I’m curious why we don’t see freight car kits of modern variety anymore? It seems like now there could be a market for this with more and more modelers modeling modern lines (Say that ten times fast :P) I was wondering howcome no one has jumped on the bandwagon.
I mean it seems perfect, we got more and more modern modelers, and with space and budget concerns a quick generic freight car in their favorite pike could be a hotseller.
Which leads me to point number 2. Why not have kits that require no glue or smaller detail parts to get in the way? Modeler’s are looking more for the instant gratification (Not saying this is bad), but I feel that may be attributing to rising costs in the hobby, I feel like snap together kits could fix some of that. Why aren’t those a thing?
My belief is that it is because the freight car manufacturers all hate me.
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You will see a lot of people blaming young people that do not want to build kits, but that is nonsense. Have you ever assembled a Gundam kit? Young people put those together all the time, and they are amazing. Younger people still love to build things.
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I think it is because, although we do not want to admit it, model railroaders are getting very old, and kits are not selling anymore.
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I am stuck with what Tichy, F&C, and a few others offer. None of these are modern.
I love kits and just completed five Branchline “Blueprint Series” kits over the past 3 weeks, which provided me about a week’s worth of entertainment during that time. Nowadays, most folks, however, would rather pay for a preassembled, detailed (RTR) piece of rolling stock or structure than cut & assemble it by hand. That’s their choice.
For the manufacturer, it’s more cost-effective and a larger profit-margin to have a kits assembled, painted, and detailed overseas. And a lot of the time it can be done better than modelers can do on their own. That said, I still much prefer kits over RTR and purchase those whenever possible and/or needed.
If that’s not modern enough, then you’re out of luck (unless something from Accurail or Bowser is available). ST is testing the waters with this kit. If sales support it, they’ll make more like them.
As for why no one has “jumped on the bandwagon” is that the bandwagon may have a bunch of modern modelers these days, but few of them want to build car kits. There simply isn’t enough of them willing to take the time and effort to learn how to build kits. Which relates to your last point: instant gratification. Today, people want to run trains. They’d rather spend an hour running fully built models than an hour building a kit (not to mention the hours and hours it takes learning how to build kits).
We had to build kits back in the old days because that’s practically all there was. We were forced to become kit builders or buy expensive custom made models or el cheapo junk models. The middle ground (where things run well but don’t cost a fortune) were Athearn BB, MDC/Roundhouse and a few others over the years.
BTW, a snap together kit has been a “thing” in this hobby for decades. See: Athearn, MDC, Accurail, Bowser, etc. Few of their kits ever needed glue, just a screw driver.
It isn’t a matter of what types of kits modern vs. older, it’s a matter of RTR far outsells kits in real life and manufacturers don’t want to continue to make something that doesn’t sell well and isn’t profitable.
If you don’t believe me, here from Athearn’s wiki straight from them:
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Which leads me to point number 2. Why not have kits that require no glue or smaller detail parts to get in the way? Modeler’s are looking more for the instant gratification (Not saying this is bad), but I feel that may be attribu
“Modern” means recent. Recent means a relatively short time in existence. That translates into fewer eras. A car built in 2010 is only good for 17 years, right now. A car that was built in 1980 will span almost twice that. With greater sales, one might think. For example, Atlas introduced a very nice centerbeam flat in 2009. The prototypes were built in 2006, I think. I didn’t get very many. And they haven’t sold real well. THERE was a modern freight car. At the time.
Plus, over time, there have been fewer road names. And people tend to have road name loyalties. “Oh, I LOVE the Nickel Plate. I must HAVE the Nickel Plate…”
Because there is no perceived need. RTR cars are selling briskly, as far as I can see. Not-snap-together kits are doing OK–Accurail is around and producing new models on occasion. And there are “real” kits coming and going in the market.
However, you and some others here MAY perceive a need. And you should consider pooling your money and producing some.
In addition, the “finer” you are making a model, the harder it is to keep it snap-together. Little bitty bits come to mind. Having something snap in is a trickier thing than pin-glue. And it gets trickier when it gets smaller.
So snap-together will have to remain crude. Accurail is sorta crude. Are there people who can’t handle an Accurail kit??? Can those same people also build a layout???
Exactrail, Tangent, Intermountain, Kadee and Atlas still make kits of their cars, the problem is getting your supplier to order them, and for the the importer to get their supplier to properly pick the parts to assemble the cars.
I have found many kits to be missing parts lately and then have to get the said parts from the importer is almost impossible, because the part nos on the instructions and the part itself does not match (especially Athearn).
I still have a bunch of Athearn, Exactrail and Tangent kits to build.
By the way the Kadee kits require no glue to assemble.
People are willing to spend the extra money to buy RTR rather than save the money and build themselves. That applies to many things these days. If the RTR price were to increase a lot, like maybe labor costs increasing, then kits would be more prevelant.
Also note that most kit manufacturers offer kits from 1970 era and older. They were tooled and molded a long time ago. A kit manufacturer of more modern equipment would have the up front costs of building brand new molds and such, so it would be a bigger risk than just producing a batch of kits themselves from long-ago expensed equipment.
For interest, I just compared Intermountain Caswell gondolas, street priced at $14.99 kit and $22.49 retail. For the kit I need a decal set, $3.19 for Tichy (if correct enough), making the kit total $18.18. Additional to shipping (except at our train show), options such as Kadee couplers and metal wheelsets would, for me, be added, making the total investment higher, with the same $4.31 cents savings.
I doubt for many who like to build kits it’s much about saving money, though one can save alot with old BB kits in quantity, for instance. For me, it’s the fun of it. The extreme case would be a kit that cost the same as the RTR and building it just for the entertainment value. I probably won’t do that, but it’s not too far from what I’m actually doing.
I do wish there were more kits available. But I get by pretty well via existing offerings of Bowser, Accurail, supplemented by older items still offerred (EBay) like BB kits. And I enjoy taking on some of the better detailed ones (like a Tichy crane that has not been addressed).
I’m glad the issue has come up again, as I see I need to look into doing some Intermountain kits I have not tried! But that would add to the unbuild inventory if I order now.
I predict that as the Baby Boomers continue to age, and more and more of us are on fixed incomes, kits will come back in a big way.
RTR exploded in the 90s because the Boomers hit the empty nest category: senior in your job, well compensated, very busy, the kids are married and out of the nest, the mortgage is paid off, and the dog is dead. Boomers had more money than time, and the market responded, as markets do.
Everyone is an expert at predicting the future but few have actually been right; case in point - people predicting the demise of the hobby for the past umpteen years.
Here is one major flaw in your prediction. There are already many hobbyists with HUGE collections of kits who never had time to finish the kits accumulated over the past 50 years. I see these collections at nearly every big train show I go to - tons of kits from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s there for the picking for cheap. I see this show after show, year after year for the past 10-15 years as RTR models have take over the hobby, evil as they are to some hobbyists.
The market is, and has been, glutted with kits for years because so many people bought far more than they had time to build. Oh, and even John Armstrong wrote about this common model railroader characteristic back in the 1970’s and mentioned it in one of his book I read, LOL.
I was victim to buying more kits than I had time or desire to build too btw, and over the past 10-15 years I have gone over my collection numerous times and realized hey, if I haven’t built most of these I might as well sell them and use the cash to help me buy RTR cars which happen to be accurate versions of real cars - what a concept.
Lack of time and desire to build umpteen kits and the same universal realization is the reason why RTR took off wildly during the past 20 years. That glut will have to be eaten through before the demand is high enough, and manufacturers actually figure it out, before kits start to make anything like the come back you are prediciting. That is assuming that ever comes to pass at
There are probably several reason why easy to build/generic/snap together cars are mostly non-existent. I just don’t think the market for simple, generic models is potentially very lucrative. (EDIT While I was typing riogrande5761 made some of the same observations.)
Part of this is knowledge. In the bad old days research material wasn’t available in the volume we see now, so the average hobbyist couldn’t so easily determine just how poor typical models were. More of today’s modelers are demanding better products with prototype specific details, and I suspect that’s enough of the market to keep generic cars from being profitable for most manufacturers. Generic RTR stuff doesn’t necessarily sell as well as highly detailed versions of the same models either.
Hobbyists have always been looking for instant gratification. Used to be you could almost get that from a basic car kit, which usually resulted in, at best, a so-so model. Now you can get something in RTR that’s much better for a cost that’s actually pretty reasonable given inflation. I maintain that modelers from years past mostly built car kits because they had to. Some of us approach the hobby as a craft and enjoy the process of building things, but a large proportion just want to run trains, so building may be viewed as a hindrance (and it’s fine with me if that’s what somebody prefers).
Plus, if simple kits were supposedly the gateway to tacking more complex models, howcome so few ever attempted advanced kits? Rarely do I encounter anyone bemoaning the loss of basic kits who ever developed the skill to build advanced plastic cars, let alone wood or resin. Most people figured out the minimum to get by with stuff like Athearn or MDC, and never moved beyon
It’s not the hobby, life has changed. I don’t think we can put the genie back into this bottle.
We sit longer in traffic going to and from work. We have to catch up on the Internet every day: mail, news, forums, endless youtube videos, facebook, twitter and instagram. Gotta shutttle the kids to soccer practice or lacrosse camp.
My grandfather used to whittle whistles from some sort of branch and my mother made me a bubble toy out of soapy water and the top of a green onion.
Now you order a big plastic hoop from Amazon and make huge bubbles. The kids in my neighborhood don’t ride bikes, they ride battery powered mini motorcycles. Their parents don’t walk, they load the dog in the golf cart and ride around the neighborhood. Not even the dog gets exercise anymore.
Look around any restaurant. People aren’t talking to each other, they are looking at their cell phones.
It’s all about instant gratification. There is no attention span anymore. We want to open the box and use it, not assemble it over hours or days. I too miss the old days, but we are dinosaurs.
Thats part of it for sure. I think the big kit fans who are often retired forget things like that when they praise the kit building world and cast RTR as a bad thing or in some cases acuse hobbiests of wanting instant gratification. I feel that is an over simplication when in reality, the things you raised are very true. Time is not a commodity many have in liberal supply.
In my case, I work long hours. Also in order to get out of the chaos of the area I live and maybe get a home with decent sized basement, I’m now planning to move another 30 minutes drive futher away from work. But around here, unfortunately, if you aren’t loaded or have inherited a few hundred thou, then you have to move further out for a stand alone home with a decent basement. Many have kids, and busy lives. Thats a fact.
So when manufacturers started offering RTR, people who have limited time are pleased with the HQ RTR offerings.
Also, as Rob pointed out, people now are interested in accurate models vs. the old generic models of Athearn/MDC blue box days of yor. They would rather have fewer accurate models than a large roster of generic models, in many cases.
Sure, I get the “I want it now crowd” but the instant gratification accusation is used as a kudgel and a bad thing when most modelers know it is a big time consuming task to carve out time to build a layout and all it entails. If you have lots of time, bless you, but RTR models do help you build
I’ve heard the story before, but not Flip Wilson’s version.
Speaking of tangent, Tangent offers some of their r-t-r cars in kit versions, too.
While mine aren’t especially modern, at least they were kits…
Rapido hasn’t yet done a lot of freight cars, but this is one of them, and was built from an undecorated kit…
I “get” that r-t-r is what sells, and I’ve bought a few myself.
I’ve also had the opportunity to fill my roster of freight and passenger cars with stuff built mostly from kits, and most of them upgraded, often more than once.
It’s been a lot of fun, and most of the kits on which I learned are still available for those who want them - check out local train shows in your area. In most cases, prices are even better than they were 20 years ago. And if those kits aren’t challenging enough for you, there’s nothing preventing you from making a few of your own “improvements”.
I think that most model railroaders aren’t ( and never were) that interested in kits. They built them because they had to. But once the labor cost came way down by assembling kits in China, RTR rapidly became the preferred option. For those who like kits, they are mostly high end - very accurate and expensive. I hope Accurail survives, but I see their prices are creeping up.
I see the same thing happening with structures. RTR is expanding, Woodland Scenics line is constantly growing. Other companies like Menard’s are getting into RTR.
Even track is more RTR with built in road bed and switch motors.
Personally, I like kits and continue to buy and build them. But I am planning a large layout (17x40) in my new basement. So I will use all the RTR I can to get the layout built. Even using standins from other scales - I’m building in S, but a lot of the O pre built structures are undersized and can be used.
Not necisarly so. I bought kits because that is what I could afford, now I can buy RTR that are better done than I could ever do, an I could do some fine work. RTR stuff today (the good stuff) is at a skill level that would have been in the top 1% in the 60’s thru 90’s at least. To build a freight car, even a modern one requires a whole lot of different skills, some of which can ruin the finished product if a mistake is made. Example, once spray painted a flat car, done fine work before but this one slipped out of my grasp, no damage but the spray got too heavy on the mid section. Given the situation I could fix it but what if it happened when I was on a more complex item. Also my skills with decals, dry transfers ect., are not up todays printers.
