Question for Manufacturers

[ncbqguy]

No, I am not coming back to pee in the punch bowl.....

Just to clarify, I am all for robust, reliable, properly proportioned equipment in N Scale.  I tend to be frugal and probably recall $1.50 freight cars too well.....but am aware of the value of today's product when compared with those 1968 cars when you crank the inflation calculator and see what you're getting today, even if it is the same basic tooling.  (recall that it took even Kadee/Micro-Trains years to add end reporting marks!!)

For those of you that weren't around in the late 1960's they were exciting times....N Scale was almost like the slot car craze with Atlas, AHM, Life-Like, MiniTrix, Revell, Con-Cor and Bachmann all making new product releases seemingly at some points on a weekly basis.   Rivarossi, Lima, Roco, Kader, Rowa, Arnold Rapido and Sekisui Kinzoku and others were cranking out new products fast and furious.  Many of the cars were pretty decent and some are still with us today....but it took ten or fifteen years for locomotives to start to be close to what is acceptable today.  HO was just starting to move as well with AHM and others breaking the cycle of very few new product introductions....remember when Athearn had a new locomotive every two or three years and that was a VERY big deal????

There are certain things that have proven to work in N Scale.   The so called "low friction" pointed axle/coned plate for example.   Yet we still keep getting product with blunt end axles riding in a hole and various types of wheel wipers...even when requests are made to follow the defacto standard.   I understand the move away from the wiper strips to improve pickup continuity for DCC Sound but it is done at the cost of ease of consumer maintenance. People outside of North America don't understand the way we keep and value our older equipment and thus give little attention to maintainability and supply of parts. 

I wrote at length about the design of N Scale Steam in previous issues of the NTRAK Steam Locomotive book.  I still think the Con-Cor Hudson and the Micro-Ace line of Japanese steam locomotives have the best design approach and only need to be updated to DCC and improve the shell details.  They have a low part count which makes less expensive to manufacture.  The drivers and valve gear are set up for keyed orientation assembly so the engines are assured to be in sync without fiddly quartering.  They pull better than any current imported steam.   

With regards to the Geeps....I thought that Atlas was doing pretty good with the frequency of revisiting those models.   Perhaps somebody has been keeping track of how many releases, roadnames, paint jobs, and roadnumbers have been done since they were first released in the Kato tooled version.   They do have some factory option variety but don't go into road specific details like overnight heaters, snowplows and different light arrays.   Now with the acquisition of the Life-Like tooling there is another range of units that they can do.   And no doubt somebody will decide to do them with all the bells and whistles....but they will probably not release them any more frequently than Atlas.....and it isn't like the current ones are the ones that had the shells stretched to fit on the RS3 mechanism!!!! 

Some engines have been done that should be on a at least yearly release schedule but due to marketing not understanding the profile of the US market too many of too few road names were released and likely no more will be made. There are a number of units that could be done on almost a continuous basis....but the factories are not set up to spread production out over a full year and the market (distributors, retailers, and consumers alike) cannot absorb big runs no matter how diverse they are. 

At one time Con-Cor had an almost ideal formula for production.   They would have Sekisui Kinzoku run a range of decorated models for the first production and order a years worth of mechanisms and undecorated bodies.
As the market demanded relatively small batches of new and rerun road names, paint schemes and road numbers could be run (in Chicago, then Tucson).   Unfortunately, nobody has recently been able to pull off such a thing....except for Micro-Trains.
   
Charlie Vlk
Railroad Model Resources

[EL3632]

I am part of a 4H club, at least for the younger entrants to the hobby (yes, those exist!):
They want things they can see, which for us is NJ Transit (Thanks, Atlas!). They also are involved online (not here, they don't know about TRW), so they want current stuff, the road name doesn't matter as long as it's running today.
They want "Pop Culture Icons," which can be a variety of things, but namely any type of train that has a leading role in mass media (unstoppable, Polar Express, Thomas, etc...) or any train that has clout in the railroading circle (primarily passenger trains, mostly named or well-known high speed trains like TGV or Shinkansen, but sometimes can be specific engines, i.e. Celebrity Locomotives, like Heritage Units or locos that have notoriety for one thing or another, or types of trains as well).
They want Steam, not just because of you-know-who, and are primarily into current and past steam excursion stars, as well as interesting extinct steam (mostly streamlined).
They want Amtrak, not sure why this specifically, but Amtrak is very popular amongst them. They tend to want anything from Phase III onwards.
They want it if it's cheap/accessible, which is ultimately the most important thing to them, as if they can't have it, what's the point in getting it?
Some of them, far more rarely, do like a specific railroad or location, we have one that models British Rail steam, for example.
I ultimately think an entry level modern 4 axle is a good idea for these reasons. A GP38-2 or GP40-2 would be great. One could even be painted in Amtrak and be prototypical. Also having an entry level small steam engine would work for these purposes also, but I know absolutely everything about that would be far more impractical.

[peteski]

. . .
There are certain things that have proven to work in N Scale.   The so called "low friction" pointed axle/coned plate for example.   Yet we still keep getting product with blunt end axles riding in a hole and various types of wheel wipers...even when requests are made to follow the defacto standard.   I understand the move away from the wiper strips to improve pickup continuity for DCC Sound but it is done at the cost of ease of consumer maintenance. People outside of North America don't understand the way we keep and value our older equipment and thus give little attention to maintainability and supply of parts. 
. . .

Charlie, I wholeheartedly want to thank you for that comment.  Nice to see that someone of your stature within the model RR business shares my view on mechanism design.  I also can't understand why manufacturers keep on producing new models with that inferior old-school design. Makes no sense to me.  The parts count for the high-friction design is roughly the same as the low-friction design, and the low-friction version is easier to assemble and maintain.  It boggles the mind that manufacturers still keep on producing models susing the back-of wheel wipers instead of going the low-friction way.