New Intermountain Autoracks

The long promised Intermountain auto racks have been announced. They will have etched metal (see-thru) side panels and end doors. With a retail price of $69.95 they have gone beyond what I am willing to pay for an autorack. All that is available now are line drawings.

Here are a few . . .

 

I saw these last night (I get emails from hobbiesusa.com about new releases) and from what I read the detailing on these is suppose to be unreal. Probably better than that of brass. But $70? I thought $30 for an athearn RTR car was bad. WOW. Bet it wont be long before we start seeing freight/passenger cars that are plastic with ever single detail correct for $100 a car.

Ethan

 

Trouble with modeling the trains of "today" with those auto rack cars, is when you see a train go by they usually have fifteen or twenty of those cars is a string. Same goes for those "Coal-Porter" and similar cars. Even a twenty car representative train would soon add up...

Tom

PS: If anything I'm more of a "Cole Porter" fan than "Coal-Porter."

 

Definitely pricey. If you are into the accuracy thing real big, they are all post-1982 racks. The detail does look to be pretty good though. Here is a link to some CAD images on IMRC's website.

http://www.intermountain-railway.com/autorackdetails.htm

 

The cars will have etched metal side panels and working end doors also with etdched metal parts. Compared to other offerings such as the recent Kadee hopper at $40.00 or the detailed ExactRail and Tangent cars which are in the $35.00 to $40.00 price range at $70.00 these to me aren't really that far out of line. We need to take into consideration that they are nearly or more than twice as long as the above mentioned cars so thy have twice the parts. Just my opinion for what it's worth.

 

Terry and All:

Your point is well taken. Sometimes a company produces a model that quite frankly is not that much of an improvement over what has already been produced. I agree that this one definitely falls into that category. Sometimes the opposite is true. The Athearn Genesis GP15-1 project is to me a definite improvement over the Walther's model. The problem is that only a few roads had them and they are modern era. That may be the reason they are being fire-saled right now.

 

I'm sorry, but $70 for a freight car just seems silly to me. I guess it depends if you see yourself as a railroad modeler or an equipment modeler. Frankly, when I'm at Ricks trying to sort out a string of cars in the Ft. Scott yard it could be a Athearn blue box and it would make no difference to me, or take away any of the fun. The first ready to run car I ever saw, a Kadee box car in the plastic box and it was about $30.00. I remember thinking, who is going to spend that? Shows what I know, now try and find a kit.

 

Almost makes G scale affordable!!!!! :0)
Dan

 

It seems to me that Walthers (And others) are charging whatever they can get away with! I'm willing to pay more for more correct models and willing to pay a LOT for more correct models, but there is a limit. I'm in N scale and the prices are high enough, but watching from the sidelines, HO prices seem to be through the roof. Especially Rapido and Walthers passenger cars (That you have to add decals to). And it seems there's no limit to what manufacturers will ask for steam engines! As for me, I'm paring down my model railroad purchases to REALLY accurate models and models that make sense for my collection. I still don't get why the makers, if they bother to release a model at all, won't just go ahead and do it right (Yeah, I've said that before, but it still goes).

Tom

 

I think what a lot of people forget is the amount of R&D that goes into make a highly detailed car. These costs must be factored in on top on the production costs, and we must also remember with less models being made the economies of scale are far less, and production costs will be somewhat higher. On top of all those costs they have to make enough of a profit to give them the ability to continue creating new models.

With all of that said, I can 100% understand why models cost so much these days. Do I like it? No, but luckily there are places out there like Wholesale Trains that make things at least somewhat affordable. The biggest downside is you really need to preorder items or risk not getting them.

 

I would like to add to Matt's comments that we all need to go back and remember that when the highly detailed freight car models started to be produced that except for Kadee they were all kits. Who could ever forget the Proto2000 and Intermountain kits that were available in 12 road numbers. Our local hobby shop owner was an N-Scaler and did get the Intermountain cars at the time that were built-up including the Frisco 50' PS1 boxcar that didn't have an etched metal roofwalk. I vividly remember that it sold for $20.95 and I said that they wouldn't sell. That was before a lot of us tried to build those beautifully detailed kits. A couple of years later that same hobby shop owner bought several hundred of them and fire-saled them at our big train show. In recent years people had had to almost give them away on Ebay. They were just too hard and too time consuming to mess with. I guess it's like gas and a lot of other things in life, we want to be able to have our cake and eat it too!