Lionel REA Scale Sensor Car, what type of Reefer is it suppose to represent?

Grampstrains posted:

If I'm not mistaken, I believe these cars were made so the shells could be changed to a road name or time period you wish to model.

Gramps,

That was stated for the PS-1 Sound Boxcars, but I have not heard that for the sensor car reefers.  That would be great if that is true for the reefers.  I wonder if the two types use the same underframe?

What do the sensor cars actually do?

Paul Kallus posted:

What do the sensor cars actually do?

The sensor cars work with the LCS sensor track.  They can be paired with TMCC locomotives or early Legacy locomotives.  In the case of a TMCC locomotive, you can create recordings using the Sensor Track, it will display the loco as it crosses a Sensor track on the LCS app. 

Using it with and pairing it with an early Legacy engine without a sensor, it will do every thing a Legacy engine with a senor will do including displaying on the iPad, trigger the pre-programmed actions, do recordings using the sensor track. 

I plan to use a sensor car with my early Legacy PRR E7 ABA set (all powered), pulling a train similar to the second-tier Admiral.  The Admiral had several head-end mail and express cars, and this is where I would put the sensor car.  I would actually prefer to just buy a kit version of the sensor package and put it in a Weaver RPO/MTH R50 (better yet, one of the engines), but Lionel has stated they probably won't do this because of the difficulty to get the sensor in the correct position to work reliably.  I may buy the cheaper sensor car and see if I can find someone to do it.

Ron

The Lionel REA Scale Sensor Car Steel Sided Reefer, 6-81294, looks like it uses Lionel's Standard O steel reefer tooling from the early 2000s.  These are nicely detailed models based on prototypes built for PFE in the mid to late 1940s.

More info on the Lionel PFE 40' steel sided ice bunker reefers can be found in the O Scale Freight car guide here:

https://ogrforum.com/t...e-steel-side-reefers

You may also be interested in the Atlas, MTH and 3rd Rail express reefers here:

https://ogrforum.com/t...-and-express-reefers

Ted,

Thank you for the link.  Since Lionel has been making that car style for a while, hopefully I can find one that fits my era and swap bodies.

I'm buying one scale sensor car and a couple of the semi-scale ones.  Since the semi-scale are cheaper, those will yield the parts for me to install into a couple of non-sensor locomotives for LCS operation.  I'll have have the scale car to move around.

John,

Please keep us up to date on your project to install sensors into non sensor engines.  Depending on how much I use my sensor tracks I may want to do the same.

I believe it'll be a fairly simple task, but I'll know more when I get a car in hand.

John,

Now that Lionel cancelled the semi-scale sensor cars (probably because too many folks were buying it just for the parts), are you still going to try this with the more expensive scale car?

Because of the expense of the sensor-car (and sensor track) as well and the neat engines coming from 3rd Rail and Atlas, I've kind of given up on the sensor track.  I may sell my sensor-car reefer from the first issue (if it ever comes). 

I ordered a couple of the sensor cars, but I am disappointed that they didn't offer a way to retrofit the logic into other equipment without buying the more expensive scale car.  I live in hope that maybe at some point ERR might offer a kit to retrofit the sensor technology into existing units, though that's a distant dream I suspect.

Need some help here. I am trying to find a PFE reefer that I can swap with the REA sensor car. One suggestion was to look for cars with 6-27xxxx but the only ones I can find is a 3 pack which includes also a sound car which I already have for PFE. Any suggestions?