Second new EXR car with body-mounted couplers announced

[Brakie]

  I guess I need to fire off another e-Letter to Blaine thanking him for the two new cars..I feel that's only fair since I been riding him for new  N Scale.

I love that gon and that LOAM boxcar.

Am I mistaken or does that gon sit lower then the Atlas gon and looks like it has body mounted couplers?

[ljudice]

Hope someone asked ER when they're going to switch to Jewel Cases....

[lashedup]

Their modern reefers came in plastic jewel cases. Not sure if that's the plan moving forward or not. Skibbe took some photos at Springfield of their new stuff.

http://www.model160.com/2012/01/28/springfield-2012-exactrail-with-lots-of-new-stuff/

[Sokramiketes]

Probably the same explanation that we've gotten before.  Some of the N scale cars have been tooled or partially tooled for a while.
Jason

Bingo. Chris Clune, now ousted from the company, had a lot of this tooling done prior to exactrail. When the other manufacturers turned down the models, he decided to form a company and sell the cars himself. That's why the vertapak looks like it would have been state of the art 10+ years ago. And ashtray there is so much duplication now.

[GaryHinshaw]

I'm not surprised that's the story.  It made sense with the 5161, and I don't even want to speculate about the BLMA dupes.  But the Atlas 2743 was announced more than 3 years ago and they've been in shops for ~2 years.  They must obviously feel their return on investment makes it worth their time, but it still sucks.

[asarge]

Isn't there an earlir version of the 2743 Thrall Gon that is a little different than the car Atlas does?

[bbussey]

If you are sitting on a stockpile of tooling, you have to put it to market at some point and recoup as much of the investment as possible, regardless of whether or not other manufacturers already have released models of the same prototypes.