Instead of making the above a Kits VS RTR, I thought wording it the above way might keep the thread from going south. My primary philosophy about any hobby is that a person do it for fun. So this is not about one way over the other, instead it is a simple query into which is preferred by those who participate here at Model Railroader’s Forums.
From my personal standpoint, being a modeler who has built models for almost 60 years and still love the activity, I want the rolling stock on my layout to be built from kits. I do have approximately 4 cars out of more than 125 cars that are RTR.
I’m wondering if the act of building models in Model Railroading has become blasé, obsolete, old hat, given the availability and dominance of RTR. If you still enjoy building models, I’d like to hear from you. If you like buying RTR cars you certainly can respond.
This is not an attempt to stir up resentment; or, people ire! It is only a query into the question I asked. Please, let’s try to be friendly about this! Like I said, my philosophy about the hobby is having fun, in whatever way this works for you.
Model builder here – I love (and, sometimes hate!) the challenges presented.
I’ve also got a lot of “train-set RTR” stuff that I also want to bring up to higher standards as well (body-mounted couplers, better grabs, etc.). They’ll likely “fall short” of the advanced kits like Blueprint Series / Tichy / Red Caboose … but still, they’ll look good.
RTR is nice and all, but (IMO) takes that part of the “fun” out of model railroading.
HOWEVER, for the guys who’s “Model Railroading” centers around operations or photo-realism or stuff like that, opening 10-15 boxes, and putting the cars in the yard might be “just the thing” that they need.
I certainly do, but there’s also lots of bashing and hacking going on, too.
On the other hand, as a narrowgauger I certainly appreciate how RTR had given me more time to build the kits I want to build. If you’re a Rio Grande NG modeler, you now have the option of using Blackstone RTR to supplement and grow your fleet of essential cars. You almost can’t get enough 3000-series boxcars. Between building them and buying RTR I have dozens. But building them does get a bit tedious and there are so many other kits I can – even need to – build instead that it makes buying RTR sensible.
Then there are the drop-bottom gons. The kits for these are especially challenging, yet when coal was king you need lots of these, along with the standard gons which also carried coal in the days when hand labor to unload them was cheap. Here, I am especially grateful for RTR, as the the kit build needed to produce one is particularly lengthy and involved. There’s a new batch of the 800-series DB gons just hitting the stores in case anyone’s interested. For me, these will be enough to round out my fleet.
I’d like to have another half-dozen boxcars in the future to go along with the last of my 3000-series kits, but after that I can be even more selective about what I need to build. I’ll have enough cars to meet the traffic needs of the layout during ops sessions. If I had to build 'em all, meeting that quota would still be 20+ years away. I’d rather be operating during much of that time as the eyes get weaker and the hands shakier. RTR has given me that time and one of the primary things I intend to do with it is build kits in a more leisurely manner.
That to me is the real benefit of RTR. Buying RTR frees up time to build kits of stuff that
I prefer kits to ready to run, but I also prefer undecorated kits and these are getting scarcer than hen’ teeth anymore. A big plus to Intermountain, Exactrail and Atlas for continueing to bring in undecorated kits with each new shipment of cars for the most part. And a Big BOO! to Athearn and Walthers for their avoidance of undecorated kits.
I do buy RTR cars for cars that are unvailable as kits or there is no decal set for the car I want to do. The loss of Champ, Greg Komar, Jerry Glow and Oddballs decals in the last few months have dealt a great blow to those that want to paint and decal their own cars and locomotives!
I used to buy kits or RTR by someone else but once the RTR from the manufacturer started having better detail than what I could do (and I am far from unskilled). I started buying mostly RTR and now only RTR. When I want to kit build, I build a building, a place that is almost impossible to find quality RTR, even from other builders.
I was buying nothing but the new RTR cars until I found several old Roundhouse kits at a train show and building these simple kits renewed my interest in kit building and since building those kits I have boughtand built several more Roundhouse and Bev-Bel/Athearn cars…
Here’s the watch it!
I have to watch the prices on these cars especially on e-Bay since one can find the better detailed RTR cars at or near the same price as these older kits.
I hear you rrebell – I will probably die of old age with unbuilt kits on my shelves and some of those kits are there right now and were there a decade ago too. And I keep adding to the pile! And in the final analysis, that’s fine. I bought them because they were “needed” (using that word in the strange way we model railroaders use words like “needed” or “essential” or “important” – that is, meaning they are merely “wanted”).
But I myself do not view our world as a RTR versus kit environment. A couple of years ago when I started to tally my roster I realized that given the industries on my layout I “needed” far more flat cars than I had, or had unbuilt on the shelves. Moreover the kind of flatcars I “needed” were often available in very nice RTR versions from Intermountain and others. So when I’d see them at Trainfest I’d buy them, even if similar kits were available because I realized that regardless of the time I set aside for kits, these flatcars were really “needed” (see above) in quantity if I wanted to run my layout the way it should be.
I also have plenty of boxcar, flatcar, reefer, and tank car kits sitting on my shelves, ranging from shake the box Athearn blue box, Bowser and Accurail to more challenging Intermountain, Red Caboose, P2K, Tichy, IMWX and other lines. If it’s 9 pm and I am yawning after a nice dinner and just want to do something, I can grab a blue box or Bowser or Accurail and go to bed having moved that car from kit shelf to active shelf. If it is New Year’s Day morning and I am home snowbound and feeling like the time has come, darn it, to really accomplish something, I pull down a Red Caboose or Intermountain or P2K kit after breakfast and it won’t likely even be completed by dinnertime. I like the challenge and I like the feeling of accomplishment.
I’m not sure how this cannot end up with some kit vs. RTR given the nature of the topic since by common sense, that is the “contrast” that exists. But I’ll try to stay objective.
I started in the hobby in the early 1970’s and my goal, like most was to build a model RR that had some realism factor. The only HO RTR stuff available at that time was the least realistic products - i.e. toy train set equipment. So if building a realistic model RR was the goal, kits were pretty much a means to an end. In other words, you had to build kits, no choice. So it wasn’t so much a matter of blase’, old hat or whatever, it was you must do it. Some may have built kits for the pleasure of it but many built them out of shear necessity, no choice in the matter. Really that was me back then and still to some degree now.
Roll on into the 1990’s and we began to see more HO products which were higher quality and were RTR, namely Atlas began offering HO freight cars and soon we saw RTR Intermountain and others entering the market. No longer were people who wanted a more realistic model railroad forced to only build rolling stock from kits, we had the options of buying models more or less ready t
Well said. You have to be conscious of what your priorities are. If it’s to build kits, well then do that. But the realities of time mean that unless your layout is limited to more modest proportions, you need to commit significant time to building the layout if you want it to be satisfying and operational.
That’s why kits are very seductive for some, without them realizing it. No matter how complex, a kit usually has directions, a plan (not all, but most). A layout isn’t like that, unless you’ve drawn up your own detailed plans as some do, and even then it’s not like the straightforward nature of kit directions. So what do modelers often do? They reach for the security of a good kit build and avoid the somewhat more complex task of what to do next on the layout.
Nothing wrong with either, but it’s just a psychological observation about what used to be a somewhat fraught and frustrating situation for me until I figured it out for myself and achieved a new comfort level with my prioritization of tasks.
Me too. And, similar to kit building is fixing up some trainshow RTR with paint, decals, grab irons, stirrups, brake rigging, and whatever. Tinkering is fun.
A few thoughts on this:
I love to build kits and scratch build. I have built hundreds of rolling stock kits over the years and recently (last few years) scratch built lots of buildings, bridges and ironically, trees. Model building takes time.
On the other hand I have a double deck layout to try and get to a reasonable degree of completion in this lifetime. It is an Ops based design, so some level of completion is desired to meet the primary goal of hosting operating sessions.
How do you spend your model time? Work on the layout or build more cars, water tanks etc. When do you take the time to do what? As Mike says, with layout construction there is no step by step plan. It can be comforting to get a well-designed kit on the workbench and just follow the steps.
I started out building kits back in the 1950’s as a teenager when I first got into model railroading, and I’ve kept on for the past 60 odd years. However, now close to my mid-seventies, my close-up eyesight just ain’t what it used to be (oddly enough, my ‘far’ sight is excellent, which still lets me work as a musician), so a kit with lots of tiny parts is a little beyond me, now. Instead of an Intermountain or Red Caboose (or Athearn metal, Silver Streak or Ambroid back in the day, lol), my kits tend to be of the Accurail or Bowser variety as far as difficulty. So now, it’s about 50-50 between “shake the box” and RTR. But with me, it was always about Getting the Right Freight Car, not neccessarily how difficult (or easy) it was to build.
But I’m still having fun, and that’s the most important thing.
I stockpiled Kits for years before I started on my current layout in 2001.
My main focus was an Operational Layout and I began OPs Session in the fall of 2001 with just 2 TOWNS.
We wanted to checkout how the track layout was and I quickly put together a number of basic kits to get things going!
Fast and easy!
As the layout progressed - I added more track and towns and the need for more cars was required (the layout now covers over 2500 sq ft)!
Again into my stockpile of kits and the layout was again populated to keep up with the every two week OPs Sessions.
By 2008 I had over 3000 feet of track down but had long since run out of Blue Box & MDC kits.
I began buying Bowser 100 ton Hopper kits by the case and any of the Accurail kits that fit my Era of the 75 - 85 time period.
Soon I had all of the kits everyone made and the need for more cars was required - the Kits were nowhere to be found but the Walthers Catalogs had lots of the proper Era cars RTR - so it was a no brainer as I keep the OPs Sessions going and the RTR cars looked way better than what I had already on the layout.
I now have over 1200 cars and 80% are RTR and I keep replacing the older (Kit Cars) with the newer RTR cars that are WAY MORE Detailed than even the early RTR cars were.
Seeing as Operations is the Goal of the layout - and if the scenery gets done someday - Fine - It certaily doesn’t make the trains run any better - so I feel my first piroity is to have good trackwork - Zero Derailments and ZERO Maintenance.
The RTR cars provides this and more - it makes me get out the scenery materials and spruce up the layout to keep up with the detailed RTR cars!
Remember that say 20-30 years ago, most pre-decorated kits were pretty poorly done. You generally had to paint and decal the car yourself, or get custom decorated cars from say Bev-Bel (who would buy undec kits from Athearn or MDC etc. and decorate them.) In recent years, not only are there many more RTR cars than there used to be, but now even relatively cheap cars and engines have ‘state of the art’ decoration. Compare a decorated Athearn bluebox caboose of today to one from c.1990 and the new one has a much more complete and correct decoration. So…the need for undec cars isn’t as great as it once was. I still like to ‘roll my own’, partly because I freelance and have custom made decals for my railroad, but if a car I like is available RTR I’ll buy it if it’s not too expensive.
For me it depends on the kit and the RTR. I don’t mind spending time on a unique car, but if my route has more than 3 of them and I can find them as RTR, RTR it is. It also depends on how much justice I can do to the car building it.
I still haven’t worked up the nerve to build the 16" Navy Gun Flat yet.
My first choice for freight cars is a kit, but I’ve made RTR exceptions. Examples are an Athearn caboose, a Walthers snowplow and a Walthers depressed center flat car. I’m currently building / rebuilding a couple of kit cabooses, one an Athearn BB and one a Roundhouse. The Athearn was used and someone drilled lamp holes in the side and I decided to fill them and repaint. And the old Roundhouse had an awful UP paint job. While doing this, I’ve noted the detail on the RTR UP Athearn and it is impressive in comparison; e.g., silver painted windows trim, windows, red painted (molded on) handrails. So there are definite pro’s & con’s.
On passenger cars, I’ve bought more RTRs, Walthers UP streamliners and MOW cars. The Athearn heavyweights I acquired and re-did are the simplest of kits; i.e, add the floor, couplers, trucks and handwheel and it’s done (unless adding lighting).
To me it’s more of a preference than an economic issue, though the time requirement is also a key item before retirement.