I recently received the latest Walthers monthly sale catalog and saw the “Dinner Belle” rail-excursion-themed new structure kit. Is it just me or does that look pretty much like their Whitehall (?) passenger station???
And the city news stand(s) seem strangely similar to their track scalehouse structure kit- both versions of the scalehouse???
How hard is it to use just one other prototype resource for these “different” structure kits, when there is a wealth of them out there? Seems like their are doing the old GM trick of making a Chevrolet into an Oldsmobile, by changing the details, not the model.
At the prices they are charging, a little variety would encourage sales, I would think.
I suppose the similarities can be frustrating. Walthers Gold Line structures used the same basic tooling for quite a few of the offerings. If you notice DPM uses many of the same components for their buildings as does Rix with the Smalltown line. Even though these companies are paying the Chinese 20 cents on the dollar to build molds, tooling for low production parts is still expensive. Being in an economic downturn hasn’t kept companies from raising their prices. Compare the current Walthers catalog with one from just a few years ago. Consumers can either pay the higher prices or do without. At least the hobby is something we chose to do, not a necessity.
And they sure don’t need our support by cheering them on…
Again can’t cost that much and nobody knows how many locomotives can be made from a ton of raw material and a gaylord of motors.Of course the manufacturers know and they ain’t saying.
I am well aware of the costs of materials (oil) for plastics production and the related tool and die costs, however, my argument is with differentiation among a particular product line. Any one of us with moderate modeling skills can make A into B with a bit of effort and ingenuity; however, to baldly duplicate and rebadge the same product with virtually no variation speaks not just to bottom line sensibilities, but to poor marketing conceptualization.
If Walthers wants to “sell buicks as re-badged chevys”, then how hard would it be to issue a sub-kit of modification parts to facilitate this?
Our hobby is a font of ingenuity and I would think that enterprising entrepreneurs would be capable of a bit more than what I described in my original post, with all due consideration of costs of materials, etc.
My wife and I used to collect Department 56 buildings, especially the North Pole Series. At first, every building was different and quickly identifiable. But, after a while, the same structured building started reappearing in a different color scheme and a different name for the building. Now, three or four buildings look the same, year after year, as each new edition is introduced. So, we just stopped collecting them.
I am told tooling for plastic models can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and can require the sale of many, many units to justify the costs. Utilizing current tooling holds costs down. And if the manufacturer can sell and profit from a few more units, so much the better.
Secondly, this is not new in model railroading. Anybody remember the Revell enginehouse and Superior Bakery? A glance through the products made by Pola and Heljan shows they often did the same thing.
Not everyone has the Whitehall passenger station, so to them, the “Dinner Belle” kit is a new structure. Actually, what they are doing is making up for our own lack of imagination. You could turn Whitehall into Dinner Belle yourself, right? Or into a railroad museum or a trackside ice cream stand. (Prototype trackside ice cream stand in Norway, Maine, by the way.)
If they can re-badge a kit and sell more of them after the demand for the initial run is complete, it reduces costs. Have you looked at the cost of truly “new” kits, compared with existing kits? They’ve taken a big jump. Some is that the old kits are in inventory, so production costs have already been paid, and some is the much higher cost of tooling and manufacturing, along with increased costs of doing business in China.
Plan ahead. If you know a particular kit is in your future plans, watch for it on sale, or seek it out at shows and discounters, even if you’re a couple of years from needing it. In most cases, it’s not going to get cheaper while you wait.
This is very old news. Remember the Revell line of structures back in the Fifties and Sixties?? They started out with the engine house (w/ working doors), which then became a newspaper publisher, a movie theater, a theater barn, and who knows what all. Manufacturers have been doing this practically forever. It provides us with less expensive model, and amortizes the tooling costs over a longer period.
I work in a factory and tooling costs are not cheap. They have to design it,build it ,install it and maintain it and ensure it complies to the ergonomic standards.
My suggestion would be that if you don’t like the clones then get into scratch building if you haven’t already. The end results are (I think) much more satisfying and nobody else has an exact copy on their layouts.
HOn3 Critter has a good point, and those of us who are willing to kitbash or modify or scratch-build have already taken a step (or several more) away from “build-it-like-the box-cover-artwork” structure modeling; however, I see many on this forum who speak of the imminent demise of the hobby and the collapse of the retail manufacturing marketplace. The more blatantly an existing/discontinued product is pronounced as “new”- by the SAME manufacturer/vendor, I would think the less enthusiasm is generated for sales of that “new” product- doesn’t that adversely affect the hobby marketplace, when experienced modelers know they are seeing the same thing as before?. I know that some of the old Revell kits became Tyco kits in the 70s, etc., but that was not rebadging- that was a capital equipment purchase of an existing product line tooling by another firm, with continued production of the same product. My issue is with creativity- if the product is announced as something new, then do a few tweaks to make it different, without bankrupting the production process, such as my afore-mentioned suggestion to issue sub-kits or modification kits for existing models to enable greater novelty and variety.
The old Revell enginehouse saw several incarnations in which the same basic tooling was used to produce two or three buildings: the engine house, a small factory, and a print shop. Only the engine house door sides of the building were changed. (I suspect the manufacturing rarely changed hands; the European producer merely sold the product through Revell, then Tyco, then under its own brand, then Model Power, etc.)
Heljan/Pola/Model Power took the side walls of their roundhouse, added a some new end walls and a roof, and voila, they had a factory.
Again, the problem is that tooling, for even a small part, is rather expensive. (From what I hear, it costs about as much to create tooling for an N scale freight car as it does for the same car in a larger scale.) Printing new boxes, taking new publicity photos, changing the color of the plastic, creating new signage is relatively inexpensive.
It is easier to generate sales with marketing than by designing and making new, or even “tweaked” products. That’s just the way the economics of the situation are, always have been, and probably always will be.
Exactly. How many times has Pepsi-Cola changed their logo, but except for using corn syrup instead of real sugar, it’s basically the same thing as when they started.