I just got the May 2005 Walthers sale booklet. Accompanying it was the “First Annual New Products Guide 2005-2006 Edition”. At the end are three kits Walthers is bringing back. They are the four bay, open top hopper car; 54’ GSC “Commonwealth” flatcar; and the 50’ FGE RBL. It is nice to some kits being brought back, espicially kits I can use on my layout.
I remember when they first introduced their steel mill “subscription” series of Cornerstone structure kits in November 1995. They said this was “definitely NOT limited run”…well guess what? About 2 years later these kits became increasingly scarce. Eventually they did resume production of their blast furnace kit after a huge number of modelers flooded them with email and snail mail.
Time for another flood. Walthers lists the the blast furnace, electric furnace and the coke oven (as opposed to the “new” “coke retort”) as out-of-stcock and retired.
The only way to make sure Walthers continues making kits is to mke sure they are flying off the shelf. I see this run of Walthers kits as Walthers testing the water to see what sells and what dosn’t. If these sell well i would hope to see them start making more kits. Since athearn and mdc got sold it’ss hard to find kits so hopefully i can startt finding more kits coming out soon.
Andrew
i think the reason kits like walthers’ blast furnace, electric furnace, coke oven, straight deck great lakes freighter and other kits did not stay in production long is simply because they were way too large for the majority of layouts. i mean come on who out there with any size of railroad layout had space to build the whole great lakes freighter walthers came out with? i mean within maybe 3 years only a portion of the kit was being produced. so instead of a 729 footer you were down to a 500 footer. and the steel mill kits i mean also who would ever have the space to have such a large space devoted to something that large. we modelers in all scales, including mine of HO need industries that are just the right size like Mac Grew Oil Company, the modern bakery and the warehouse kits Walthers is coming out with