I know some manufacturers don’t have enough demand for rolling stock kits, and I understand supply / demand. Just thought I’d report on this week, buliding 4-5 Walthers freight car kits picked up at train shows. I’ve put a refinery on the layout and the adjacent yard now has 4 more tank cars, Walther and/or Walthers Like Like 10,000 gallon cars. These are very nice kits, all of $5-8 at local train shows. I bought a Shell Walthers RTR recently because I wanted one and could not find a kit. The old kits are basically the same thing.
Two things I wonder:
why some vendors make kits today but Walthers has given up on them
why some car types are much less prevalent in kit form (tanks cars, flats, etc)
Anyway, I plan to put more effort into finding kit types I want at shows (not many in Texas) and E-bay
I myself, love kits. 80%of my rolling stock is Bowser kits, and 5% RTR, and the rest are athearn, accurail, and roundhouse. One of the reasons I have heard for the decline of kit’s here lately is due to the ‘I want it now’ factor. I see this at the club house from time to time. Some folks do not see the advantages of the kits, and do not want to take the time to put them together. RTR’s are able to be taken from the package and played with in theory. However, the reality is they require as much work as a kit to run properly and cost 2-3x more than the kit. I am a big fan of the kit, and if Bowser stops making freight car kits, I will be highly upset.
Gidday Paul, Welcome to the wonderful world of freight car kit building. [swg] I enjoy building kits because they’re “doable” in a reasonably short period of time, and simply because I enjoy it. The owner of the closest LHS to me dosn’t stock many kits because they just don’t sell that quickly.
Here’s a link to NP2626s thread with a reasonably up to date list of car kits manufacturers…
I think fewer plastic kits are made because more people want “ready to run”/“ready to use” equipment. It’s part of an ongoing trend…when I started 40+ years ago, “serious” model railroaders built wood craftsman kits for cars and buildings (and hand-laid track) while kids and “newbies” used plastic kits and flextrack. Now I suspect there are many modellers who have never built a kit of any kind.
On the other hand, now there are many more “laser cut” kits which are wood but are much easier than the old “box of sticks” craftsman kits.
BTW I’ve been leaning towards Accurail kits recently. Reasonable prices, easy to assemble, good decoration (BTW before the 1990’s most pre-dec plastic kits had terrible decoration, it often was better to buy an undec kit and decorate it yourself) and made in the USA. As a freelancer, I like their “data only” cars so I can quickly add my railroad decals to a pre-painted / partially lettered car.
I picked up a couple of Walthers 33,000 gallon propane tank car kits at a train show last week for $10 each. I got them both assembled and ready for service, but the experience remided me why I see so few of these on anyone’s layout. The kits have an overabundance of flimsy and/or ill-fitting parts for the tank body and especially the railings. Areas of the walkway castings where you’re supposed to drill for railings are sometimes too small for the wire parts supplied. I ended up substituting old Athearn diesel handrail stanchions for the plastic kit parts because they look and fit much better.
I compared my assembled kits to an equivalent Walthers RTR version of the same car, and its improved stanchions gave me the idea to use the Athearn equivalents. The paint and lettering quality of the kits is nowhere close to what Walthers has on the newer RTR car. Comparison using the ACF Funnell Flow tanks is similar. Also note that the RTR models come with machined metal wheels and Kadee compatible Proto Max metal couplers while the kits had plastic wheels and horn hooks, neither of which I used.
With these particular kits, I’d suspect many hobbyists found them frustrating. They aren’t necessarily complex, nor do they have a lot of small parts, but not everything fits well and the kit design leaves something to be desired. The same can be said for some of the other Walthers cars of similar vintage, and I know many had trouble with kits like the Proto 2000 PS 4427 covered hoppers, Intermountain cylindrical and PS 4750 hoppers, Branchline “Blueprint” boxcars and other kits that were showing up at the same time, regardless of parts quality on most of those. I’
It seems kit builders often like to cast the folks who like RTR stuff in a negative light, as if they are the “instant gratification crowd” or maybe lazy. Can I just say I’m kinda tired of this posturing and chest puffing? People who buy RTR are not basically lazy “gotta have it now” people. Maybe there are other factors too which are legit and not negative why we like RTR stuff:
Some of us aren’t retired and are busy with work, house projects etc. and don’t have lots of time to build that back log of kits.
Some of us have built plenty of kits already and frankly don’t really enjoy it anymore.
Some of us have close up sight that makes building kits even less enjoyable and more of a pain in the toosh.
Some of us have noticed that the final product of many RTR are better than we can get ourselves.
Some of us would rather spend our time on benchwork, track laying, scenery and wiring etc. and don’t have time to do everything, so RTR saves some time and allows us to enjoy other aspects of the hobby.
Thank you very much.
Having built plenty of kits between my teens and 50’s, that is a silly argument. Not only do you have to spend the time building the kits, you have to do all the tweaking etc. guaging wheels, coupler height, getting rid of wobble. Big deal. I accept that I may have to do that with RTR stuff too sometimes. Lets sto
Gidday, the trouble with this debate is that it seems to quickly turn into an argument where “generalisations” and emotions take over. I know where you are coming from but it can work both ways. I have had variations of the following, "who would want to waste their time building kits, can’t you afford proper models??, and to be perfectly honest it’s like water off a Bears back, but wait there’s more!!! The same persons also complain about the cost of RTR, and also wonder how I can have a greater variety of rolling stock. the icing on the cake is upon finding that a particular car is a kit, I have been asked if I would build one for them!!![banghead]
I quess there’s a lot to be said for the old Yorkshire saying “There’s nowt so queer as folk”.
Though I make no secret that I enjoy building kits, I do buy RTR if there is a particular car I want.
What is funny is that I remember when the bias was even stronger against plastic kits by those who built only craftsman kits from wood – they’d sniff about “shake the box” kits. Even when some plastic kits got pretty challenging, such as the KurtzKraft boxcars or the Silver Streak mechanical reefers, you’d hear the same comments about “shake the box” kits when they were nothing of the sort, which made it plain the bias was really against molded plastic. Frankly some of those wood kits that were trying to look like metal freight cars such as the Ambroid ACF center flow were not very good looking even if you used sanding sealer on the wood, and model photography made those kits look even worse than in person.
I think there was a lot of frustration and resentment about how good plastic could look if it was painted and weathered well.
Not so many years back, maybe 10 years ago, Walthers brought back an entire line of plastic kits that they had discontinued a few years earlier, even going so far as to bring back and adapt some box graphics they had used in the 1950s. I do agree that some of the tank car kits were awkward to build but the box car, reefer, hopper car, and flat car kits were pretty standard stuff.
I think there were three problems that caused that kit line to be dropped yet again, this time possibly for good. First I think we had all been conditioned to expect a kit to cost much less than ready to run. Even today I think people expect that. I think they had a hard time finding a price point that made sense for them given that assumption. If the kits were going unpurchased by modelers or unordered by dealers due to there not being enough cheapness to the kit price, how can the manufacturer fight that reality?
Second I think they got tired of dealing with missing parts, broken parts, and worse yet, parts that weren’t missing or broken but the buyer claimed they were to cover their own blun
Absolutely. The shift in priorities from building cars to building layouts is a huge part of what brought us the current situation with RTR. I think MR has helped this along by emphasizing having a satisfying layout as the end goal. I wish this realization would sink in and we’d stop seeing RTR as an excuse to attack our fellow modelers.
Norfolk Fan
One of the reasons I have heard for the decline of kit’s here lately is due to the ‘I want it now’ factor. I see this at the club house from time to time. Some folks do not see the advantages of the kits, and do not want to take the time to put them together. RTR’s are able to be taken from the package and played with in theory.
It seems kit builders often like to cast the folks who like RTR stuff in a negative light, as if they are the “instant gratification crowd” or maybe lazy. Can I just say I’m kinda tired of this posturing and chest puffing? People who buy RTR are not basically lazy “gotta have it now” people. Maybe there are other factors too which are legit and not negative why we like RTR stuff:
Some of us aren’t retired and are busy with work, house projects etc. and don’t have lots of time to build that back log of kits.
Some of us have built plenty of kits already and frankly don’t really enjoy it anymore.
Some of us have close up sight that makes building kits even less enjoyable and more of a pain in the toosh.
Some of us have noticed that the final product of many RTR are better than we can get ourselves.
Some of us would rather spend our time on benchwork, track laying, scenery and wiring etc. and don’t have time to do everything, so RTR saves some time and allows us to enjoy other aspects of the hobby.
Thank you very much.
However, the reality is they require as much work as a kit to run properly and cost 2-3x more than the kit.
I won’t get into any merits of kit vs RTR, but I like kits. I have a few Walthers (white box) kits waiting for assembly. I’m working on a fleet of Difco dumps, and you can usually find the kit version for about $10., vs the RTR version for about $26. I also like IM kits, as I have collected a few cylindrical hoppers in kit form, once again, about 1/2 price or less than RTR.
My current HO layout is “modern times”, but when I start the On3 layout I have been planning, the time period will change.
Thanks Rob, thats basically how I feel too. I know I may never have the scratchbuilding skills some have, and more power too them. I admire the work they do on nice freight cars. But what I am hoping for is a satisfying layout with train running on it that mirror SP and D&RGW trains of the 70’s and 80’s mainly. RTR helps me achieve that goal.
I guess we’ll always have those out there who feel negative about the RTR products and those who buy them. Is it a perfect word? Heck no. RTR stuff needs to be tweaked or parts glued back on. No biggie. Those who like to focus on building kits can still get them in spades at train shows and online. Really, everyone is a winner in the hobby.