@GG1 4877 posted:I really like the prototype offered and one would look at home in my collection. My only challenge with purchasing one is having one freight car at this level of fidelity stand out against so many others that are not.
This is where I'm at. Early tank car prototypes are not often accurately modeled in O. They're usually part of traditional 3-rail sets, with gargantuan brake wheels and molded in details that are not crisp.
So I'm interested, but $500 is steep for a single piece of rolling stock that might stick out like a sore thumb, and won't be something I could afford a lot of.
I hope these sell out and we see more offerings from this company in O.
100%, and this is coming from someone who is a 3-railer.
@AGHRMatt posted:That's the irony. Plastic is available at a lower price point per unit, but the tooling is so expensive you have to sell a tone of them to pay for it. Brass has a lower start-up cost, but then the production is higher since there's still a lot of hand-labor involved, so you have a high price point. Atlas seems to have the plastic market pretty much tied up, especially with the acquisition of a large share of the MTH tooling. Sunset took a hybrid approach through their 3rd Rail line so they were able to offer a lower price point on the brass. Time will tell.
@bob3 posted:Some back of the envelope calculations - let's say tooling is $750k and you can sell 5000 units of whatever --> $750,000 / 5,000 = $150 of tooling cost in each unit - doing these tank cars in brass seems like the easy and only choice
Maybe the industrial 3D printing world will save us with a nice middle ground?
