I remember my grandfather telling me about MTH's lawsuits. The only issue I had with MTH's trains was that the Pro Sound and Proto Sound 2.0 would tend to corrupt the locomotive every now and again and I would have't to ship it back to their warehouse to reset it. After 3 locomotives from MTH (3rd one was Proto Sound 2.0) that was it, I went to Williams Trains and Lionel and found the Lionel models more detailed and reliable than the MTH models, also the fact that they didn't come with a complicated sound system that was very easy to corrupt.
To give you an idea of my performance of my 3 MTH Engines here's my personal statistics:
RailKing NS C40-8/ Proto Sound:
Year of purchase: 1997
Replaced: twice
Sent it back to be reset: 9 times, after the nineth time; just gave-up and removed the gears and motor to become a dummy unit.
Railking Conrail C40-8W/ Proto Sound:
Year of purchase: 1998
Never replaced.
Sent back to be reset: suprisingly only once.
Railking CSX F40-PH/ Proto Sound 2.0:
Year of purchase: 2000
Replaced: Once.
Sent back to reset: four times.
After those three MTH engines I got Lionel and Williams trains and never had an issue with their sound systems. MTH trains had nice models and the sound systems are realistic, but they corrupt too easily and they spent more time traveling in a shipping box than traveling around my grandpa's layout. One thing I was also dissapointed with, too was that my Conrail C40-8W was ORIGINIALLY a B40-8W in the MTH cataloges (It was a Conrail work train set), and when I took it out of the box Christmas morning; I know I was like nine years old, but I said "What the hell?" when I saw 6 axles insted of 4 axles on the locomotive.
"...and I was in the front and Matt grabbed and pulled my ears from behind me and made horsey sounds."
