MTH wins lawsuit against Lionel

Model Train Maker Lionel Says It Will Appeal Court Ruling Detroit Free Press, June 8, 2004

Oh, and the stuff you run that you have to keep flicking with your finger to keep it moving is better? Aparently you haven't seen any modern Lionel or MTH. S/V Express 30 "Ringmaster" "No shirt, no skirt, full service"

That is incorrect. There is no lawsuit against all of the makers of DCC.

Here's a pretty good in-depth article about the background of the MTH lawsuit:

"Train Wreck"

I found the quote from one of the jurors particulary interesting: "... juror Edward Rutkowski, a 51-year-old tooling layout inspector and the only member of the jury with relevant technical manufacturing expertise, explained one of the determining factors. 'What was pretty damning,' he says, 'we brought into the jury room two trains [an MTH and a Lionel]. I flipped them over and the way the screw holes and everything lined up there was no doubt in my estimation that it was a copied design. You could have literally screwed the parts for one train to the other.'

I also found it interesting that MTH's lawyers claimed that their production schedule wound up in the posession of Lionel's president and other top employees.

"The INC story was a sorry piece of puff journalism and was an embarrassment to an otherwise good magazine."

- Jerry Calabrese, CEO of Lionel LLC, February 16, 2005

Source:

Really?

"but people in the business have always played rough. The industry's legendary founder, Joshua Lionel Cowen,

Really?

he positioned trains as the ultimate feel-good father-son bonding hobby

Oh, come on?!

I think Calabrese was right, based on these quotes! :-)

No doubt penned by a Rainbow Coalition Member. Can you say "sappy"?

CH

Really.

Anyone here have a ghetto on their layout?

Post something about adding graffiti to your rolling stock. Usual answer is "Not on MY railroad."

There was a recent thread here where folks gushed nostalgic about their early mrr experiences.

We model what we want and 99% of the time it's a "gauzy, nostalgic innocence" right out of Disney.

And there's NOTHING wrong with that!

H*ll, I don't want to model reality. Model railroading is an escape from reality. I can make the world like I want it.

Are you saying Lionel wasn't one of the "founding fathers" of the industry?

Sure, where do you want to go?

Look at the Lionel ads from those days. Pure father/son sappy. It was great marketing. Still is.

Calabrese is in denial on the lawsuit.

Mike Tennent "IronPenguin"

How about the Franklin and South Manchester. The whole layout is a monument to decay, neglect, dilapidation and hard times.

It might ruin the value of that $35 RTR rolling stock.

Everyone has good memories and gets nostalgic over childhood times. We had some Lionel stuff and I still have it. from day one I thought how crappy those trains looked compared to my dads HO models or the pictures in MR. And I really felt sorry for the kids who only had the real junky Marx stuff.

I thought its 99% right out of the box RTR no modeling involved. But way back when most everyone's layout I remember was Tin plate or RTR HO stuff with snap track. So I guess one is nostalgic for what he had or saw and we all saw Disney movies.

Well as they say...... to each his own. But for me everything is wrong with that. I want the world of the layout to be as realistic as I'm able to produce. My dads layout was fun but it was bazaar and I don't want mine to look like that.When I look at the world around me there is no fantasy land that is so amassing. The real world can be incredibly beautiful or incredibly ugly but always incredible. My wife says I'm just easily entertained as I can watch the sunset over a garbage dump and be amazed by both when no normal person would give either a second thought. Maybe she's right.

Model railroading for me is interesting and good way to temporarily get away from people. I guess I too make the world as I want it but in an effort to duplicate what I think it really looks like.

He was the founding father of a company that made and sold fake looking trains that ran on hideous three rail tracks to the masses and that market evolved in to the hobby of acquiring expensive junk. Who founded the industry or craftsman type hobby of scale model railroading?

My wife bought a tin Lionel sign with dad and son both expressing amazement over the trains all done in warm soothing colors. Sugar sweet. I like my picture of a derelict looking RGS #40 much better.

I doubt he is actually in denial. If he was in denial it would be because he is in conflict with his morals and ethics. In this situation I think he is acting in the best interest of the company and his pay check and that might mean truth, morals and ethics could be a nuisance. Apparently Mike the Injured is capable of invoking his morals and ethics or putting them aside as required by his business as well. So they are just normal guys.

What's that when it's at home?

Yes! LOL!

If by ghetto you mean a rundown industrial/urban landscape, yes. I seem to recall numerous posts here extolling a certain layout which is simply one enormous ghetto.

Which is contradicted by the number of layouts where graffiti is plainly evident, articles in the modelling press that describe methods to recreate graffiti, and the increasing number of graffiti decals produced. Someone must be buying them.

That's the problem with sweeping generalisations. I've lived in Australia most of my life, so Disney means nothing to me. I'm not the only one here who has no affinity with that particular manifestation of American culture.

Perhaps, perhaps not, but there is much that is wrong with the assumption that we all have the same cultural baggage.

Who's "H*ll" when he's at home?

He founded his own company. He didn't found the industry.

Great marketing for Lionel, but they're not relevant to the whole model railroad hobby.

I'm in no position to comment on that, as I'm unfamiliar with the full story. And likely to remain that way, since the business affairs of two toy train manufacturers are of no interest to me.

I do agree with his comment regarding the quality of the article.

The article was a sappy piece of journalistic poo-poo. Dingo dung.

The Inc. Magazine article was very good. If I am ever in the market for an expensive O scale train, I'll buy MTH and boycott Lionel. I appreciate MTH for taking the market in the direction of quality, realistic scale trains and I dislike Lionel for its history of toy-like kiddie junk.

Nope. That's not what anyone means when they use the term ghetto.

And the Franklin and Manchester (I assume that's what you're referring to) is still more nostalgia than reality.

Sort of like "West Side Story" compared to "Gangs of New York."

I tried carrying them. No-one bought them and I ended up giving them away at cost. Most of the pics of them I've seen in the model mags were in their ads for them.

Yeah, right.

Get over Disney.

Pick the Australian equivalent of the gauzy past that didn't really exist and you have it.

Pick the German equivalent of the gauzy past that didn't really exist and you have it.

Pick the Chilean equivalent of the gauzy past that didn't really exist and you have it.

Like I said, even the Franklin and Manchester is more nostalgia than reality.

I didn't say that. We all have our cultural baggage from our own culture. That's what we model. To contend otherwise is silly.

OK, sure. They were just a bit player. Didn't impact anything.

Yeah, sorry, You're right. Lionel was irrelevant to the growth of the model railroad industry. Their ads were ineffective. None of us dreamed of a new Lionel under the Christmas tree. We didn't play with them when we got them. Our fathers didn't help set them up.

And of course the "World's Greatest Hobby" campaign, which is using that same marketing approach, is irrelevant to the whole industry, too.

Mike Tennent "IronPenguin"

Some of it was, but I guess my historian background allows me to read stuff like that and look for the unintentional insights. You have to do it all the time when reading first person accounts, etc. You know there's a bias, so you use that as a test and contrast to other statements or known facts.

Filter out the obvious fluff and discount the bias and there are some interesting insights into BOTH sides.

Couple it with the transcript of the Lionel chatroom session Mark M. recently posted and it's easy to see that this thing is going to get even nastier. The only ones that will really win, as usual, are the lawyers.

Mike Tennent "IronPenguin"

Define it for me, since the meaning is not one I'm familiar with.

Nostalgia for what? The Wall Street crash and the depression that followed?

Again, you are making a comparison that means nothing to me.

You didn't see recent articles in MR, RMC, RMJ, and CM then?

You couldn't sell graffiti decals, so by extension nobody anywhere at all wants them?

Yeah, exactly. Growing up in rural Australia in the 1960s somewhat limited my exposure to cinema and television. I'd heard of Mickey Mouse, but that's about as far as it went. I've never wanted to model anything with ears stuck on it.

Disney was your analogy, not mine.

As far as I can see, we have no equivalent. We haven't developed an nostalgia industry of the sort you refer to. As for your claim that 99% of us model a non-existant "gauzy past", that ignores the people who model the present, the here-and-now - who are certainly more than 1% of the hobby. What are they nostalgic for, if they model the things they see when they simply look out the window? That's the problem with sweeping generalisations.

Fantasy, more like.

To contend otherwise is perfectly reasonable. I know a lot of people, and know of many others, who model railroads from other countries, other eras, that they have no direct or indirect personal experience of, or any cultural links to. I'm helping someone build a layout based on a railway I've never seen, in a place I've never visited. Neither of us have any cultural baggage associated with it, and yet that's what we're modelling. How silly is that?

I'm sure they had an impact. Their impact didn't extend to founding the model railroad industry, as the article asserts. With your background as a historian, I'd have thought you'd be aware of this.

Everything I've read suggests Cowen was hostile towards the rest of the industry. Their marketing was intended to promote their own product at the expense of others. To contend their ads were designed to promote the growth of other players in the industry is just silly. You seem to have trouble distinguishing between an individual brand, and the hobby industry as a whole.

That's your own cultural baggage at work. Anybody outside the US would have entirely different experiences. Come to that, anybody in the US who was into American Flyer, or any other brand than Lionel would have different experiences. Until quite recently, I'd never even seen a Lionel train, let alone dreamed of them under the Christmas tree. (After having seen one, I don't know what all the fuss is about.)

It's relevant to the MRIA, Kalmbach, and the manufactures who sponsor the campaign, only one of which is based outside the US - at a pinch two, if you regard Kato U.S.A as being foreign-based. It's relevance to the whole industry is questionable, given that there is more to model railroading than simply"feel-good father-son bonding", as the article states.

It's relevance, or even recognition, outside the USA is limited.

The John Howard Picket fence of the 1950's

Mark, I have some Lionel which we brought back with when my family moved back to Australia after a 3 year stint in the US. With that being said they are pretty rough and ready a bit like Lima's DL 530 model that gets he who shall not be named nickers in a knot over. Imagine what he would say about the wheel profiles and the like. One thing I know are that the AC motors are quite heavy beasts.

Wait a minute. I'm under the impression that you model modern US railroading, right? And you aren't familiar with an ordinary term like ghetto in it's modern US context? Goodness.

Yes, as incredible as that may sound. When folks talk nostalgically about the "good old days" (let me guess, you aren't familiar with that term, either) it's the 20's, 30's and 40's that they're talking about.

When pressed - "Do really think food lines were good? Wasn't the depression bad? What about the lynchings in the south?" they tend to hem and haw a bit before admitting that they were being a bit selective in their memory - which is how folks who model that era tend to be also.

And as I said before - there's nothing wrong (or unexpected) about that.

You keep pointing out your limited knowledge of other cultures and history. Is that supposed to help your argument that you can model them correctly?

Mark, your cultural baggage is that you grew up in Australia. Your cultural baggage is that your perception of another country is based on filtering through your own country's media and your own experiences.

Does it surprise you that many Americans think Foster's is the best and most popular Australian beer? That's cultural baggage.

Are you comfortable that many Americans perception of Australians starts and ends with Crocodile Dundee? That's cultural baggage.

Are you sure you're perceptions of the US aren't similarly skewed by YOUR cultural baggage?

What's silly is that you seem to think you can do it unfettered by your own cultural baggage.

Which was made clear in the article you have labeled as fluff.

I haven't contended that at all. Please confine yourself to what I have said, not what you'd like for me to have said.

No, all I've said was that Lionel was one of the founding fathers of the industry. Would you care to dispute that?

Are you saying that the health of the major players is irrelevant to the rest of the industry? You think that if the mrr industry in the US shrinks and dies of old age (as many of the doomsayers repeat here endlessly) that the European market would fuel enough sales to provide all of us with the incredible variety of products now being produced?

I haven't heard that particular argument, but you're free to make it.

Mike Tennent "IronPenguin"

snip......

And you would be speaking of Loki?

Ooops, said it.

When it comes to getting knickers in knots, there is no sortage here of people who do that. (LOL)