Chris Webster wrote:There is an old project management rule that says "High Quality, Inexpensive, On-time: Pick any Two."
MMW has chosen high-quality and inexpensive. Posters don't realize that MMW models are inexpensive. MMW could have contracted with model makers in the US and UK and ended up with the same quality models but those models would have cost $50k (or more) each. Instead, MMW chose inexpensive.
Having picked high-quality and inexpensive, it was inevitable that MMW's products would not be finished on time!
Chris, I don’t know where you got that bit of mythology from, but they aren’t at all inexpensive. $4500 for the ones with a motor shrouded in a couple castings and wheel gearboxes the shape of traction motors hardly sounds inexpensive to me, I fear. As to your assertion they would cost $50k to make in the US or UK, I can safely assert that, while the US is a bit defeatist about whether they can make anything anymore, they could certainly be done in the UK. A look at DJH’ website shows full-sized steam offered ready to run and made in Britain, at somewhere near 3500 quid, so I suspect the $50,000 number to be pure mythology and perhaps a bit of puffing if Erik is saying that in his advertising to justify his price as “inexpensive”.
Lou at CLW is doing a few RTR projects, to be fair to the Yanks, and nowhere near $50k a pop and with comparable drives, I’d bet.
Meanwhile, entire model ranges are actually made in the UK, from Peco trackwork through well over a hundred different injection moulded O Scale wagon kits from the likes of Slaters, God knows how many different state-of-the-art loco and stock kits in brass, DJH locos in kit and RTR, all domestic and all O Scale. If they can do it, the Americans could do it if they’d stop making excuses and feeling sorry for themselves, and Lou for one is proving it.
Its perhaps beside the point, admittedly, but unless my eyes deceive me, I don’t see a 50 kilobuck pricetag for US manufacture (and anything less is good value for money) as is being asserted.
In fact, I fear I see an OMI or Oriental version as where the value for money really is at the moment; high-quality (especially the Oriental versions), under $2000, and they exist.
