I know this is a dead horse, but I trust repetition more than I trust my patience to deal with the search function.
I’m looking for basically these things: 90 and 100 ton coal hoppers with loads eastern road names preferred, but I’m going to paint over the road names and stencil BPRR above the numbers. Used would be great because they will look like crap when I’m done. eBay prices on these far exceed Trainman retail.
Semi-modern & modern freight cars that you might find on a mixed freight today in NS Western PA (Conrail and NS hoppers, corn syrup tankers, Rail Box, Conrail & NS box cars, covered hoppers, etc CSX is also okay in small quantities --inter-modal and auto-racks are probably too much for my 12" radius.
All the above in Trainman would be great. Price counts.
And I’m looking for an Atlas B&P GP-38 #2000 (released in 2006.)
N Scale Supply is a good place to start. Here’s their main page and down towards the bottom of the pageare links to their Catalog and the Pre-Owned Equipment. The Pre-Owned is cheaper, but it’s hit and miss, ya know? Mostly loco’s up front, but there are some cars towards the latter pages too. Oh, and I’ve bought from them before with no problems.
He doesn’t have an online inventory, so you won’t know for sure what he’s got. But, if he doesn’t have what you want, he has some suppliers that he checks, and can sometimes come up with it anyway. And he and his wife are nice folks!
He has an online inventory, and is also quick. I haven’t met him, but email corresponsence with he and his wife have also been very friendly. Oh, and once when the online inventory was wrong, she called me within minutes to ask what I wanted to do.
The two I rely on are MB Klein (www.modeltrainstuff.com) and Feather River Train Shop. Both provide top drawer service, excellent pricing, and a good to excellent inventory of current and recent releases.
It’s not so much that they didn’t have a correct inventory-- I owned a mail order/Internet business, one that had such a good reputation for customer service, that we became number one on the lists of manufactures when they were asked to recommend retail outlets.
When we had to contact a customer to resolve a problem–like asking for a substitute product–we did not make the customer stop what they were doing, log onto the Internet, find our site, so a search, and have them tell me the part number of a item when I had a computer right in front of me that I was typing on and was dedicated to my inventory.
–I think that the cluelessness of the customer service rep was appalling.
Did you try Wig Wag? If it is around to be found, George will find it. when he has to dig things up, it might take a little longer, but it is worth it!