The July 2021 announcements from Intermountain include Frisco 3 bay covered hoppers in BN green paint in 6 road numbers in both HO and N scales. https://files.constantcontact.com/6a6d4255701/2ef53383-270d-464f-8991-ea0b9a94ad73.pdf Paul
Interesting offering. The listing shows a built date of 8-80, so it does make the cut for the end of Frisco operations.
The story is that Frisco ordered them in BN Cascade green paint so the BN logo could just be applied after the merger. But that never happened, I believe there still may be a few floating around in original paint.
I am a little behind on updates, but as of October 7th these cars are now in transit according to Intermountain. We should hopefully see them soon.
I received another update this morning. Intermountain expects these cars to start shipping out to dealers next week. They have real pictures of every car in this offering now. The one in the email is blurry, I will see if I can find a better copy. Worth noting, there are a lot of other hoppers in this run that would look at home on a late 1970s - 1980 Frisco layout.
Pictures available on the Intermountain website now. https://www.intermountain-railway.com/ho/html/453119.htm
I am highly frustrated with Intermountain right now about these cars. I ordered the N-scale cars back when they were announced. It was not until I saw the “these cars are available notice” yesterday that I learned the cars were canceled. The cars went through all the right statuses for me to believe they would be delivered just like the HO ones. The website even said the cars were in transit last month. I asked Intermountain about this today and they said the in transit status was in error, but that means that all the status changes that came before were also in error. I would have been disappointed but much less frustrated had Intermountain cancelled the cars a year ago. Paul
I cannot say that I am surprised. Intermountain promised a set of Mandarin orange and white F7s about 10 years ago, canceled them, re-announced them again about 5 years later and then have never produced them. Similarly, they announced a SD38-2 for the Frisco in 2017 and never have delivered it. Scale Trains had enough time to establish themselves as a brand, tool, produce and ship a Frisco SD38-2 for us in the mean time. Looking back through my emails, I talked to the dealer I had reserved these items through a full year ago at this point. Both the F units and SD38-2 were "confirmed for production" at that time. I just checked their website and they are back to "Taking Reservations". You never really know what they will and will not produce.
On the N-scale side, they have the Mandarin orange and white F units marked as “queued for production” and the SD38-2s marked as “Confirmed for production". Of course, the canceled the F7B units to go with the F7A units after they had been marked “confirmed for production” for several years. Maybe some day I will get the ones I have on order. Paul
For those that missed out and or skipped on these cars in the past, all 6 road numbers are available at Midwest Model Railroad. They are currently marked down to $30.42, which is an excellent price for an excellent car. https://midwestmodelrr.com/ho-scale/ho-scale-rolling-stock/ho-scale-covered-hopper/?_bc_fsnf=1&Road+Name=St+Louis+-+San+Francisco+(SLSF)&brand=133
