Jeff Aley comments:

Wow! That's a pretty big pile of money! I thought that one could tool an
entire freight car for $100,000. Are the brakes really 1/4 of the total
cost? Or is most of the $28,000 "overhead"? [Or does it cost a heck of a
lot more than $100K for a freight car?]

I may be out of date on this, but the $100k number that used to get
thrown around was for steel dies. Aluminum dies made with NC technology are
supposedly less expensive. And any single sprue, as opposed to a multi-part
die which has to open in several directions to eject the part, cannot be
close to the costs for a full body die. Can anyone supply modern numbers
for these various cases?

(Should I subscribe to the Tooling Costs for
Injection Molded Plastic Freight Cars List (TCIMPFCL)??)

Hey, now THAT sounds interesting. But I think I'd only want to join the
Steam Era TCIMPFCL.

Tony Thompson Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA
2942 Linden Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705 http://www.signaturepress.com
(510) 540-6538; fax, (510) 540-1937; e-mail, thompson@signaturepress.com
Publishers of books on railroads and on Western history