Terry,
In teresting cab-forwards. Wanted to do one when I was a kid, but the funds never shaped up to do one.
Lots a fine examples of other work posted this week, too.[Y][tup]
Bear,
They do run sweetly, as well or better than well-tuned brass – but right out of the box, no further user intervention needed, unlike nearly all brass. One could say they’re cheaper than brass, but that depends.
The Blackstone K-27 has hurt the value of brass K-27s, with the market still soft for them. In fact, you can pick up some great deals on brass K-27s. So despite the Blackstone price, it actually has opened the HOn3 market for many by making it more affordable overall.
The C-19 has not had quite so large an impact. It was a smaller class in total numbers and not so well-known. There are a variety of other C-class locos that Blackstone has not done, so the overall HOn3 market for 2-8-0s has not been as impacted as the K-27’s was.
For both locos, factory-weathered examples like mine are harder to find. This group of C-19s were delayed for nearly a year when the weathering just wasn’t up to par and Blackstone sent them back for a rework. That gave some extra time to get the funds together to afford #40…
But now there are two new groups of locos coming from Blackstone - the K-28 later this year and the K-36 in 2015 if things go as scheduled. They may sound a little pricey, but you can run an entire narrowgauge empire on just one decent loco. Most of the time, people lash-up two or more diesels. With the price of those with sound nowadays, that’s gonna cost you more than a Blackstone.
