Lionel's pre-order only product question

I personally am not the least bit concerned about Lionel having sufficient parts to repair our equipment for years to come.

If you are worried, why not write directly to Lionel and get the answer from them rather than to ask Forum members (other than people who work for Lionel like Mike Reagan) who couldn't possibly answer this for you.

Lionel has never really "disclosed" how they stock parts. it has been mentioned many parts come from whole locomotives dissassembled by Mike Reagan and Co.

Mike Reagan has revamped Lionels parts and service in a big way over the past several years. He is now overseeing production, and I'm sure he's already thought of making parts available. I don't recall anyone sending in a locomotive under warranty only to be sent back with Lionel saying there are no parts. As far as out of warranty locos go, Lionel stocks thousands of parts for locos made as far back as 2000.

When it comes to parts availability in O guage, Lionel is by far the leader. Perusing the parts section on the website will demonstrate this.

Heres 500 pages worth, this is only the "legacy" items mind you.

Lionel Legacy Parts

Heres another 500 pages of TMCC stuff if you aren't convinced.

Lionel TMCC Parts

I still don't know where folks get the idea that Lionel has no parts available?

Thanks, guess your reply was the final decision maker to put the deposit out there. Thanks again.

What you are showing in your example is 500 parts not pages.  Or am I confused?

Buzz

Lionel's current policy does seem to be break down assembled engines for parts.

If the same part is defective in all of them, there is going to be some very unhappy customers.

It is just amazing how many (small) parts it takes to make a diesel or a steam locomotive model like Lionel's work. Most people who purchase these locomotives rarely think about the parts until one or more parts are needed. I help out at my local hobby store in Ardsley, NY two days a week and when a customer brings in a locomotive that is not working properly we test it first and if indeed something is not  working as it should we try to figure out why and then tell the customer how to obtain service from Lionel or MTH or Atlas or Bachmann-Williams or Sunset Models-3rd Rail, etc. Most of the time the problem is a bad component(s) on a circuit board.

In that case they would make a run of the replacement part   Geez people 

Actually I think the question was somewhat thinking out loud. And I think forum members answered it well and probably more convincingly that Lionel would have. Often, companies do too much thinking about repercussions and not enough answering. Customer reviews can be telling even when they are guided by unusual personal issues.

Chuck:

I am glad you are comfortable with the comments made by our Forum members and you believe you now have an answer that satisfies you.

I have never had an issue with Lionel in terms of products or related parts, so the thought of being worried about the BTO product parts never crossed my mind, not does it worry me now.

I have seen some late model engine parts which are unavailable...such as pilots on some diesels, etc. There was an engine on eBay which had no smoke and was missing the rear pilot with steps. I thought it was a good buy at less than half list, but the pilot part was listed as unavailable. Couple that with the possibility that it had no smoke because someone might have taken the smoke unit out made it a questionable buy. The seller seems to not know anything about the details. I bought a Mikado from this seller I think which had no sounds. Big surprise...two circuit boards missing from the tender. Luckily the Railsounds board was there, but the other two missing. It turned out to be an ok buy...needed some steps on the tender and a pile of screws missing. But all in all, Lionel had everything I needed in that case.

I do kind of wonder about some of the parts that go missing with great frequency. One issue was windows out of the non-vision gensets. Almost all of them were missing out of one I received new and all but one of them were in the foam in the box. Lionel quickly sent me one. But what about all the gensets? If the windows fell out of many of them, then one would think a run of windows, not engines, would be necessary.

Another common missing part is the rotating bearing cap from lots of rolling stock trucks. Sometimes they are not in the box. I know of two that were totally missing. Not a big deal, but seems like a bearing cap run would be needed in manufacture but certainly not hoppers. How many hopper bodies would go missing? They must make parts as well as finished products as part sources.

Did you click on anything listed? Its a combination of seperate smoke unit parts breakdowns and entire locomotive parts breakdowns.

The use of "parts" is a bit off,it should be locomotives/ smoke units. There has to be several thousand parts for several hundred locomotives listed.

It also says this:

Notice: More than 500 parts matched your search, please refine your criteria to narrow the results. Only the first 500 parts will be shown.

I did a general TMCC/legacy search, so it automatically stops at 500 selections, there are still more not listed as it asks you to "narrow" the search.