I noticed that this years Walthers catalog no longer has any proto steam. That’s such a trajedy, because the proto steam power was among the best of the best. No Y-3, no 0-8-0, no 0-6-0, no 2-8-4, no anything. [:(] I consider these real losses as no one else made a real quality versions of these fine engines. Instead it’s just a flood of the typical GP, RS, and F/E units that EVERYONE and their cousin makes.
I guess there’s just not enough profit for Walthers there.
Takes his hat off in respect to some of the best running and detailed steam ever made
Ah nuts, and I was thinking of picking up another Proto USRA-clone Rio Grande L-107 2-8-8-2. The one I have is a superb runner and a relatively decent puller. Sure like to double-head those babies!
It may not be detailed as much but get a Bachmann EM-1, 2-8-8-4. Stop lamenting over something you have no control over. Model railroading is a lot more fun then lamenting.
One big issue seems to be the whistle does not sound correct.
A few are not getting the sound module but put in a TSU1000 with a whistle that is more prototypical.
I see quite a lot on You Tube about this loco and watching one fellow in the Bachmann forums with quite a lot of modifying he is doing.
Quite frankly I am not surprised. Walthers has pushed the price to the limit for their Heritage steam locomotives.
They are also doing the same to their passenger cars. Check prices against Rapido, Intermountain and others… Hopefully Atlas will be able to compete as they now have the Branchline passenger coaches.
I would not be surprised to see Bachmann bring out coach sets in both the HW and streamlined types. There certainly is a market for passenger coaches which are reasonably priced.
I never realized that Walthers made the Y6b. Was that after the Y3 or whatever they produced as Proto 2000?
Steam models do not sell quickly like early or late diesels, but might be produced in the future as demand builds for more 2-8-4’s and switchers that Walthers have made in the past. Any product that stays in the warehouses for several months are not tolerated any longer. The cost of producing detailed steam models is always high and they might be looking for a new manufacturer also to keep their profit at a level that makes money for the company.
I would hope they do produce the NKP Berkshires again since their last run of the NKP Berkshires were very good and close in detail to any of my brass ones except the DVP model of the locomotive.
The Walthers/Proto model is a Y3, not a Y6b. Proto/Walthers never made a Y6b.
Walthers hasa long standing policy of not including items in the catalog that will not be available for the fall season when the catalog comes out.
That means they could still be planning a re-issue of any of those locos in May and their policy would be to leave it out of the catalog.
Proto steam is very nice - I have a few, but also very limited in selection and they may feel the market for those items is currently saturated. That does not m
I saw a news item last year to the effect that Sanda Kan, the company in China that makes practically every model and brand name sold in the U.S., told some importers that they would no longer make products for them and those companies would have to find someone else. Maybe Walthers steam locos were some of the ones affected.
The 0-6-0 and 0-8-0 switchers seem to come and go. Right now, none are available, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see them come back in a few months. Any model which sells out as quickly as these do will likely be repeated, perhaps with different road names and numbers.
Still, I’m glad that I picked up an 0-6-0 with sound from the second production run. Beautiful little engine. That one locomotive changed me from a Transition Era diesel guy to a dual-era modeler. Thanks for that, Walthers.
I can only speak to my own very limited experience with the P2K Heritage Series USRA steamers. I have the one 0-6-0 which I truly love. It runs like a top, and it looks wonderful. If I were to suppose that Walthers is for the time being out of steam offerings, it is probably because they are not good sellers, and that might be because they were not strong pullers. Perhaps not across the board for all their models, but enough people commented on this forum back in the 2006-09 timeframe that they were disappointed with the tractive effort of their steamers from Walthers (formerly they were Life Like).
I always felt that their Santa Fe and Berkshires were nifty, and so were the Y3 series. I would have enjoyed a 0-8-0 because they are stronger pullers than the 0-6-0 is. Still, I hope they don’t stop outright. It would be a loss IMO. It is bad enough that W/S has just had a catastrophic fire.
Yes. Apparently in June 2010, they dropped 60 smaller companies to focus on their big customers and their own companies. Unfortunately this has really impacted S scale in the short term as the two largest as well as several other S scale manufacturers/importers were among those dropped. They are now scrambling to find new producers and to get their tooling from Sanda Ken.
I’m not sure it’s Walthers so much, as it is the Chinese companies that make them. The Chinese are now realizing they’ve been selling their products too cheap, and now they will cull a lot of small manufacturers to concentrate on the big, rich boys… My thoughts only…
Proto Heritage steam is, or at least had been, a quality product. Too bad if they stop producing them.
It is also too bad that Life Like ever sold out to Walthers. That was the death knell of a great little company. I own more Proto steam and diesel than any other brand.
You are probably right about that. All of the manufacturers of all kinds of different products, not only model railroad related, moved their manufacturing capacity to China and the Far East to take advantage of lower worker wages and lack of employee benefits only to find themselves paying outrageous manufacturing costs. Maybe someday the U.S. manufacturing community will wake up and see this for what it is and move manufacturing back to the good ole USA.
Life Like, located here in Baltimore not far from where I live, may have been a little company as trains go, but all train companies are small in the big economic picture - even Walthers, Bachmann and Athearn.
But going way back, when all they made was scenery materials, Life Like was a big player in model trains. That was possible because they were a very big company in their primary business - styrofoam.
They were/are one of the largest makers of styrofoam coolers and insulation materials in the world - making styrofoam train tunnels was just an off season use for the cooler line at first - than it got big.
Life Like later bought what was left of Varney and evolved into the company that was sold to Walthers.
The reason the train division was sold to Walthers was because the parent - Life Foam Industries - was sold and the new owners did not want to be in the model train, toy, slot car business.
As a model train business, LIfe Like was well run, at least from a customer view. How much money the train division made is unknown. Maybe the new owners did not think it profitable enough or maybe they simply did not know anything about trains.
But better Walthers than gone, or in the hands of someone without the money/experiance to run it.
TOO many good ideas and products in this business suffer from lack of capital - I can think of few current companies right off - better to be at Walthers than a few others I think of.
I doubt that steam is a dead issue at Walthers, more like a small break. Thinki
You need to remember that the list or catalog prices are ALL FAKE. Sure they will sell them to you at that price, but that is supposed to be a list price. The dealer gets them for about half that price, and then marks them up a bit, but seldom to the list price. And then he will give his favored customers a discount on the marked price, making the dealer out to be a good guy.
PROTO 1000 subway cars are catalog priced at about $250 a set. Trainworld has them for $180 a set.
BTW: IIRC, it was Trainworld that commissioned the first subway cars from Life-Like and bought the entire run. They were exclusive at Trainworld for about a year before they became available in other stores. And there HAVE BEEN improvements to these models as the price went up. The $180 product is far superior to the $100 product.
The funny thing is that is was an evidence anybody with a normal mind could foresaw. Once you move EVERYTHING somewhere cheaper, you loose the competition factor. Short term planning… Short term profits… Short lived companies…
Anyway, just to say my first EVER steamer when I was a teenager, was an Heritage 0-8-0… Probably my finest looking and running locomotive until recently. But I remember I paid that thing a monstrous amount of cash back then. They weren’t the poor’s man steamer…
This is hardly a surprise to the LION. The LION expounded upon this in a term paper in 1979. I still have that paper somewhere if you want to read it. Bottom line: prices will fall until all workers around the world earn the same living wage, and then they will all go up and equalize. China’s middle class is equal to our own, and these workers all have the same standard of living as we do. THAT is where the money is going, and rightly so.
