Well, my last two purchases have caused me problems. First, the BNSF Container cars. They used to come joined at the middle truck and ready-to-run. Now, they come as two separate cars with no instructions on how to put them together. It's not that hard to figure out, but you have to remove a 3/16" pin on the one truck to add the second car to it. If you don't have a 3/16" nut driver (like me), it is no picnic. My buddy finally got the pin out with a pair of needle-nosed pliers so all is well., but why no instructions (I had to search for something close on Lionel's website) and why having to put them together in the first place?
Second problem is the new Scale O piggyback trailer set. (Beautiful, btw.) On mine which just arrived, one of the standards that holds one end of one trailer came falling out of the box. You can see where it went and where it looked like it was originally glued to the car floor. Plus there is a tiny pin that holds the apparatus together and it was rolling around in the box, too. After spending nearly an hour trying to get the pin back into the standard to hold it up properly w/o luck, I gave up and propped the trailer on the flatcar. It looks pretty good, actually, but what the heck? Pay all that money and have the stuff fall apart out of the box?
I would suggest that Lionel back off a bit with the FRAGILE scale details and use components that are more bulletproof.
When I buy a Lionel product, I do not want to have to finagle with it for hours before I can get it semi working, you know? Plus a lot of Lionel's customers are old guys like me and our hands don't work so good with these tiny, tiny parts anymore when we have to assemble or reassemble them.
Frustrated.
