I have a decent sized inventory of rolling stock for my size layout ( 600 pieces) a good portion of them are the Athearn kits and some other assorted kits, Round House, Bevbel etc. and it’s been my experience that there is a lot of work and added expense to get the kits to run and function as well as the quality pieces such as Kadee, Walthers, BLI, Intermountain etc. I’m not refering to detailing or weathering but just to get them to function on a par with the good stuff so to speak. For example I had a set of IHC heavy weight passenger cars I picked up at a show. By the time you add Kadee couplers, interior kits, light kits and weight them the cost is equal to or very close to lets say a Walthers passenger car.
So I was wondering what your thoughts and opinons on the subject. Is it true you get what you pay for in this case?
I have to agree. It’s why the RTR market is growing and the kit market is slowly losing ground. Also, the better kits cost about the same as the better RTR so there really isn’t much incentive to buy kits. The cheap labor markets of Asia have changed the hobby in that respect.
I still buy kits because I do enjoy them, but most of my hobby time is spent on building the layout and using RTR rolling stock. As I get more time I’ll get back to scratch/parts building - but I’ll focus on cars not commercially available in RTR or kit.
I think overall the RTR is a good thing because it allows more folks to have a layout. And you can still build individual cars if and as you want to.
I notice a different in the RTR vs. old kits, just in how they roll. I have some old Athearn kits, and they just don’t seem to roll to good. BUT the RTR/other brands roll great.
I do a lot of weathering, and I will 95% of the time buy a RTR car. Better detail, rolls better, just a better all around car. One problem is the money difference. Some company’s start a RTR car at $25+, where you could get a old Athearn kit for $7.50 or so.
Plus once money gets better, the older kits will be making a new home on the shelves. [:-,]
BTW re the IHC cars, if you use the Pullman Palace interior kits, the floor they include is a very heavy metal piece which takes care of weighting the car at the same time it helps with the interior detailing.
I like to do stuff, as well as run stuff, and when I buy RTR I get bored. Even a simple kit like an Accurail or Bowser car gives me something to do, and when it’s on the rails I feel like I did something. When I run trains with it, I enjoy it more, because I feel a sense of personal investment.
Here’s the really crazy part: I enjoy running my clunky old mechanically-upgraded trainset cars more than the finest RTR car. The detail isn’t as good, but I took something regarded as useless and made it useful. That’s fun!
Right now I am working on a Tichy flatcar. It’s taking a while in-between home repairs, but I don’t care. It’s a gas.
We should never let mundane considerations spoil a hobby.
If you want the model that the manufacturer made for the roads the manufacturer made, then RTR is better. If you want a different car or engine than the manufacturer made or a road other than the one the manufacturer made then kits are better.
When I was modeling the 1950’s only about 10% of the cars I bought were RTR. The rest had some form of kitbash to make them more like the roads I model or were painted and decaled for the roads I modeled.
Now that I model 1900-1905, any RTR I buy or more or less 'standins" because they have the wrong details and I would destroy the paint schemes to fix them or the details to strip them. The vast majority of models I buy are kits, either because they are “craftsman” cars or I need kits for kitbash fodder. I like to buy MDC 36 ft reefers, convert them into boxcars with scratchbuilt underframes and then recycle the metal underframes to gondolas. It is easier to convert an MDC reefer into a boxcar than to redetail an MDC boxcar. I have taken Athearn 50 ft gons, cut them down to 36 ft long and 1 ft high sides and made models of a 1902 Pressed Steel Car Co. low side gon that fits perfectly on the MDC underframe. That would be darn near impossible with a RTR car. I would destroy the parts disassembling them.
If you are going to give your cars a little weathering and plop them down on the railroad RTR is great. If the manufacturers build the cars you want, RTR is great. If the manufacturers letter them for the roads you want, RTR is great.
If you are going to do any other work on the cars, RTR is not so great.
Well I have about a half dozen old Ambroid kits that I built and are running on the layout and thye run great. I upgraded to Kadee trucks and wheel sets but the over all quality of the kits in my O/P is far superior to that of modern day Athearn kits. There is something genrally wrong with putting a metal screw into a plastic body or floor which many if not all Athearn kits do.I have gone as far as insert 4/40 helicoil sets intot he floors of Atheran car or clearance drill the holes and use 4/40 nylock nuts. I can’t count the times I have picked up pieces of rolling stock and left one of the trucks sitting on the track.I love to super detail rolling stock and locomotives I enjoy weathering as well but that is not a prioroty right now. For me thats something to do when your in more of the final stages of completion. You know how we say the layout is never really finished well thats a part of it for me. But I just get frustrated that you have to do so much work to bring the kit car up to basic running standards that you have met or exceeded the cost of a better quality ready to run car.
I forget the term, but you also have to look at the ration of hobby time to dollar amount. If you purchase a cheaper kit along with all the details you want to use to bring it up to par, you will get more hobby time for you money as you assemble it than you would with a RTR car. To me that is the selling point since I don’t have a layout to run. I just keep building Accurail, BB, and old MDC kits to occupy my time.
I guess it comes down to what your priorities are in the hobby. For me, as others have stated, personal time investment counts for something. I get a lot of satisfaction from finding cheap old rolling stock at train shows and upgrading them to make them look/work better. It also has made me a better modeler and that’s one of the reasons I’m in the hobby. As long as I have the will and dexterity, I’ll continue on this path.
I upgraded those inexpensive IHC passenger cars and find they roll as well as my Walthers HW passenger RTR cars. I have no regrets buying either, but the IHC cars were more fun.
It also depends on what you’re hoping to end up with. Personally, I’d rather have a few outstanding models than a yard full of pretty good, but not great cars. I’m talking about Westerfield, Wright Trak, Speedwitch, Branchline, etc kits. Some of these are pretty expensive and can take more than a week to construct, paint, and decal. But done carefully, you end with a beautiful, correctly detailed model. For me at least, that really enhances what I hope to end up with.
I’m at the opposite end of the spectrum from the preceding poster. To me, freight cars, passenger cars and MU cars (I run both EMU and DMU) are just pieces in the chess game called Operation. If they pass the one meter test they’re good enough.
I recently purchased some RTR cars, as kitbash fodder. Quite simply, while they have free-rolling trucks the tracking and rolling quality aren’t anywhere near the level of rolling stock I’ve been running for forty years. There’s something to be said for needle-point steel axles running in metal pedestals.
Of course, I can’t just go to my LHS and buy appropriate rolling stock, in either kit or RTR form. I’m on the wrong side of a rather wide ocean - and a rather poor exchange rate.
Myself, I find that I’m usually fiddling around with even the RTR’s, at least as to changing out couplers to Kadees (and sometimes the wheelsets in the trucks), so its very seldom that I’m running the car ‘right out of the box’, so to speak.
I enjoy kits. Favorites are Branchline, Tichy, Intermountain and Red Caboose, even though it’s getting harder and harder to find either Intermountain or Red Caboose in anything but RTR, these days. The Tichy take a rather long time to build, but everything on them goes right where it’s supposed to.
Accurail are simple kits, and in my case, require the installation of new couplers and wheels, but I’ve always liked the results–especially the finish on their wood cars.
My favorite kits are still the old Athearn metal (with six gazillion parts) and Silver Streak wood kits, but that’s talking WAY in the past, now. The old Ambroid wood kits were always a challenge and carefully built, made into pretty spectacular models. I don’t know if I could tackle one these days, however.
The RTR rolling stock is better than I can build, but I like the ones I assemble better. They have “personality” … and I have bonded with them. (Blood is thicker than water.)
I have a set of standards for my rolling stock - non-magnetic weights, brass truck screws, metal wheelsets with accurate profile, Kadee couplings at correct height. This often means stripping down an RTR model to replace the weight, so I practically end up with a kit anyway.
Given the choice, I would buy the kit and build it to my mimimum layout standard, rather than get RTR. Unfortunately a lot of manufacturers do not give this option.