the wounded soldiers on this train must have a hell of a PTSD episode when their locomotive starts barking out machine gun sounds

“If I was an injured soldier and saw this thing coming to rescue me I’d turn around and continue to die” 😂 I couldn’t stop laughing

A note about the chuffing sound, I have a lionel steam loco that also has a chuffing unit in the tender, I think that it's really intended for the larger O scale wheels, which have a lower angular speed than those HO wheels of a significantly smaller diameter.  Something tells me they took that same mechanism and simply applied it to this set.

Wow, this train set at RRP costs more than the price to drive a steam locomotive at the Dean Forest Railway, which according to their website is £299

Being a lifelong Lionel O Gauge fan, I still don't get why the company bothers dabbling in the HO market. This is the third time the company has attempted getting into that market after two failed attempts in the 1950's and 1970's and I doubt this new range will last much longer either. The HO market is just really saturated and Lionel's biggest draw has almost always been their 3 rail O Gauge line and it's pretty apparent whenever they branch out to other popular gauges that the company can't figure out how to appeal to those more hobbyist base markets.

I did some digging and the locomotive number 4100 was never a Berkshire. It was a 2-8-2. However the Santa Fe did own Berkshire’s, but they look very different. For example it have a weird feed water heater on the front.

Sam you gotta make a "ready to go train set" vs "same price self-assembled train set" to see which one is the better value!

Sam, some info on the Lionel HO range,

Almost all the tooling for the proucts in their range is well over 30 YEARS OLD AT BEST! Lionel bought the tooling for most of it's range from a defunct company called Model Power, who, even in their heydey, were seen as one of the cheaper brands.

The earliest reference I have to the coaches in your set, the Model Power Harriman Coach series, is a Walthers Catalog of 1987! The tooling for their freight cars (up until those in their Spring 2023 catalog) originally were sold by two different companies, Marx and HobbyLine, and the Lionel 2-bay open hopper, a 1957 MARX TOOLING, represents the OLDEST TOOLING STILL IN CONTIUOUS USE IN U.S. HO!

The tooling for the Chassis from the locomotive might be from another defunct company, Life Like, but the boiler and tender shells appear to be new toolings, done in style compairable to their O-Gauge toy trains.

I reccomend you watch Eric's trains. He has an amazing o scale layout and collection and I would love to see the 2 of you collab and share eachothers knowledge:)

At least it hasn't got a dime glued to the smokebox...

To think this isnt being sold at a dollar store for $25 is mind blowing
Not in a good way tho

22:55 “let’s get to work throwing this into the dust bin!” 😂

most lionel trainsets are intended for beginners, and in oscale are price appropriately as such, their separate products are high quality but insanely expensive. Their ho scale range however, has NEVER been known for quality.  In this case, despite the technology involved , it doesn't mean much if it's not compatible with other brands.

With all the moulded details, you wouldn’t be attacked for mistaking it for an ancient Triang model!

They are probably like "oh hey, this is an HO model, but let's put an O gauge price on it!"


Even Dapol's clearly-more-professional O gauge locos aren't that expansive

Great review.  The diecast 0 scale lionel steam are  a sight to behold, but this set looks slightly less than stellar.

Hey Sam been watching you for two years and I would like to say thank you for getting me and my dad into hornby trains me and my dad didn’t even know that hornby trains even existed until we saw one of your videos two years ago and as soon as we saw one of your hornby train videos we where hooked to hornby trains and I would like to say thank you for getting us into British train hobby

That magnelock track is every bit as awful as I thought it would be. I've read reviews saying it's awful, but never seen anyone try it on carpet, which is one place where roadbed track would normally have an advantage over regular track.

I think for around £75 to £80 it would be good value.  I'd buy it for that, maybe.

Some pluses; 1) the controller looks plasticky, but works decently well. 2) real metal Kadee (TM) couplers - those should outlast the entire set! 3) it has a decent enough tender, and the 3-axle buckeye trucks (bogies) are reasonably close to the prototype, though they usually have brake cylinders mounted on them for this application (tenders), though not on - say - depressed-center flatcars. 4) the livery is simple and well applied, typical of AT&SF steam locomotives. I didn’t see any paint splatter or bleed-through on the white lettering. 5) The mechanism actually has brass/bronze bearings. 6) The choice of DC, DCC, their controller, or Bluetooth was a nice touch. It would have been interesting to see Sam download the app and try it that way. It’s just a shame they sold a toy train set at a price of a high-end model, like Athearn Genesis, Bachmann Spectrum, Atlas, Kato, or Broadway Limited. 😢 It at least didn’t have a fake plastic silver coin stuck on it - thank God! Or worse, “gold” coal! Gaaaa….!! (Run for the hills, folks!) If I ever see anything that atrocious again, I may have to make a trip over there and feed it to Sam’s train-eating zombie! 🤣😆😂