New Lionel E8/9

You're right.  Looks like heavily photoshopped E7 artwork (which Lionel used an E6 pilot on.)

 

Wrong numberboards, too.  

 

I always say you can't trust catalog artwork, but this is a horrible misrepresentation.

 

Rusty

Hopefully,  they will resurrect the Kline tooling.  Otherwise these will be a hodge podge of toy like units.

Don't forget the HUGE gap that the Legacy E7's came with If that's still the case with the E8/9's, just put them in the o27 category.  

When I heard about these I hoped it would be new tooling like the F3/7s and the new PAs.  Then I saw those pics and preordering became WAY too risky.   

The catalog does look a little thrown together in places and I would not necessarily think that the images represent the actual product design. At the bottom of the online catlog pages where the images copied above appear, there is also a bodged image of the CZ 4 car set - the tops of the vista domes have been cropped out. The set is shown with them on Lionel's product pages.

 

Not a case where I would be inclined to risk a pre-order.

Remember when the E7's were first cataloged - they had a very long snout nose illustrated, which they did fix.  I do wish however that tooling on par with the F3/F7 be created for these (wish that were the case for the E7 . . )

 

Robert

Hope they get the production models correct especially for the prices listed even with the dealer discounts. I'm sure we remember the messed up E7s. Several of them were returned by my model train dealer as customer's objected the look of the engine's nose and the incorrect foot steps.

I own 4 sets of E8s AAs from Weaver Models purchased in 1991-92, Canadian Pacific, Amtrak, Southern Pacific, and Santa Fe, and 2 sets of ABAs from MTH purchased in 1998, Rock Island and MKT Texas Special. The Weaver models do not any sound as built and the MTH models are proto-one. The dies for the MTH models were gotten from Weaver.