Atlas acquires Microtrains

[ljudice]

I can smell the management consultants all over this one.

Brace for impact!

[bbussey]

I have let this sink in for a day, and here are some thoughts:

1. There is no way low run, monthly releases can continue if sourcing from offshore. It just can't happen.

It’s not sustainable domestically either. MTL has been doing it with mirrors ever since the fire. If it wasn’t for the new printing technology this would have happened much sooner. Even with the new tech eliminating the need for multiple pad printing hits and paint masks, they’d been releasing half the number of monthly schemes than they were before the fire.

The nativist collectors will whine and say they won’t buy foreign-made MTL … until the first new “wow” model is released.

Note that it takes a couple of years to develop a new product. They didn’t whip up the GONX in a couple of months.

The MTL collectible market from a monetary standpoint dried up decades ago. Big money for discontinued cars is a 20th century relic.

[ljudice]

https://rv-times.com/2025/11/20/micro-trains-line-co-warehouse-is-closing-in-talent/

20 or so workers apparently to be laid off....Isn't the bad "optics" for a consumer business?

[ljudice]

So much for the OCS NS 36 Lowell Smith inspection car I've had on pre-order for 5 years!

[Olivani]

4. Something is really off. MTL just announced the GONX gondolas. If they were struggling, you wouldn't see new tooling - certainly not tooling announced, but not introduced, before the sale.

THIS bothers me the most. I was looking forward to weathered and beaten up versions on a monthly base.

Gondolas to collect scrap metal from Alter Metal, Pembine, WI   

[GaryHinshaw]

I am oddly unmoved by this news (save for the impact on the MTL employees, which is truly sad).  But given the circumstances at MTL, being bought by Atlas is probably the best-case outcome.  I'm content to wait and see how this turns out.

As for the demise of N scale, my wallet would care to take issue.  I have purchased more product from new-ish companies this year than I ever have: Aurora, Otter Valley, Rapido, NARC, N-Possible (all Canadian as it happens...), and the quality has been outstanding.   (Same for a bunch of the new MTL releases, BTW.)  I'm almost overwhelmed by the goodness this year.  I wish Atlas the best with this acquisition.

[dem34]

Yeah, I think I'm about done with this hobby.

I see this a lot recently here with the MTL and I see it elsewhere albeit much more with British modelers.
So where you in the hobby to model what you like, express artistic muscles to make miniature worlds? Or just buying the next piece of injected plastic that sits in a box with hundreds of others. Because if thats the case than I'm sure theres still millions of little jewel cases out there that can be bought for a song that have been languishing in other collectors cases for the last 50 years.

Yes it sucks to lose a manufacturer. But atleast to me I will still be modelling trains even if the bombs go off and I have to pull little whittled blobs around a track with a string.

[peteski]

Regarding the BLMA etchings - yes there are contractors available to etch parts, but how many are going to pre-package them?  I love the quality of etched and laser-cut parts from PPD in the Kingdom, but the parts come in bulk on the master sprues.  Works great for me and for personal projects, but not for the mass market strategy that Atlas employs.

Why not have the parts etched by the subcontractor somewhere ship them to the same factory also overseas where their (and ex-MTL models) will be built and packaged, and have those fastidious ladies also package the etched parts for sale? I'm suspect that even now not all the parts that go into a complete model are made in a single factory.

[peteski]

3.  The comparison to the hobby paint racket is totally off base as a comparison.  First, because of the success of limited run production, modelers aren't nearly as pressed to paint their own models these days.  Is there a market for paint?  Sure.  Is it easy to produce small volumes of high VOC paints in hundreds of esoteric colors like Floquil or Scalecoat in today's business environment?  I doubt it.  When Testors took them on, they were a notable brand of hobby quality paint.  When they sold out to Rustoleum, which is itself a subsidiary of a gigantic publicly traded conglomerate, that was the end of that.  Too bad, really, I was hoping for a giant rattle can of Pullman Green or Royal Blue... Whatever assets were left were scrapped and sold off for the next quarterly report.  Completely different from this situation where a family business has bought another family business that's in the same business.

Lee, while it is off-topic here, I'm tired of hearing that Rustoleum axled Testors and Floquil paints.  If you check labels of your old Floquil and Polly-S paint bottles you will see the RPM logos on them.  This was long before all the hobby paint debacles happened.

RPM is that large conglomerate you mentioned, and Rustoleum is just one of the subsidiaries owned by them (along with Floquil and likely Testors). To me it means that if anybody killed those hobby paints is RPM.

Or is there some roof that Rustoleum (all under RPM's umbrella) was given control of the hobby paints and Rustoleum itself did the dirty deed?

[ljudice]

from Reddit:

TheFlashJaxx
•
1d ago
All employees were fired this morning except the skeleton crew to process remaining orders. Everything is being packed up and shipped to China. The quality can not remain the same because only 2 of us know the special printing process we have worked a combined 20 years to perfect, and we aren't training atlas on the process that is for sure. If you like the weathered and graffiti cars they will definitely not look as good. Prototypical clean releases may look as good since everything will be printed in China as a fraction of the cost per print we had been paying US workers to do it

[Dave V]

from Reddit:

TheFlashJaxx
•
1d ago
All employees were fired this morning except the skeleton crew to process remaining orders. Everything is being packed up and shipped to China. The quality can not remain the same because only 2 of us know the special printing process we have worked a combined 20 years to perfect, and we aren't training atlas on the process that is for sure. If you like the weathered and graffiti cars they will definitely not look as good. Prototypical clean releases may look as good since everything will be printed in China as a fraction of the cost per print we had been paying US workers to do it

Well someone ain't tellin' the truth, because this flys in the face of what Atlas said. So either the Redditor or the company is lying about China. Reddit isn't known as a bastion of truth either.

[chessie system fan]

Worth mentioning that that Reddit poster posted a lot of comments in that thread around noon only hours after being laid off and he deleted almost all of them by yesterday evening.   Maybe he got a job offer from Atlas or spoke too soon about some things? Anyway, I'm sure the China part is incorrect.  He didn't have inside information.

[ridinshotgun]

As a side note tangentially related to this but in my real day job I deal with regulating imports and this trend of American companies moving production out of China is really just a shell game. These Chinese manufacturing companies are still making the base items in raw parts and then sending them to shell companies in other Asian locales, likely owned by the Chinese manufacturer on the down low, for assembly. Then claiming that the product isn’t Chinese. It is a huge problem and takes a lot of detective work to nail those component supply chains down but it is done on a daily basis. So don’t buy into the whole idea that as long as your product, be it model trains or a kitchen mixer, is claimed to not be from China it may very well be from China but only assembled in whatever other Asian country is the flavor of the day. This really isn’t anything new but the uptick in occurrence has greatly increased in the last several years for a variety of factors.

[fcnrwy23]

As far as "REDDIT" Goes...  It's what they say about the Internet... 

Last Night, I was told by a more "Creditable" source...
That, YES things are going to the "East".  BUT, NOT CHINA...
There are NEW players (countries) in the game..
As far as, the Quality and Availability.  That's anybody's guess.

Personally, it will not affect me.
To be honest, I have only purchased "Two" pieces of MTL stock in my 36 years of Modeling.

Jerry

[bbussey]

In addition to the destination of the tooling, the Reddit poster also is misinformed about the printing technology not being available overseas. My contractor acquired the same equipment that Micro-Trains had and they’ve been releasing quality photo-realistic mural models since earlier this year, albeit in scales larger than N. The front end of that equation is mastering the artwork in Photoshop. I’ve been practicing, and it can be mastered in a few weeks. Smooth side cars are much easier than rib side cars, as you have to remove multiple Sol-generated shadows from the latter.  Photoshop does have the capability to do that, although not in a single step. That’s where most of the practice is required. Also, the artwork should be created at 3x N scale or larger, and any illegible lettering in the photo is masked and retyped if desired.