Problem with RR Trains Online Retailer

Hi

I did a search in the forums to see if I could find any reference to people having trouble with orders placed with RR Trains (www.rrtrains.com) I can find plenty of refernces to Internet Trains but not RR Trains so I thought I would start a seperate post.

Living in Australia and NZ the last 30 years I am no stranger to mail order and have ordered from many US sources over the years including trouble free experiences with Internet Trains!

A while back I tried RR Trains after seeing their ad in RR Trains, I noted in the ‘about’ part of their site they pupport some sort of early association with Kalmbach.

The reason I tried them is that it is easy to order anything from the walthers catalogue via the rr trains site and the discount helps offset the high cost of shipping to Australia. I use a lot of the more esoteric products that usually arent listed on a lot of sites, many of which typically focus on volume sellers like freight cars and engines and a few generic details.

Anyhow first couple of orders went ok - apart from taking a few weeks to ship. In March 08 I placed an order for a total $611USD incl shipping. A month later I placed a second order for somewhere under $200USD. Neither order materialised at my end but the debit for the first order had been billed to my credit card.

I got a response to my first email to say that they had held my first order and would combine with my second order and ship that day. This was over a month ago. No parcels have arrived, I have still not been debited for the second order and two more emails asking for an urgent update have gone unanswered.

They seem to work limited hours which means I need to set my alarm for about 2am here if I have a chance of catching someone there by phone, so far all I have got is the answerphone.

Before I try more early morning phonecalls and following up with the credit card company I would be interested to know if anyone else has had any experiences with this company?

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Daniel, I have purchased from them in the past because they had far and away the best price on a limited edition train-set that I wanted. There was a delay in shipping due to the manufacturer and I had to follow up with RR Trains to find out what was up. I got the impression that they are a virtual company, in that they are small and the folks that answer the phone were not in the same location from where the product was shipped. I did get what I ordered without problem.

Maybe you need to purchase their $50 preferred membership plan??[:-^]

Besides the $50.00 preferred membership fee it appears they will order anything in via the manufacturer list but it seems their actual stock on hand is quite limited. This could lead to a lot of back ordering which can get expensive as to shipping and handling costs.

What is the association with Kalmbach Publishing? Are they or are they not associated? Note: they refer to prior to 2004 and the launching of the web site.

If what you read on their web site is true as to the discounts it may be a very good place to shop, then again…