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Who would have thunk it, that Rapido’s survey of N scalers would have generated such widespread and long-lived discussion!
You always can hone model-building skills by kitbashing ready-to-run models. Everything runs in cycles. Prior to InterMountain releasing N scale freight car kits around 2000 or so, there hadn't been rolling stock kits since the 1970s by Atlas. By the 1980s, people who wanted the well-tooled RivaRossi freight car models released under the Atlas banner in the late 1960s such as the 40' chemical tankcar and the 40' boxcar with the good Youngstown doors had to scramble to find them. Con-Cor released a number of Kato-tooled freight cars in the early 1970s where a specific road/scheme wouldn't be readily easy to find. Those MTL (then Kadee) single dome tank cars that Otto complained about up-thread? Some of those early schemes disappeared quickly and were highly sought after when the model debuted in 1980, prototypical schemes such as the GATX and UTLX as well as the popular schemes that pre-dated the model such as the General Electric, Sinclair, Phillips-66 and the silver Texaco. Kadee/Micro-Trains has a history of releases in the early days that disappeared in a blink when they were first released, such as the 40' PS1 in West India Fruit & Steamship, the 50' PS1 plug door in C&O blue with yellow door, and the red Mobilgas tankcar. What you're going through now isn't any different than say 40 years ago. What I did was start to build my own, by cutting up existing models or scratchbuilding from styrene. Were my first models perfect? No. But that's how you learn. Scott Lupia scratchbuilt an FM Trainmaster as a teenager that looked as good as the Atlas ready-to-run model that came to market 10-15 years later. It took me a couple of tries to scratchbuild a New Haven NE-6 body to fit the MTL caboose chassis, and I had resin castings made so that I could have six of them. I ran them for 20 years before I replaced them with the Atlas ready-to-run model. I fully scratchbuilt a New Haven NE-5 that I still run today because it looks as good as the Atlas model when that hit the market.You work with what exists, and build what doesn't.
Going to be a piece of the territory since most of the objective discussion has been discussed to completion so we are only left with personal opinion.Throwing my hat in, I also model what I wasn't born with but.. have a personal connection to. When the brain says "Passenger Trains" I see 90s era NJT and Amtrak and its holdouts. When my brain says "freight" its the CNJ and later NYSW freights my Grandparents would show me on home tapes and the Conrail/NS trains squirreling out their MOW equipment from yards they are no longer welcome in, and sitting in traffic in a booster seat as a white face SD80Mac goes by pulling a long oil train to refineries. So, I model what facilitates those things. Everyone is going to have their preferences and sometimes the cycles just don't accommodate ready to run for what I want. Good example, 90s intermodel stuff was super common under Deluxe. Now, when was the last time somebody tooled Bulkhead Husky Well Cars in N?
I bought a group off a fellow Railwire member a few years ago when it became obvious waiting for DI to do them again was not a good strategy. Glad I did, but it's likely someone will release them again, DI's or new tooling; they're good from mid-80's until at least 2010 in numbers, to 2020 as stragglers here and there.
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Topic: Rapido newsletter #165, a survey for N scalers (Read 12759 times)
