Lionel sues K-Line

[okiechoochoo]

I am amazed. Why does anyone keep tapes (remember Watergate?) or records on computers of any thing they say or do that may come back and bite them. What idiots.

[zwbob]

[:O][:O][:O][:O][:O]OH NO will I ever see my CSX club engine

[brianel027]

Oh well, maybe FOX could consider doing a reality show on the 3-rail train hobby. I think this would all be a good laugh if they all ended up on Judge Judy... that would be the only humor to be found in this mess.

The ironic thing is that while trying to advance the hobby forward through unsurpassed detail and constantly changing "improved" technology, the various train companies are slitting eachothers' throats. And everyone's move to China (a regular box car costs $2.00 to make and ship to the USA) has hardly brought down prices on trains. The increasing costs of new technology and new tooling to make trains that appeal to the minority has continued to contribute to making trains unaffordable to the masses. And as ChiefEagles said, we the train consumers will end up paying for this mess.

Most folks I talk to could care less about digitial control trains with speed control... there's something magical about running trains with the simple turn of a level on a transformer that has worked for nearly 90 years... though I know there are those who will disagree with that.

For the past decade the train companies have for the most part ignored the youth market with zero product development or tooling for this market. They've courted the minority in an oversaturated market that has poor visability and distribution and zero advertising outside of the model train press. They can't afford advertising, yet they can afford lawyers and ligitation. They thought they couldn't afford to not outdo eachother with the latest new scale/technology ladden thing. Now they may not be able to afford to even be in business. They've all been cost cutting in recent months: a sure sign that things are not so great in the train manufacturing biz.

K-Line wanted Bob Grubba and they got him. And they now may get more than they bargained for. They should have stuck with what they once did better than anyone else... making quality decent affordable starter trains, and made the needed improvements on that stuff... maybe tooled up a new modern Dash-9 type diesel for the 027 market as I long ago told Maury Klein that he needed to do, but he didn't listen.

They did get a lot of good press with their scale engine releases and cars though. I remember the headline: "K-Line Finally Gets Serious." Now things will probably get serious for K-Line and they will get some new press they didn't count on.

Quote: "K-Line had no immediate comment." Yeah, no surprise.

[IRONROOSTER]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Daniel Lang

QUOTE: Originally posted by Reading and PA RR

Oh, and remember this too: That computer program called Evidence Eliminator does not eliminate evidence! Neither does reformatting the hard drives. So, if you dispose of a computer, and it had been used for anything personal, like banking, or eCommerce or Ebay, or any other thing that could contain your credit card numbers or any other identifying info, well, you need to take out the hard drives and sma***hem to bits with hammers.

Actually, a simple disk wipe program will destroy all the files:
http://www.thefreecountry.com/security/securedelete.shtml

Darik's Boot and Nuke sounds good:
http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Just make sure the utility can handle the largest disks so it overwrites all the sectors. (Some older utilities have disk size limitations).

Daniel Lang

Unfortunately, even after overwriting you can often still read the data using special equipment. I would sma***he drive, and burn the pieces.
Enjoy
Paul

[AlanRail]

Okay so now that Lionel is the big bad aggressor instead of MTH; are we all still feeling that protecting your ASSets is unimportant?

Despite the lawyer-bashing, lawyers don't create these situations where there's someone to sue. And if anyone must profit from the stupidity of others. . . why not us lawyers? Better it should be plumbers or cardiologists?? They already profit enough from others poor piping problems. However, here it’s a different type of "LEAKS."

The reason trade secret lawsuits are so expensive is that they're worth it. Anyway, whatever Lionel wins WILL go into the pot that in part will find its way into MTH’s pot.

So we should all thank Mr. Klein for helping Lionel pay MTH. And some of you cynics say this hobby doesn’t look out for itself.

[brianel027]

On a slightly off, but related subject, read the following story about one of the largest train retailers in the country (and also a distributor for some product lines). Though I don't agree with him that railroads are going away (the big Class A's seem to be stronger than ever), he may be speaking some truth about model train companies.

http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=184820&source=r_technology

[cheese3]

I'm tired of this lawsuit crap it is almost enough to make me shy away from O scale.

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by IRONROOSTER
Unfortunately, even after overwriting you can often still read the data using special equipment. I would sma***he drive, and burn the pieces.
Enjoy
Paul

The ability to recover overwritten data using special equipment is overrated. It requires special equipment such as magnetic force microscopy, which puts it beyond the budgets of most data recovery firms. For an article covering disk data recovery, the German magazine C'T took some disk drives and overwrote them with a single pass of zeros. None of the commercial data recovery firms were able to recover data (most were unwilling to even try).

Daniel Lang

[Anonymous]

If the allegations are true, and they probably are, K-Line should agree to pay a royalty for the technology being used of 7 - 10% of net sales and move on, and Lionel should take it. But neither will, why not spend hours and hours in depositions, conference calls with attorneys, gathering documents, and spending millions in attorney fees.

I'm sure that Lionel's attorneys have taken the case on contingency, so common business sense does not come in to play, its all about their cut of the settlement or award.

[iguanaman3]

I am amazed. Why does anyone keep tapes (remember Watergate?) or records on computers of any thing they say or do that may come back and bite them. What idiots.

Or maybe crazy like a fox, That evidence saved his @ss with Lionel when they caught him I bet. No one could be THAT stupid. He told Grubba that his drive crashed so he couldn't erase it...and then starts "cooperating" with Lionel. Hmmm.
Anyway we know what the new TMCC2 Odyssey will be like. I have it in my Kline Mikado and it works great!
Neil

[FJ and G]

I find it interesting that after MTH sued Lionel, many Lionel fans said Mike was causing ill will. Now that Lionel is suing K-Line, not many seem to be saying the same of Lionel.

[Anonymous]

Dang! There's no honor among thieves.

[jonadel]

Good Morning,

If someone were to say "you have just bought your last xyz locomotive and rolling stock because we are all changing tooling to sell choppers" I wouldn't lose a minutes worth of sleep. I'm blessed with some great product, less than some of you but yet more than I really need.

It seems to boil down to big business and greed. So much for the belief that we (as consumers) think that company xyz really cares about us. It's the bottom line, greed.

Jon

[nblum]

I find it interesting that after MTH sued Lionel, many Lionel fans said Mike was causing ill will. Now that Lionel is suing K-Line, not many seem to be saying the same of Lionel.

MTH had and has presented no evidence that anyone working at Lionel misappropriated MTH property. They said that Lionel was responsible for actions of their subcontractor's subcontractor in Korea. And it took a while for people to realize how sketchy the MTH case was. Maybe this case is sketchy too, and people will say the same thing about Lionel. But right now we've only heard one side's version and there is little or no way to determine the rights and wrongs. MTH's case started five years ago and there is more time and much more data to have formed an opinion of the rights and wrongs.

[cheapclassics]

I liked Brianel's comments about where K-line was and where it is headed now. K-line might have been better off staying in the "Marx" niche of the market that it had. When Lionel abandoned the O-27 equipment, K-line was in the right spot to scoop up that business. Instead it tried to compete with Lionel and MTH and this lawsuit could be one of the results of that effort. Any time events lead to legal activity (warranted or not), investments of time and money are not devoted to courting new and existing customers. On the other hand, that was a good article on Train Express, which is a place I have made most of my train (and slot car!) purchases. It was interesting to hear that Neil Young has visited the store several times. There is a good biography of Neil Young called "Shakey" by Jimmy McDonough (sp?) which talks about his Lionel activities. Please be aware that the language is quite salty, and it is definitely NOT for children to read.

Keep on training,

Mike C. from Indiana

[brianel027]

Thanks Mike C. I think the Train Express article shows what I have been saying for years: that rather than trying to really expand the train market they have tried to expand individual company sales by taking sales away from competitors. Although there have been improvements made in starter sets, those improvements are a small fraction of the efforts put into the high end of the market.

And when improvements have been made, they seem to be more of an advertising gimmick than real improvment. For example, K-Line puts the most powerful transformer into their train sets and likes to promote this point. Obviously this necessitates a price increase. Yet the 120v. transformer has no step-down voltage posts... it puts out 0-20v to the track. No wonder the starter K-Line engines fly off the track. 50 years later, the Lionel 1033 is still the very best transformer to give to any kid for a starter train set because of it's adjustable A-U / B-U voltage selection. So in my mind, the "improvement" was not really an improvement. I use the Lionel 1033 exclusively at the B-U setting (with a full-wave bridge rectifier to put out DC current to the track) and have no problems with K-Line starter engines flying off the track, even with my nephew runninng the trains.

Instead of trying to replicate the modern trains of today with some current road names, they try to entice youth into the hobby with technology. It doesn't matter how much hi-tech you put into a train set if the trains don't relate to something kids would see today. It astounds me with the dozens and dozens of train shows I've done, that kids get way more excited by a traditional control short non-scale engine in Norfolk Southern than in a steam engine with speed control and digital control in New York Central.

Ooutside of MTH/Railking, the starter end of the market has consistantly gotten the "master's leftovers" for the past decade, with virtually no new product tooling (exluding FasTrack which I still think was a waste of development time and money), and no current contemporary roadnames. Train sets and starter related items are the business card to the future. Seems the only business cards being handed around in the train business now are those of attorney's. And as far as the future of the train companies, to borrow Neil Young's nickname - it looks pretty "shakey."

Former Lionel CEO Gary Morreau wrote a book on how Christian ethics are sorely needed in today's current corporate business environment. Boy, was he right! Simple age old rule: Thou shall not steal.

The sins of the world have been the same since square one, but with new names. Embezzlement is still stealing though. Lots of people don't want to hear about Jesus anymore, but the things He taught are as pertinant today as ever. Short-sightedness, thievery, pride and greed bring no better results today than they did 2,000 years ago.

[palallin]

Actually, the whole thing has left my disgusted with the hobby. I've been looking at shifting my emphasis to O 2-rail, and crap like this will probably make that happen. It's getting very hard to grasp that warm-and-fuzzy feeling with Lionel anymore.

[IRONROOSTER]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Daniel Lang

QUOTE: Originally posted by IRONROOSTER
Unfortunately, even after overwriting you can often still read the data using special equipment. I would sma***he drive, and burn the pieces.
Enjoy
Paul

The ability to recover overwritten data using special equipment is overrated. It requires special equipment such as magnetic force microscopy, which puts it beyond the budgets of most data recovery firms. For an article covering disk data recovery, the German magazine C'T took some disk drives and overwrote them with a single pass of zeros. None of the commercial data recovery firms were able to recover data (most were unwilling to even try).

Daniel Lang

I understand commercial data recovery is based on the data itself having not been overwritten and, to prevent typical recovery operations, overwriting is sufficient. My point is that even though it may not be cheap or easy, it is possible to recover data that has been overwritten, if someone wants the data badly enough - like when millions of dollars or criminal prosecution is involved. Up to you how senstive your data is. If you feel safe overwriting, and you feel confident the overwriting program performs correctly, then don't smash it. I personally plan to smash it after overwriting it. A little fire would be good too, but I don't know if that would produce toxic fumes.
Enjoy
Paul

[Anonymous]

If I didn't read this article in print and somebody had told me that Lionel was suing K-Line, I'd have thought it was a witty joke. Unfortuntely, it's not. The Big Three are now all caught up in lawsuits. On the real railroads, things aren't looking much better. Take Union Pacific, who sued Lionel and Athearn a while back (What ever happened with that lawsuit, anyway?), not to mention this guy with the calendar.

All I can say is that Williams is probably sitting back and feeling very good about themselves right now.

As for me, I'll just stick with my traditional prewar and postwar toy trains.

[brianel027]

It's amazing to me all this talk of destroying hard drives and trying to eliminate evidence of potential wrong doing from computers. What the heck ever happened to ethics? Decency? Honor? Honesty?

Maybe the real answer is not trying to steal information from other companies in the very first place. Then there are no concerns of a paper trail, even if the paper trail is left on a computer hard drive.

Is it any wonder that the computer technology in the trains have such a high failure rate and aren't always what they're cracked up to be either?

[Jumijo]

QUOTE: Originally posted by brianel027

. . . Is it any wonder that the computer technology in the trains have such a high failure rate and aren't always what they're cracked up to be either?

Not when you consider that the same engineer is designing them all!

Brian, you've got mail.

Jim

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by brianel027




Former Lionel CEO Gary Morreau wrote a book on how Christian ethics are sorely needed in today's current corporate business environment. Boy, was he right! Simple age old rule: Thou shall not steal.

The sins of the world have been the same since square one, but with new names. Embezzlement is still stealing though. Lots of people don't want to hear about Jesus anymore, but the things He taught are as pertinant today as ever. Short-sightedness, thievery, pride and greed bring no better results today than they did 2,000 years ago.

But Lionel made JUNK under Moreau. as they did under Medaris. Ethics, however do need to be emphasized in business.

[3railguy]

QUOTE: I find it interesting that after MTH sued Lionel, many Lionel fans said Mike was causing ill will. Now that Lionel is suing K-Line, not many seem to be saying the same of Lionel.

Had MTH not sued Lionel, Lionel would not be sueing K-Line. Sort of like a computer virus that spreads through email, MTH has caused all the ill will.

[brianel027]

John, you're right but with a disclaimer. Lionel stuff even during Moreau's time was still overpriced. Back then as now, Wellspring is really calling the shots to some degree, so any CEO of Lionel can only do what the investors allow him to do.

The Construction, Safari and N&W starter steam sets under Moreau were certainly junk - at least for the asking MSRP. Had they been a third of that, then maybe one could possibly justify the quality cutbacks. Lionel would have still done better molding the Construction Set RS-3 diesel in black or brown as long as they didn't want to paint it. And included a DC power pack with the set so it would have run foraward and reverse. The the steamers from the other 2 sets needed the front trailing truck that was left off the sets.... there are times when the cost-cutting actually does more harm then good. Those sets are prime examples where the cost cuts did far more harm then good.

As I've said many times, given the companies position to not be able to advertise nationally in normal media outlets, that the starter set is the business card to the future... it is the front line of advertising to the new customer. Moreau is no less at fault than the others: they've all put starter sets and related products at the bottom of the priority list to court an ever decreasing audience with ever increasing high end expensive trains.

I have little sympathy for the cost cutting on the lower end stuff now, given that it is all made in China for next to nothing. And also given the large sums of money that has been spent on the "no future" adult market. MTH should have had a constantly chaging selection of cars in the Rugged Rails line every year rather than putting out the same old stuff for 6 years. Same for K-Line's Train-19 line, most of which were reissues of formerly released Classic line cars with scant few modern road names.

Thank goodness for Williams and Ready Made Toys. Now if Industrial Rail could come back, I'd have no worry to be concerned about these other companies ever again. RMT is by far the company to keep an eye on because they have the RIGHT idea!!! Williams too.

[1688torpedo]

The main problem that I feel causes these lawsuits is the need of the offending toy train companies to copycat each others products. Just exactly how many GG1s, 700E, F3s, can the Market absorb when the older Collectors are dying off and not too many Younger ones are taking part? and the other part of the problem is now the cost of all this litigation when the companies thought they would save money by moving overseas.Maybe we should just stick to collecting older trains.With decreased revenue maybe the Companies will start playing nicely and pay attention to the marketplace. As I said in a previous post Marx Trains has it good. They do not copy other products and nobody copies theirs.This is as it should be

[Anonymous]

Apparently, K-Line is not just going to roll over and play dead. They updated their web site this afternoon with this:
"K-LINE On The Road
Visit with a K-LINE representative at these stores and upcoming events:
August 6-7: Great Train Expo - Ft Washington, PA
August 13-14: Great Train Expo - Edison, NJ
August 13-14: TCA Meet - Denver, CO
August 20: Artcraft Toy Trains - Hamburg, NY
August 27: Village Trains - Perry, OH"

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by brianel027

It's amazing to me all this talk of destroying hard drives and trying to eliminate evidence of potential wrong doing from computers. What the heck ever happened to ethics? Decency? Honor? Honesty?

I agree, the right thing is not to steal in the first place. However, when you decide to dispose of a hard drive thay may contain your credit card numbers or other sensitive information, one should wipe it with Dban or equivalent (format is NOT sufficient!). If the disk has crashed, one should smash it. This way, someone cannot steal your data.

Daniel Lang

[okiechoochoo]

I have to disagree with those who say no one seems upset with Lionel like they were MTH for sueing. I am. I was very upset with MTH and have not bought anything of theirs and won't after they filed suit. It really PO'd me because I thought it was merely a take over attempt of what they really wanted, the Lionel name. I have been a Lionel fan for 50 years but this latest episode does me in I think. Now I am just as upset with Lionel. Lawsuits in this hobby are nuts and it will not benefit any of us. It will hurt our pocket books in the end as the legals fees, etc, will be passed on to the customer. I agree with the previous poster who said the warm fuzzy feeling for Lionel seems to be disappearing. For me is certainly has. This type of stuff doesn't take place in two rail scale. I may turn to HO or N for my future hobby interest and sell off this three rail stuff. The fun seems to be gone. And I don't think it is just the lawsuits but the incompatibility issues between manufacturers and increasing prices for less than good quality control. At least in HO and N, everybodys engines will run on any track and anybodies DCC system will work with any other one. I see a change coming for me.

[Anonymous]

I share the shock about this that many people are feeling. I don't share the disgust. I like O gauge trains. I like them a lot. I like the layout I am building and I have some neat operating accessories to put on the layout. I am going to have fun for decades with this layout. O gauge trains are the highlight of my life. When work gets boring and tedious, I think about which engine I will pair with which cars and which "tasks" I will carry out on the layout. Beer cars that need to be loaded up at the brewery and then "delivered" to the sidings near the taverns. The Lionel boxcar will need to be loaded with toy trains at the Lionel factory, and then those trains need to be delivered to the Lionel hobby shop. Oops, the hobby shop owner isn't there right now, because he's over getting a haircut at the Lionel barber shop. Etc, etc, etc, and I have not even begun to talk about the coal that needs loading and then delivered to the Power Plant on the hill overlooking the town... So, no, I don't share the disgust that some have for the whole world of O gauge trains. Sounds like one guy who is not so honorable has screwed up the business affairs of a few companies, and now it is finally hitting him in the backside. So I for one am not giving up on O gauge. I would not give up something that is enjoyable to me just because some ying-yang in North Carolina or florida or wherever he lives created some corporate bad feelings. Keep your head up, and "don't let the turkeys get you down". Stay with 3 rail O gauge, you will love it for another 50 years. You have my word on it.

[Anonymous]

I think I will stay off the train boards for a while. This is not my cup of tea.