as the modeling season ramps up to full swing, I am egar to start and am ready just waiting on the ho walthers cataloug. Why haven’t they come and why so late?
I think they are out. I believe I saw a stack of them at the local train store this past Thursday. I’m in Pennsylvania.
And they appear to be in-stock at Walthers: http://www.walthers.com/exec/search?quick=913-213&x=0&y=0.
The 2013 HO catalog has been released – I saw some at a train shop in Tucson, Arizona last week.
When I started in the HO scale side of the hobby 9 years ago, I considered the Walthers catalog as the Bible of the model railroad hobby. I couldn’t wait for the annual edition.
But, let’s face it. who really needs it anymore?
Once Horizon Hobby bought Athearn and Walthers stopped listing Athearn products, the annual catalog started to lose its relevance.
I no longer buy the annual edition. Walthers would be better off giving them away.
Rich
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Their website and ebay are soo good I do not need a catalog much. I do read this flyer which shows up with my orders though. Ya know, sunmit and jegs might not even have as organized website.
“Walthers would be better off giving them away.”
I am surprised that they are not given away! After all, you can go to Walthers on-line, and, in fact, buying a catalogue goes against my grain. I have never bought a catalogue in my life. I have always thought that catalogues were supposed to be a marketing tool and given away free by the vendor.
I seem to recall that sometime in the 1980s, department stores started charging for their catalogs (may have been earlier, not sure); what they did do was rebate the purchase price off your next purchase from that catalog. I think the last Walthers Catalog I got was included free with a purchase I made from them (they did this a year or two ago, their new catalog was almost ready to release so they threw in the old one).
What we really could use is a website that does what I suppose Walthers Catalog did in the old days - listing ALL the manufacturers and resellers, from big firms down to the neat little garage-sized manfacturers (“oh, hey, they make that part, cool! Hmm, never heard of them before!”). Right now it seems so ad-hoc; you find a mention on one forum but not other forums, or from one magazine but not others, sometimes in passing, sometimes as a review, all too often after the manufacturer is out of business BECAUSE ALMOST NOBODY KNEW HE WAS in business in the first place.
1/87 Vehicle site does a decent job of keeping people updated on new vehicle manufacturers, but as can be infered that applies to HO vehicles of course, and not structural detail parts or freight cars or paint or whatever else that could be really useful.
I joined some kind of club that Walthers has and part of it was getting the catalog. Welp mine hasn’t got here yet and the local store has had them for a week.
RMax
I had put a catalog on order and hadn’t checked on it until I saw this post and I found that my catalog was shipped the 27th of September. For some of us, even with the computer, having a catalog comes in handy. As an example if we don’t want to turn the computer on.
AFAIK, Walthers has always charged for their catalog. While we all might wish the hobby were big enough to sustain free gimme catalogs, even when with other industries that is pretty hit or miss these days and has been for some time, but it isn’t.
Certainly the catalog wouldn’t be so colorful if it were free. Manufacturers pay for insertion in many cases. I’m not certain, but you may only get a black and white listing with little or no graphics unless you upgrade your listing, sort of like a phone book.
I’m not privy to the way Walthers does business, just calling it as I see it over the years (my first was 1971 IIRC). You’ll note that its lines come first in each section (a privilege of being a wholesaler/distributor) lines where it is the US distributor get lots of color likely out of proportion to actual sales (think European buildings), etc. There is probably also various forms of marketing/promotion funding that is involved in what you see in the catalog, but it’s a lot more complex than just printing what a vendor decid
My father worked his entire 45-year career for Montgomery Ward at its Chicago headquarters just north of downtown Chicago. He was a “packaging engineer”, designing the packaging for all types of products sold at Montgomery Ward.
For many, many years, Montgomery Ward produced a colorful thick catalog of all of the products sold at Montgomery Ward. It was free because it was the chief marketing tool to prompt its customers to directly place “catalog orders” or to visit their local retail store to directly purchase its products.
In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Montgomery Ward started to charge a fee for its catalog because it no longer served as its chief marketing tool, so it became too expensive to simply give it away. The entire catalog operation faded away, and customers had many alternatives to simply shopping at a “department store” like Montgomery Ward (or Sears).
I see parallels with Walthers. When I joined the hobby 9 years ago, I used the Walthers catalog to shop and then visited one or more of my three local hobby shops to make a direct purchase or place an order. All three of the local hobby shops turned to Walthers to fill their orders and stock their shelves. Now the three LHS are gone, I place orders on the Internet, and I rarely order directly from Walthers because they don’t discount their prices and they don’t carry a full line of manufacturers’ products. Also, once they distribute the initial inventory of a manufacturer’s product to retail vendors, it is no longer available from Walthers to the individual customer.
I predict that someday, perhaps sooner than later, Walthers will no longer produce the catalog, so you won’t be able to acquire it any cost.
Rich
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Walthers could easily do what many manufacturers are doing – put the catalog on their web site as a PDF file and the user has to print their own copy. Printing anything in color today is not cheap.
Imagine the size of a PDF file for a thousand page catalog! And being able to scan through the pages.
Not insurmountable, try wading through some government publications. If nothing else as long as it’s key word searchable it would a leg up on 90% of the PDFs out on the net.
Rich,
I retired from Montgomery Ward in 1990 and have copies of the last catalogs. It’s a shame because with today’s internet Wards could have been really good. One of my last jobs was to clear out the inventory from the catalog operations. I really like the Walthers catalog. I buy one every couple years. Got mine finally in the mail today. To me the Walthers website is terrible. I would rather flip the pages than use their site.
RMax
I rec’d my Walthers catalogue last Friday or Saturday. Maybe they go out to us “Yardmasters” first?? I get one every year, but if you don’t want to, you can get on their mailing list for the monthly updates for free.
Speaking of Monkey Wards, my wife was a model in the early seventies for Wards and was in most of the catalogues from the early seventies.
It’d be around 30 megabytes.
I know this because one of my babies at work was a 750+ page document with virtually no imagery and zero color and it weighed in at 18 megabytes.
Maybe Uline will buy Walthers[;)]! My office is out of my home and I do virtually zero shipping. Yet five or six times a year I receive a mailed copy of the thick, all-color Uline catalog which is close to the size of the Walthers catalog.
Jay
richotrain, I just got a Mongomery Wards catalog in the mail last week. It’s not like the old ones and alot thinner.
Sonar X2 Documentation…approx 35 Mb…1,972 pages…and all of it in my cellphone…[:-^]