Hear hear.Well put.Armand Premo
----- Original Message -----
From: Gatwood, Elden SAW
To: STMFC@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2011 7:57 AM
Subject: RE: [STMFC] Necessary Freight cars (UNCLASSIFIED)



Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

Andy;

> A solid data package will go a long way to advance the possibility of
> a model being produced.
>>No doubt, but ........I've already talk to Exactrail and Tangent, they
didn't seem to be very interested. The larger manufacturers like Athearn,
Walthers, Atlas, already have a lot of coal hoppers in their lines already...
ditto Bowser. Intermountain I haven't talked to about it, oddly enough, it's
kind of up their alley - they have done a bunch of covered hoppers (albeit
only one steam/transition era), and not a single coal hopper.

You bring up another good point, and I have talked to a number of
manufacturers about it; what type of cars sell best and get the most
interest.

This is the inevitable answer:

Box cars, box cars, box cars;

Covered hoppers

Gondolas and flat cars

Open hoppers bringing up the rear.

There is a lot of speculation on why, including: RTR open hoppers are
extremely costly to assemble, don't sell as well as other car types, and have
big differences between RRs that render them applicable to only a handful of
roads. Open hopper kits are "hard to assemble", and other reasons above.

So, the answer we get, repeatedly, on the "why don't we have an alternate
standard twin offset hopper" is: a) many detail differences between RRs, b)
not enough major roads for one version to warrant doing one, c) people don't
really buy a lot of open hoppers compared to other projects we could do that
would do better, and d)... Richard Hendrickson won't buy any of them.

I don't buy all of this, even the part about Richard, and will continue to
work with open-minded manufacturers on ANY project that might benefit us. I
also have hope we will see an alternate standard twin offset hopper in HO,
just probably not RTR.

Elden Gatwood

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE




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