. For example in Steam engines I'd rather have communication between the fireman and engineer about what they are doing in the locomotive. I think that would be more realistic and pleasing to hear.

>>Crew Talk and Tower com will not have road names or number callouts unless it is a Vision locomotive. We have been given lots of feedback from the community that “Talking Locos” are not prototypical, and to tone down the dialogs. We have, and my decision as CTO is our Tower and Crew talk are fine as delivered, and no plans to change are in process. To change the paradigm, we have added sequence control and much more variety in the tower and crew talk dialogs. Our locos are more feature rich than any time in our history of Command Control, and more to come with our IR transmission on the belly of the loco.

There was some talk a few months ago that a club (I think LCCA) had just got word that the special run General engine they had was going to have Crewtalk. I told them it better sound like some guy shouting out a window. Still waiting to hear what they get.

I have fun with Crewtalk, but I can take it or leave it. Some people really got bent when the non engine specific Crewtalk was released. I thought it was nice because if you repainted/renumbered a locomotive you could still use crewtalk and not worry about the dispatcher saying "844" when you renumbered it to 836 etc

Matt,

How did you get "Cajun" out of what RickO had wrote? He was talking about a Boston accent.   lol...I find that hilarious....When I think "Cajun" I think of the Cajun guy from the movie The Waterboy with Adam Sandler.

Nick B.

I actually don't use it that much but in my opion RS4 with intelligable crew talk was the best,but people complained and they came out with RS5 now you can understand what is being said and guess what,people complained. Now we have RS5.5 again people are complaing!  Where does it stop??????

Just my 2 dimes

Doug

Just because some people on a forum express their dislike for a particular feature (one by the way that they are not required to use) does not mean everyone dislikes it.  I have always enjoyed the feature and would not purchase TMCC locomotives made by Atlas or Weaver or Kline because their engines lacked that particular feature.  When showing my layout to visitors, this feature was and is a real crowd pleaser.

earlier this year I purchased three new Legacy engines and was very excited about each (Southern Crescent PS-4, Santa Fe Northern, and Southern Mikado).  That is about $3000 worth of engines.  I have been severely disappointed with tje lack of engine specific announcements and decided to sell them and replace with the earlier versions.  I also canceled the UP 9000 knowing that it too would have the same exact sounds as the other three.  (there is nothing quite like having the engineer of a Southern Crescent engine respond with a heavy New York accent).

When Jerry Calibrese announced the Vision line of products several years ago, he inferred that Vision features would trickle down to non-Vision Legacy engines.  It seems that the reverse is true.  Features that have been on better TMCC equipped engine since 1998 are now only going to be available on Vision engines.

I understand that I am not their biggest customer but I will not be purchasing any new Lionel engines until this feature is restored.

Happy railroading,

Don

We've only recently 'moved up' to Legacy with the K4 and now a UP Mikado that we will re-letter for Southern. It irritates me that I have to listen to the IDENTICAL voices in both steamers and especially the thick 'New Yawk' accent from my Southern Mikado....

......not to mention this famous "crewtalk voice"

Guys and gals, just think about this...

The fact that Vision Line locomotives continue to have roadname-specific cab chatter should tell us something.  If Lionel were TRULY listening to consumer feedback about making Crewtalk/Towercom less of a high-profile feature, then why wouldn't they carry that important feedback directly into their top-tier product line?  I'm betting the REAL reason for generic cab chatter had much more to do with helping to trim product costs on all but the highest price products whose pricetag (by default) makes it MUCH more feasible to go through the cost and coordination of managing new voice talent for each new locomotive.  It's all about the money, folks.  Everything else is just marketing speak. 

David

I fully expected to get the answer from Jon I got.  I appreciate Marty adding it to the LUG agenda.

David, of course it's about money.  Everything in business is!  This is not a newsflash.

Didn't say it was news, Charlie.  Just pointing out a "slightly" different reasoning than the corporate party line.  Nothing more... nothing less.  As you indicated, you got the answer you expected to hear at York.

David

I was a bit disappointed to but the sequence controls and other things coming down the pike will make it much easier to forget about crew talk.

It's harder to understand why Lionel would choose a heavy New York (?) accent for their new "universal" sound set.

Is that the case for diesel as well as steam?

so far, yes.

Maybe I am in the minority, maybe not, but know I enjoy the tower com and crew talk feature.  I like c.sam am annoyed that the engineer in my ATSF Northern with the think NY accent is the same engineer in my UP 9000.  I understand not using road number specific dialog, but I feel Lionel should at least use different voices for different engines.  How expensive would that be?

The fact that they have the same dialog saves programming time, I think that's the whole point.  If they had different voices, they'd have no more expense including engine numbers.

Personally, I think it was a mistake removing the engine numbers, I thought that was a touch of class.  Not that the crew talk is all that classy, but at least that helped.

My grandson doesn't like the locomotives that don't have crew talk, that's the first thing he checks.

I hope one day they return to doing the crew talk with the numbers,maybe if enough people were to request it enough to change Lionel's mind on it, but the point is I think Lionel is losing it with the crew talk but keeping up with the features(features that break).

Gosh, I don't know, why not simply make it optional and you only trigger it if you want to?

I also want the old crew talk back. Part of the fun was the different voices for each engine. 

I too miss the old crew talk.

I will agree with Marty that my initial experience with the sequence control (I'm forgetting if that's the actual feature name) is positive, but it does not IMHO replace the "cool" factor of the engine specific crew-talk and tower-com.

If it would help the cause, I'd be OK with reverting to the crewtalk and tower-com that said the same thing, regardless of the other actions going on(unlike more recent offerings where you have different exchanges based on whether you are stopped/moving, etc). 

-Dave