Now that I am catching up from my trip to the Lionel Red Carpet Event in North Carolina, I have time to talk about some of the things I saw during my visit to Lionel.
One of the most pleasant experiences was being able to see, touch and try out the LCCA Monon Operating boxcar for 2014. The two production samples unwrapped in Mike Reagan's office were flawlessly decorated, came in Conventional Classics boxes and worked perfectly. I manipulated one of the samples by hand and Ryan Kunkel of Lionel took the other one and tried it out on the test layout with similar happy results. This is really a nice unit and the reason I am mentioning it now is that April 1st is the deadline for LCCA members to order one. My understanding from the powers-that-be at LCCA is they are going to take it off the web site tomorrow, so if you have not ordered one yet, now is the time or buy it, or you will probably pay a lot more for one, if available, on the secondary market.
This is the first operating boxcar of its type in the multi-year Conventional Classics series, which makes it of special significance to me as a collector. Anyway, now that I saw one "in the flesh" and how good it looked, I wanted folks to know that you could still get one as an LCCA member, for the next few hours at least.
Ed Boyle
