I was talking to a Lionel parts guy at Saturday's train show. He's kind, knowledgeable and has been a huge help over the years finding parts for the handful of postwar locomotives I kept from our family Lionel. Of recent generation Lionel, he said the parts situation can get frustrating. Initially, when Lionel decided to export production, they engineered everything in house. Their drawings were used for production and parts sourcing was easy because all were of uniform design. But as time went buy, Lionel quit doing the engineering and decided to let the overseas manufacturers do it all. Thus, with each manufacturer using its own design, shared parts became a thing of the past and it's led to difficulty in finding what's needed. We've seen some of this in N Scale too, haven't we?
Ah yes, the lose of production has brought much troubles. In many forms. Most interests and possibilities have been changed. Sad.
Bringing up the Lionel ZW transformers again, there are some YouTube videos of guys repairing/restoring them and wow, what engineering went into those! Pretty complex! Doug
