Last Updated on November 25, 2018 by Dave Farquhar
Lionel is starting up production in the United States again. It’s a limited basis–just a plastic-bodied box car–but it’s something. Interestingly, to me, the plastic bodies are going to be produced in Warminster, Pennsylvania. My dad grew up in the same county, a couple of towns north of Warminster, roughly 12 miles away.
The tooling is being produced in China–not a tragedy, seeing as the original Lionel Corporation frequently outsourced its tooling production and even a lot of its design to Italy–and individual parts will be made here. The trucks and wheels will be die-cast here, the frame will be stamped and formed here, and the body injection molded here. Then the parts will be assembled here. Originally, they planned to make all the parts in China and ship them here for assembly, so this represents a change of plans.
This venture proved short-lived, but after Lionel purchased the old Weaver tooling, it resumed some small-scale production in the USA though the majority of it remains in China.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.