I have been trying to find out if American Flyer S-Gauge trains are being produced by Lionel or some successor company.
I am a subscriber to MRN and have checked out the American Models web site. I am passing that information on to an interested friend who was an American Flyer dealer years ago (that is why we are being specific about AF).
Lionel seems to ignore any relationship with American Flyer. Did they purchase rights to AF several years ago?
Jim Pond
via the internet
When American Flyer ceased production after 1966, the name, dies, etc. were bought out by Lionel. Nothing was produced until 1979 when Lionel brought out a boxcar, tank car and hopper. For the next several years, many items were produced including sets featuring a specific railroad, locomotives including PAs, GP9s, GP20s and EP5s, and more than 100 different cars of all types. Lately, however, they have been pretty quiet about their American Flyer production. They have changed ownership and/or presidents for the ‘n’th time and none in the S community really knows what will happen to the AF line. Meanwhile, there are several alternatives available (you found one in American Models). The S-Curves column in MRN will highlight these AF compatible trains from time to time, or you can find out more on the web, etc. All AF fans, though, hope that Lionel will decide to mass produce them once again like in the good old days of A.C. Gilbert and post 1979 Lionel.
— Roy Hoffman
Roy is our “S-Curves” columnist — Ed
Michael Pratt,
I enjoy your magazine immensely. Though not at present an active model railroader, I can keep up with the latest products through your very informative reviews, as well as the manufacturers’ ads and news briefs. My comment concerns a situation that is all too common in the railfan press: lax editorial standards, in particular, poor editorial control of spelling, grammar, syntax, and other essentials of good standard English usage. In the November 2000 issue, there are two misspellings (see page 10, “...the screens are of coarse heavier than on the prototype....” and page 31, “This, of coarse, would be no small task....”) of the word “course” which, had there been only one occurrence, one might label merely a typo. Two such occurrences, however, raise a suspicion of, well, ignorance of the difference between coarse and course. In the words of old Casey (Stengel, not Jones) “You could look it up.” I would venture to hope that with a minor course correction this rather coarse treatment of our revered mother tongue will not occur again.
Henry Schmidt
Allentown, PA
