Their Facebook and homepage says there will be a new freight car, announced on July 1st. There is lots of speculation in another forum, but as far as I can tell, it is just speculation.
Most are just predicting their wanted model, regardless of whether it’s a realistic candidate. We’ll have to wait and see.
Its been about two years since their first model (their Committee Design open hopper) released. Pretty much the only releases the company has made since then was a brakewheel detail kit and then their own metal wheelsets.
So what am I expecting for the new model? Well other than the fact it will likely be on the Arrowhead produced wheels released last year, I frankly have no clue. It will be curious to see if Arrowhead bumps up production over the coming years, or if it is going to stick to the current pace of one highly detailed car released every few years or so. Seeing that the “higher end” freight car market already has Rapido, Athearn Genesis, ExactRail, ScaleTrains and Tangent all in play; Blaine’s new product is going to have to be really well done to stand out from the crowd. Obviously the Committe Design hopper got a lot of people excited and talking, so it will be worth seeing if lightning strikes twice with this next car.
Only thing that would excite me are highly detailed models of 36’ boxcars.
I don’t think it was Arrowheads plans to take this long for the 2nd release; the Chinese factory closure that Arrowhead and a number of other companies used closed just as Arrowhead was shipping it’s first batch of models. I’m guessing it’s taken 8-12 months for Arrowhead to find another factory and get to a point of that factory being up to Blaine’s standard for his next model.
“Sticking with a release every few years or so” probably wasn’t the plan, but rather much less time than that. That factory closure also greatly delayed other models such as Intermountain, ExactRail, Wheels of Time and Trainworx etc.
Knowing Blaines high standard and goals for pushing the envelope beyond most of the mentioned companies, we can expect a very high quality model.
AFAIK, there is more than one model on deck. One which has been mentioned publically, is the ACF 4600 covered hopper, but I don’t think that is what will be announced tomorrow. When Athearn released their 4600 covered hopper, Blaine shelved that model, but when many hobbyists complained about the poor fit of the top to the body with it’s warped or wavy seam, especially for the street price of around $42-45 each, the plans to offer an Arrowhead 4600 were revived.
I didn’t buy any of the Athearn Genesis 4600’s after se
So the July 1st announcement was an announcement that another announcement with the actual product reveal is coming soon?
Riveting. [:P]
Yeah. The official reveal will be July 10 at Lombard Hobbies via FB I think.
I prefer Tangent’s Dave Lehlbach’s method of just out of nowhere, announceing a new model and here it is, help ya self! No beating around in the bush. So now we gotta wait until July 10 to find out what it is.
There are some “crumbs” here:
YouTube: youtu.be/yqBXERPiTgo
Cliff Notes:
It’s a “model relevant to both east and west coast modelers” and it’s “practically essential for 1980’s to present”. Also “it’s not what you think”. There you go.
I’m more of a 1970’s guy but my hard cutoff is 1983 so I’ll have to wait and see, but I generally limit models I buy to about 1980/81 so …
Not what I was expecting, starting with a lemon in his rum and coke.
Rickie Ingalls of the National Association of Ballast Walkers said “It was alright”
William Randihour, International Association of Prescott County Railroads said “I will put it ahead of my green one”
Like Jason Shron, he has a sense of humor, but different. He needs a blonde for his videos.
**
If indeed it was a Cuba Libre, it should have been a LIME.
People in that “other forum” are as mad as the guy in the movie Network, 7 pages of angry people on the Internet. As if we don’t have enough of that everywhere else these days.
Who put a bee in your bonnet?
Why don’t you let people read the discussion themselves and decide whether it’s an angry mob or a civil discussion rather than simple come here and slag off AtlasRescueForum “that other forum”. People express reasonable opinions and but apparently to you it’s a bunch of angry, unreasonable people in “that” forum. People may disagree about what is “reasonable”, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are angry or wrong.
Btw, my wife didn’t care for the way the announcement was made. Who am I to tell her she is wrong? [:-^] [(-D]
Speculation as to what Arrowhead’s new release will be and mention of another ACF 4600 CF Center-Flow covered hopper raises questions about the decisions made in introducing new models to the hobby. My references are to HO because that is what I am most familiar with.
There are already two iterations of the ACF 4600, one a nice but budget kit that does not fit the standards I have set for my rolling stock so, no purchases of that one. The other one was supposed to be a higher priced premium model that flopped due to quality control problems. Why was this alllowed to happen? Why go through all the expense of tooling up the model and then torpedo the effort by not having it go together properly? Worse even is bringing the flawed product to market at full MSRP? Are not test shots and pre-prodution samples made in the hopes of avoiding just such situations? Are contracts written so that if the manufacturer bungles it, it is his problem, not the importer, if the the defects are identified to the manufacturer on the pre-production samples?
Duplication also exists with the ACF 4650 Center Flow, albeit two models of fairly equal quality by different importers. One does suffer from riding too high on overly thick bolsters but, a few minutes with sandpaper or a file will bring the bolsters to a more reasonable depth. Then, the only other issue is to replace the now overly deep draft gear. Why couldn’t it have been done correctly before the cars went into the boxes?
Just like F-7s and SD40-2s, how much duplication of effort can the hobby support? Somebody is going to lose because not everyone needs or wants F-7s or SD40-2s. Unless another F-7 or SD40-2 can be a tremendous improvement on what is already on the market, WHY? Granted a GOOD 4600 CF Center Flow would have a chance, but why not be truly innovative and introduce something cu
Sir, it is you that seem be troubled by bees.
It thought it was against our rules to refer to advertise other forums by name and recommend our members go there, but I could be mistaken. I certainly am not going to copy and paste that discussion into this one to prove my point. But the phase “taking to the fourms in anger” was used there first, not by me here.
Perhaps ARF is a bigger forum than this one, and that accounts for the sheer volume of posts, 154 including a handful of replies by Blaine vs 11 here. Let’s just say there is more buzz over there.
So everyone here was in so much of a snit that nobody posted what this was?
They’re still playing games, showing pictures of lots of … boxes, but without showing labels of what’s in them. We are supposed to deduce from this – and I think several people deduced correctly:
I’ll let y’all decide if all the ongoing dangling is worth it.
Obviously they are selling boxes filled with Wyoming air.
Some time after 11:30 last night, the Arrowhead site was ‘properly’ updated:
https://arrowheadmodels.com/collections/shop
Watch for the ‘special Lombard hobbies exclusive’ edition (shown as ‘sold out’ for direct order) to become a scarce eBay item… [;)]
Frankly at $54.95, given the amount of work and care in this car it’s a steal.
Now the folks at MR need to get crackin’ with a how-to article on converting this car to other builders’ variants of the prototype … probably starting, as he said, with Thrall…