Closing the book on LBF Models?

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
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http://www.nrtoday.com/article/20091203/NEWS/912039989/1063/NEWS&ParentProfile=1055

The link contains this news story:

Douglas County commissioners on Wednesday wrote off back taxes owed by a
defunct model railroad manufacturer once based in Roseburg.

County officials concluded they would never see the $57,202 owed by USA
Plastics and the commissioners ordered County Assessor Ron Northcraft
and Sandee Correll, the county’s chief financial officer, to wipe the
debt off the tax rolls.

“We’ve done all we could to collect. We even seized and sold the
equipment, something that’s rare for us to do,” County Attorney Paul
Meyer said.

USA Plastics opened shop in 1993, manufacturing model rail cars through
a plastic injection process. The trains were sold throughout the United
States and in Canada, England, Australia and New Zealand.

The company accumulated more than $400,000 in debt and had its machinery
and furniture, fixtures and other possessions seized in 1998 by the
county. The items were seized to pay for unpaid taxes and penalties that
at the time totaled $8,196.

The machinery was later sold to Frank Hubert, owner of Hubert’s Model
Railroad Manufacturing of Oregon, which also operated in Roseburg. He
also encountered financial difficulties and in October filed for Chapter
7 bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of
Ohio, where he currently resides.

Equipment that originally belonged to USA Plastics was seized by
Hubert’s Douglas County landlord, Jay Roth. He’s holding it to pay off
what’s owed to him.

In his bankruptcy petition, Hubert listed a debt of $1,803 owed to the
Douglas County tax collector, $5,000 owed to Fred Becker, who had served
as trustee when USA Plastics went out of business, and $9,861 to Horizon
Service Cen

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I have no idea whether these folks made good, bad or indifferent models, nor do I know anything about the principals involved. It’s interesting to me in light of forum posts about "why don’t manufacturers release (insert favorite desire here)? I own (with my wife) and run a small machine shop. I love model trains. At times I think “I oughta” when I see posts about people wanting such and such a product. I’ve made injection molds for 30 years so the engineering isn’t the rub. It’s money! For someone to go out, purchase molding machines and all the peripherals that go along with them, spend time and money building a product is a huge risk. These guys, two sets of them evidently, couldn’t make it happen. Too bad, the hobby could use more “little” guys.

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Their HO scale models were mediocre compared to Athearn Blue Box kits and other brands. IMHO, their HO scale metal replacement wheelsets were some of the best that was available at the time. The only way to get them, though, was to order directly from LBF and wait several months for delivery.

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Go to the rec.models.railroad archive at Google and search for Fred Becker and you’ll get all the dirt.

Basically, Fred Becker started a hobby shop many years ago. It quietly went out of business while still owing money that was never paid back. Then he started Front Range, which was in business for a few years before it, too, went out of business while owing people money. Then he started working for McKean models, which was sold to Skylim…which then went out of business. Then he started to work for E&C Shops, another company that has gone out of business. Then he started LBF, which lasted a suprisingly long time (for Fred) before it went out of business owing lots of money (sensing a pattern here?). His partner at LBF was Hubert, who apparently did a hostile takeover of LBF when Fred became seriously ill…and now Hubert’s has gone out of business while owing people money.

My point is that Fred Becker had many chances to make a go of it in this hobby. He or his tooling failed at least six times by my count. It makes you wonder just when are people going to stop lending him money to start over again?

Paul A. Cutler III

Weather Or No Go New Haven

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I checked the google stuff----

I’m amazed the guy got $$$ that many times----I’d be wondring about ANY of his tooling by now—tnx for the info!!

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I really don’t think that it is so surprising that Mr. Becker got loans for his repeated ventures, in spite of prior failures, in a time when loans were certainly more readily available then you are ever likely to see them again.

However, what the situation does reflect to me is how easily small companies attempting to break into the model railroading field (and I’m sure many others, as well, in recent years) tend to fail. If you look at the number of companies that existed in the hobby 30-40 years ago and more, in a time when there was a real market for far simpler products for the hobbyist, you’ll quickly see how many companies came and went in short order. Today’s products need to be far more complex and likely best manufactured off shore, making start-up much harder and more expensive.

We are currently down to just a small handful of established manufacturers larger than one man operations and the start-up costs today are unlikely to encourage many newer individuals from even considering entering the field. The days of the little guy making any inroads into the commercial end of our hobby, unless offering a truly unique product, are pretty much over. Remember that the likelihood of success for a new start-up is only 9%.

CNJ831

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This travels the same road I was going down. I’d love to manufacture products for the hobby, but I’m not abo

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This travels the same road I was going down. I’d love to manufacture products for the hobby, but I’m not about to invest the time, money and heartache just to hear some cretin say he can buy one from China Inc. for less money. I’ve got nothing against people around the world making money, but when consumers expect to pay big box prices for limited production specialty items like model railroad stuff, I wonder how they expect their economy to run for long. The recent thread on Hobby shops vs. the net was interesting. Go to the hobby shop, feel it, look at it, maybe talk the owner into letting you take it out of the box and run it, then go home and order it from the net for a few bucks less. Then complain and say you don’t know why the guy went out of business and now you’ve got nowhere to go for rail joiners at 3:00pm on a Saturday.

Depends on what you’re going to manufacture. Not everything is amenable to being shipped offshore to China. Specialty manufacturers like Speedwitch, Alkem, Train Cat, etc. do exist but they produce items that don’t really have a “mass” market in the sense that Atlas, Athearn, BLI, etc., have. In any case, it’s the manufacturer who sends production offshore, not the purchaser of the product. You produce an etched brass HO kit for the Southern Pacific buffet-parlor car “Oliver Millett” ( a fixture on the “Del Monte” for years) for less than $200 and I’ll buy one even if trucks and couplers aren’t included. The problem of course, is, that I only need one and even if there are a lot of SP fans out there who would want a copy they would probably only buy one each. Your market would be limited. By the same token, that limited market would make it uneconomic for Walthers to come out with it in plastic made in China.

You are right that there are a lot of ignoramuses (ignorami?) who can’t quite seem to grasp the concept that model railroad market is not only small, but highly fragmented. Not only are there multiple scales, but multiple prototypes, m

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In their day (1990’s) E&C Shops made decent and inexpensive Wood Chip Cars and Coalporters (their first offerings…hmmm…Exactrail, anyone). And they were genius because they made mass produced multiple road numbers available at the same time, something that the big guys are just now embracing after years of cycles of watching for announcements and checking the ones you already have. At the time and at least 10 years beyond it was nice to grab a dozen BN coalporters with different numbers in a box and go. Kudos to Fred and Hubert for trying something different and cutting edge. I have over 100 of their coalporters and I kept buying them when the W Bethgons came out because they were less expensive and more detailed.

[2c]

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Meh—that is not surprising. The issue about the fragmentation I think that is what existed for quite sometime before. I kind of started thinking about a differing set of methods for doing a business in this area----almost a type of “one of a kind” thing. Basic format for the shell and the detailing comes after—AACH! who knows----

The restaurant field is just as fragmented and heavily weighted with the skeletal remains of many former restaurants that failed—and still we see them come up

As for the belly aching----nothing new there—[:-^]

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Meh—that is not surprising. The issue about the fragmentation I think that is what existed for quite sometime before. I kind of started thinking about a differing set of methods for doing a business in this area----almost a type of “one of a kind” thing. Basic format for the shell and the detailing comes after—AACH! who knows----

Oh, why not? The hobby is much smaller than the restaurant business. The hobby was pretty generic in terms of what was offered 50 years ago regardless of the then existing scales. N and Z were non-existent and there were no commercial offering using the 45mm gauge (and all its “scale” variants) popularized by LGB.

What was your idea? I do remember back in the 60’s, someone suggested modularizing F unit shells to be able to make all F unit variants from F3 thru F9 with a single basic shell. Paul Lubliner eventually took up the challenge and created Highliners which was bought by Athearn a few years ago and gave us all those lovely Genesis F units.

The restaurant field is just as fragmented and heavily weighted with the skeletal remains of many former restaurants that failed—and still we see them come up

Perhaps, but the ones that survive (especially the ones that aren’t chains) offer something special and that’s what a good business will offer. The Country Inn in Santa Clara, CA, started off as Uncle John’s Pancake House in 1957. It’s not a chain. They still make the best pancakes I’ve ever had. First time I ate there was as a kid when we moved from SoCal to the Bay Area in early 1958. I still go there whenever I can and some of our kids also frequent the place. My youngest granddaughter loves the place.

That being said, something special doesn’t always guarantee success. There was a burger joint in San Jose back in the mid 80’s that ground their own beef, baked their own buns and made absolutely superb hamburgers. Every time we went there, the place was crowded. Unfortunately,

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Andre wrote"whine, snivel, kvetch and belly-ache."[:)] Sounds like a good name for a model railroad to me. As for businesses coming and going,well, I had a small landscaping business for about 15 years along with a regular 8-5 and burned out. I got out without debt and without selling ther business. I sold off the assets and used the money to help send the kids to college and spent the rest on model trains. Life is good. BILL

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Andre: I’m still doing a learning curve thing on a few tooling issues at the current time but I did–do?–have an idea pretty much along the same line as the guy you mentioned–with the basic body and detail parts associated with a particular prototype and building it up from there.

The one of a kind thing would be almost a custom builder thing. The difference being that the ‘artist’ would put the piece–say a Mogul-- out for sale whereas the custom builder does it on a commission basis—commission being a term used in the sense that someone ‘commissions’ a work from the specific builder----

This type of builder is not necessarily a full time occupation but if it turns out could be a going concern.

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I think if we can hold out a few years, we can all be our own manufacturers, or close to it. Rapid Prototyping machines are making big improvements and it won’t be long before some genius mods something up in his/her basement that we can build at home. There’s loads of clever home made CNC machines out the in the web. RP can’t be that far behind. Maybe for our grandkids…

Lou

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I think it will have to be a lot fancier than a machine that can make parts - it seems no one wants kits anymire, they want instant gratification. Now that I’ve said that, there will be a dozen posts saying “but you can still get kits” Before you make a reply like that, stop and think. Sure there are still kits from the likes of Westerfield, Sunshine, F&C, etc. But we just saw Athearn doign away with the Blue Box kits, and I doubt we’ll see much from Accurail. When someone new who never built a kit before asked about it, where did we always direct them? AThearn Blue Box. Easy enough for a beginner to get their feet wet in kit building without frustration. And then you moved on to Accurail and on up the line. A Sunshine or Westerfield ‘kit’ is not somethign for a beginner who has never built a kit before. Where do they start now? They either pick a different hobby that does have beginner kits, or they stick with RTR.

–Randy

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I’m still a little bit hazy as to what you really mean. It almost sounds as if you’re talking about “modularizing” steam loco construction something along the lines of The Locomotive Company of the late 1970’s. It’s too bad they failed. It was a great idea, especially for locos of the very late 19th Century. Unfortunately, the execution was abysmal.

If you actually are talking about manufacturing steam locomotives, go for types not likely to appeal to the BLI’s, P2K’s and MTH’s. IOW, stick with smaller stuff.

Just as an aside, the Southern Pacific’s E-23 4-4-0’s and M-4 2-6-0’s used the same boiler (hint, hint, hint [:-^] ) and both engines would be prototypical with the same type of tender, although SP was known for playing the musical tender game. With different detail parts, you could probably come close to several other RR’s engines ( B&M comes to mind right off the top of my head).

Here’s another idea. Create a conversion kit for the Spectrum 2-8-0 (which is becoming part of the Standard line, IIRC). Conversion kit would consist of a Harriman style cylinder saddle and some Stephenson valve gear external pieces/parts to allow easy conversion of the Spe

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You had to throw a lit stick in here didn’t you?[:-,]

Andre: The idea I have is somewhat along the line of The Locomotive Company—modular based kits with basic body/frame and the detail parts chosen by the customer thrown in----the idea being that it would be the smaller steam engines getting done. I could not remember who the beeplets it was!!

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As well as mention some of the small manufacturers that are still around and doing ok. We’re not all big giant mass production companies like Atheran and Life-Like. There’s room for small manufacturers to continue to provide those more specific items that don’t have broad general appeal.

Of course you’ll notice they don;t go out and do it by buying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machines - you need to have some realistic business sense to succeed at anything, be it model trains or a restaurant.

–Randy

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I think it will have to be a lot fancier than a machine that can make parts - it seems no one wants kits anymire, they want instant gratification. Now that I’ve said that, there will be a dozen posts saying “but you can still get kits” Before you make a reply like that, stop and think. Sure there are still kits from the likes of Westerfield, Sunshine, F&C, etc. But we just saw Athearn doign away with the Blue Box kits, and I doubt we’ll see much from Accurail.

Athearn’s stated reason for dumping Blue Box was that they couldn’t price them at a point where they could make money relative to RTR. I picked up an Athearn RTR caboose last week for $14.95 at a LHS that sells 20% off MSRP ($18.95). IIRC, the equivalent BB kit sold for $1.98 MSRP in the early-mid 60’s. The current RTR MSRP is the equivalent of $2.68 in early 60’s dollars and it’s a superior offering with metal wheels, Kadee compatible couplers, inset window glazing, finer end rails and superior painting (including the frame/underbody and trucks). So let us imagine an equivalent kit for the inflation adjusted early 60’s MSRP of $1.98. The equivalent kit would have to be priced at $13.99 (and that doesn’t include the improvements you get with the RTR version). The thought of the whining, sniveling and moaning that would have broken out if Athearn adjusted their kit prices to reflect business realities was probably enough to convince Athearn that it just wasn’t worth the effort.

I don’t blame Athearn for dropping Blue Box. The alternative (a kit price rise to realistic levels) would have unleashed a torrent of invective at the company for “price gouging” and “greed”. And those would be the polite ones.

Ye who covet ever cheaper trains have sown the wind and now are reaping the whirlwind. Deal with it.

Andre

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And that is the good thing. The small scale companies will fit the small scale ‘kit’ markets a lot more readily than something like Athearn----simply by dint of their scale–

That was one of those issues that many people do tend to overlook----thinking that the latest of the latest machinery work better. Nah. It’s the skill involved in running the ding things as well----