rex desilets wrote:If'n you're going to put your freshly-built car in the tracks, there to stay, they are wonderful. If you need to schlep them to your club and return, way too many bits break off.
I'll have to argue that. I've shipped them from Europe home after building them with no damage if packed with some intelligence (not so much San Juan tank cars. Grin!) I've taken them to shows to sell or run on exhibition layouts, and again they are perfectly survivable if treated like a scale model, not a toy. I found the whole robustness bit really boiled down to care in assembly (how many lasy effs couldn't be bothered to clear the paint in the holes before gluing up?) and care in handling.
What Atlas did to those cars to make them "handleable" as the three-rail world demanded was to go backwards with respect to fidelity, but that was what the market demanded and more importantly make them bombproof to ship in containers from China, since they expect everyone to send them back to fix them, since the hobbiest won't. Too bad about the crap quality control and the zincpest in the ladders on several runs.
You do hit the real nail. Here, the builders are rare compared to the box peelers. Even San Juan had to get the Chinese to build them because the huge proportion of Americans don't want to. Too bad Intermountain only did the four kits, and Red Caboose three. They were stellar, but the market in the US wouldn't go for it.
To the UK kits, I've often wondered why the huge difference is in how the hobby is practiced. Just the two ranges mentioned have 125 prototype specific goods wagons kits between them. The Brits carry everything to exhibitions and the club (not many have room for home layouts like in America) and the "lack of robustness" argument regarding styrene kitbuilt stock just doesn't come up. All these kits are made in the UK, so the argument it costs too much to make stuff in the US is bollocks. It boils down to one thing. In 7mm the building of each model is part of the culture.
Some RTR is available too, but the choice in modern kits just beggars belief.
