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Post by runamuckchuck on Mar 29, 2024 0:05:16 GMT
As reported and verified elsewhere the passenger seats in the Vista Dome portion of the passenger cars of the Great Northern Empire Builder and the American Orient Express are facing backwards from the seats on the main floor when the car is properly oriented with the 3 red tail lights at the rear of the car not the front. Is the full dome car afflicted as well? Not sure.
With no easy fix in sight will Lionel give these poor owners the same silent treatment they gave Yeultide spelling error owners?
Also reported elsewhere it appears that when Eric Siegel presented his American Orient Express video, he reversed the orientation of the dome car(s) so that the dome passengers were seated forward not backward with the 3 red tail lights at the front of the car not the rear.
Who runs their coaches bass ackwards? Not me!
I can envision dealer returns.
Would it be fair to suspect that the Western Maryland Excursion dome car(s) suffer the same fate?
These cars even at preorder discount are not cheap by any means.
My gravitation back to both Standard and O gauge modern tinplate is looking better and better.
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Post by superwarp1 on Mar 29, 2024 3:19:08 GMT
Eric sorry to say is a Lionel enabler, he’s not going to bite the hand that feeds him. I feel your pain and other over yet another Lionel screwup. One reason I’m so worried about the up coming Berkshire release
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Post by david1 on Mar 29, 2024 4:31:44 GMT
That is horrible but my thoughts on the New triplex coming is beyond thinking Lionel is going to get the engine correct no matter the paint.
How long will people put up with these mistakes, only time will tell.
Dave
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Post by redjimmy1955 on Mar 29, 2024 11:21:57 GMT
You guys have convinced me to stick to the secondary market or Atlas or MTH for my trains. EEEEEGGGADDDs who lets Quality Control become a joke? Risk cementing a B A D reputation? And as some have stated..Lionel (LYing L) doesn't care about QC and sticks it to their consumers? Pass on Lionel...."empty customer service responses begat dwindling customer base"!
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Post by harborbelt70 on Mar 29, 2024 11:37:33 GMT
I have already switched away from Lionel's offerings due to events like this, which are inexcusable. I'm even reverting to running other scales although 3rail O is, by dint of having some things I don't want to let go of, my mainstay. In other words, I'm done getting new Lionel stuff.
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Post by ron045 on Mar 29, 2024 13:06:30 GMT
Don't most train car seats flip and reverse in the real world? Most passenger trains don't turn around either. They go in one direction, then back in the other direction. I found this cutout online. The seats are in both directions.  |
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Post by runamuckchuck on Mar 29, 2024 13:09:57 GMT
You guys have convinced me to stick to the secondary market or Atlas or MTH for my trains. EEEEEGGGADDDs who lets Quality Control become a joke? Risk cementing a B A D reputation? And as some have stated..Lionel (LYing L) doesn't care about QC and sticks it to their consumers? Pass on Lionel...."empty customer service responses begat dwindling customer base"! To be fair and balanced, this cautionary tale is more directed at the vagaries of the BTO model when combined with sketchy QC. If all Lionel products were flawed in some way it would be easy to walk away from their products. The problem is that their inconsistency means you never know if you BTO'd a lemon or a winner. Hopefully Mr. Muffin's stated experience of having no problems with these types of returns to Lionel extends to all their dealers directly or through Lionel distributors. Many Lionel products are terrific, the problem is you never know which ones until they hit dealer shelves or buyer's rails.
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Post by runamuckchuck on Mar 29, 2024 13:21:13 GMT
Don't most train car seats flip and reverse in the real world? Most passenger trains don't turn around either. They go in one direction, then back in the other direction. I found this cutout online. The seats are in both directions. Rather than flip, the dome seats swivel I believe. Nonetheless the only way to flip/swivel these dome seats around is to run the car backwards with the 3 red tail lights at the front rather than the rear of the car. I suppose the fix is to run the car the way it pleases you most/bothers you the least. With the obvious limitations of model RR, I prefer to have my passengers all eyes front. It just seems more logical/likely at least to me. But keep in mind that this issue was spotted by someone who populates his passenger cars. If you do not put passengers in the dome maybe nobody will notice/it doesn't really matter. It seems unlikely that it was a conscious decision by Lionel to have the dome seats facing rearwards.
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Post by trainman9 on Mar 29, 2024 14:57:32 GMT
Is it possible to open up these cars and reverse the direction of the seats.
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Post by runamuckchuck on Mar 29, 2024 15:24:55 GMT
Is it possible to open up these cars and reverse the direction of the seats. Evidently the access to the lower level via the stairwell does not make this simple rotation possible.
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Post by david1 on Mar 31, 2024 4:37:18 GMT
The question is why do these mistakes keep happening. Why can other companies have far fewer mistakes especially at the prices they are selling for. It seems the management team is not doing their job. Any job I ever worked for QC was always job one. Why Lionel can't seem to get a handle on their quality is beyond believe. Any company that don't are on the track to not surviving very long. Lets hope for the best for Lionel in the future.
Dave
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Post by harborbelt70 on Mar 31, 2024 9:47:07 GMT
Is it possible to open up these cars and reverse the direction of the seats. Evidently the access to the lower level via the stairwell does not make this simple rotation possible.
I think that Lionel has used the same assembly in all of its Vista Dome ABS cars. What seems to me to be an oddity is that unlike the other interior assembly parts, it is not a once piece moulding - the seats have been separately applied, and this probably accounts for the factory mistake. Even though the assembly looks like one piece the seats are actually fixed in place by pegs underneath that are cross-headed so that they can only be installed facing one way or the other. I found this out when I took out the assembly in one of these cars to turn the seats into a dome dining compartment: In my case I had to drill out the pegs, replace them with round styrene rods and then ensure that they were lined up correctly. It is not a simple job but it was part of a project in which I added dining tables as per the basic configuration of the prototype (the City of San Francisco dome observation car), actual floor level lighting and, of course, sundry diners on an excursion run:
 This could have been got right at the factory and trying to do the exercise of turning seats individually is too much to expect the customer to do, especially on more than one dome. I had a particularly elaborate plan for my car and in the project this was only one part of it.
P.S. Regarding ron045's diagram posted above, I think that you will find that most extended dome cars had seats facing both ways but in the Vista Dome cars they faced the direction of travel (i.e. the shorter end of the car’s roof) and were frequently angled so as to look out in that direction.
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Post by runamuckchuck on Mar 31, 2024 12:40:39 GMT
Good insight.
Wonderful outcome interior detail wise. The floor covering is especially stylish.
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Post by rockymountaineer on Mar 31, 2024 13:28:32 GMT
Whoa!!! Yet another factory goof that almost makes one conclude this is the first time Lionel has produced passenger cars. You just can’t make up a more creative story with all these mistakes. Seems no matter where we turn, compromise is always part of a Lionel purchase.
Even stuff that was done well decades ago comes off the assembly line with a glaring error nowadays. And Lionel’s position is “take it or leave it”. They just looked the other way on the YUELTIDE misspelling on their top-of-the-line Christmas passenger set — pretending nothing was wrong. That pretty much established an all-time poor “crap happens and we just don’t care” attitude.
I don’t see this changing anytime soon. Lionel is producing far too many SKU’s in a management culture that treats every product like it’s just another widget. And our comments here are viewed as speaking another language — dare I say gibberish — to these people.
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Post by runamuckchuck on Mar 31, 2024 14:28:24 GMT
First let me assure you all that rockymountaineer and I are not the same person, even though we have never been seen at the same place at the same time. Nor do we collaborate on our QC posts. We do however appear to share the same expectation when it comes to money spent and value received.
A local hobby store in discussing these production gaffs across scales and gauges with me indicated that they had been told by a number of model train importers with whom they deal (not Lionel directly) that their QC folks are still not being allowed into factories in China due to COVID. To paraphrase, the importers don't know what they have until it get's here. That in and of itself is problematic from a sustainable business model however it begs the question what does the importer do if and when they know there is a problem?
The reaction at least from Lionel seems in large part do nothing, as evidenced by the Yueltide misspelling, the 20th Century cosmetic issues of gray tone and striping width/location, the chronic K-4 (and other models) gear box rengineering that has not been done after years of issues/malfunctions, and undisclosed deviation from the appearance of custom runs as in the Trainworld KATY diesel from 2023.
Forget we consumers, what is the bridge too far moment for our model train dealer friends? Perhaps we are seeing the tip of the iceberg with some dealers refusing to deal with any Lionel issues instructing their customer to take it up with Lionel themselves directly.
Talk about punitive marketing, but maybe it is just survival mode for select dealers.
It is almost like clockwork that this whack a mole topic of quality pops up again with virtually every group of new product arrival from Lionel.
Oh new stuff just arrived from Lionel; wait for it.
Are backward seats in a partial dome car a threat to western civilization as we know it? Certainly not.
Maintain perspective and simply refuse delivery, return it as defective, or keep it and enjoy it.
The choice as always is yours.
I am just happy the yet to arrive City of Miami set has no partial dome cars!
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