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I think that most of us are just fed up with Walthers. I am from Milwaukee originally and have always felt a bit defensive when people complain about Walthers and Kalmbach. Heck, I may be one of the few people who still think that Bud Selig is a good guy (even if he has been bad for baseball). Many of us have contacted Walthers repeatedly over the years. I have personally spoken with Stacy Walthers-something for 30+ minutes at the last two Trainfests. Where has this gotten us in N scale? I would say almost worse than nothing. A rerun on kits so old that I can't remember seeing them before ? That would be great if they were of high quality, but they aren't. Meanwhile in HO they have cool product after cool product. These guys know how to do it! Anyhow, that is their business model. They are free to do as the please but we are free to complain when they offer products such as these in N. Contact them directly if it makes you feel better but don't expect them to do anything other than pretendto listen.
Boy do I know how you feel!!! It's one thing to bad mouth and complain in the forums, which I'm not sure they even peruse, especially Stacey. My point is we need to start complaining not so much or just on the public forums, but also hit them on their social media pages and in emails directly too them. If they get po'd, too bad, what's the worst that can happen? Personally, I'm ok with these offerings. Not ecstsatic, but they should be simple to put together which I hope means they will be reasonably prices and that's good for newbies, which means I can sell more. But I would really like to see several HO buildings make it to N scale.
Rather than just bad-mouthing them on the forums, you need to call and send emails or post on their FB page.
DKS, are you listening?
I'm all ears. I just need more hands (well, that and a new knee).
Brian, Just like the eastern cabooses, you can find the original Life-Like kits of these structures at the shows pretty easily. Better, you can beat Walthers to the punch on the rest of its "new" N scale structure releases and find the rest of the N scale Life-Like structure line Walthers will likely be reintroducing as some form of cruel joke on us later in the next century.I tried to speak to a Walthers rep once about N scale, but he wasn't much into conversation:
My guess is that they make decisions based on sales history. N may not be big enough for them to invest the capitol in...or they are, as a company, populated by HO modelers who are looking to improve their options. Hard to say. I get lots of requests to expand NN3, the scale I modeled before I joined MTL. I would like nothing better than to do that, but sales are beyond being tanked and it's hard to convince the folks who write checks to get on board with a project that has little or no hope of making Roi. Face it, the hobby is going through a contraction due to the economy and our core demographic getting older and I see Walthers sticking where the market is biggest. N is tooting along pretty well, but I don't think we have the numbers of HO does. You can't use the smaller companies as a indication of how N is doing because their overhead is much smaller than the "traditional" manufacturer. Craig and others don't have to worry about supporting hundreds of employees and that gives them the opportunity to do some of this amazing stuff they do. I would kill to have MTL do the Tri cools or even Tropocana cars, but we would get our financial hats handed to us. I guess what I am saying is that we go through a useless exercise trying to force a company to produce product they can't pay bills with. If as it sounds here, attempts have been made to pressure Walthers with no success then talk with your purchasing dollars, make Craig rich so he can produce more stuff we want. Joe
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Topic: Walthers announce "New" structures (Read 8113 times)
