I think Kato traditionally packs their trains in ultra-tight boxes. I can remember opening my first Kato GP38 back in 86 when KatoUSA issued their very first model from that location. I could barely get that loco out of the firm foam insulation, but did it and then my first impression of watching it run completely made me forget the problem with the tight packaging.
I didn't give it a second thought, although looking at my boxed models from over the years, you can see where I carved out the foam to protect the finish and prevent me from breaking off exterior details while extracting the locos to run them. Heck, I even had some problems with those "photo-album" Hudsons from ConCor in 85, then some Kato JNR passenger sets I picked up, but again disregarded it as a minor inconvenience to put up with to have the best running locos.
It didn't become a major issue until I got my first Kato Mikado in 96, and while taking it out of the box first time, the drawbar broke because the tender was so packed tight. Kato took very little time in sending me a new drawbar, and again, I carved out the foam to allow a little looseness when it was being stored. After all they never went farther than my shelf to my layout.
I think they are strongly packed because they are shipped from Japan, and I wouldn't be surprised if our longshorement or post handlers were less than delicate with the shipping containers. My train work group took a field trip to Port Everglades (pre-9/11) and toured the facility in the idea to putting it on Ntrak modules. We watched the containers being unloaded from the ships and were very thankful no explosives were in the manifests. The word fragile to a Port is a "7 letter word".
Ken "FloridaBoy" Willaman
