SANTA FE STEAM ENGINES LETS GET KATO ON THE BALL

According to my newest issue of Trains 2926 should be back on the rails by 2016 after a lengthy restoration. So that will put another ATSF loco back in steam. That might just get someone's attention amongst the N scale builders with another one on the rails.

 

Can Kato tie in the 4-8-4 to any of their streamlined cars that have been run already? Steam as a regular back up maybe. Tie in car sales to the loco and you have a better chance.

 

KATO has the best pickups on their tenders. You can get THEM from KATO.

 

Ya gotta wonder if there is/was a demand for UP 844 in Japan as well and if that was the deciding factor to produce it. There seems to be an interest in BIG US steam in Japan -- so like, Challengers and Big Boys? But that's more UP stuff.

So ATSF ... big steam ... how about a 2-10-10-2 from Kato? "Will it run on my 4" radius curves?" Well, no. So then there are those rather ugly articulated 2-6-6-2 prairie mallets ...

 

Kato's Hudson from the mid-late 70's was a bulletproof model. They still must have the tooling . They are sitting on a goldmine. J3A Hudson in black, streamlined Dreyfuss and super Hudson with PT4 tender. Hallmark has already made the tender. Can we bring production back to the USA?

 

There are always boiler issues in this modern world. the tenders are filled from fire hydrants, not from railroad maintained treatment plants. the city water used has a high oxygen content, and they don't seem to have a treatment solution for it.

 

There's plenty of solutions, it's the commitment to actually do it every time and everywhere that's the problem. The 'good guys' will do a fill-up water sample and carry 50-pound bags of chemical in the tool car to adjust the water chemistry and have a little on-board lab kit to do it. Even on fixed-location tourist lines with municipal sources the chemistry changes as water is sourced from different wells, different water table levels, etc. Most of the lines I work with will do at least a daily chemistry check of the water, it's just so much easier than running into big oxygenation pitting or scale problems. One 25-mile line I work with has completely different chemistry at the two different water tanks on two different ends of the railroad, and they adjust accordingly. Every day.

When Kato started the 844 project it looked like a sure bet that the locomotive would be running indefinitely, and that's one of the reasons they picked it. I'm not sure how much it has actually impacted but it hasn't helped, and there's no real date for return to service of the real locomotive. Other boards get into this in excruciating and vengeful detail, if you want to do that, go join trainorders and vent over there.

You can still pick up Hallmark 4-8-4's on the auction site on a semi-regular basis, I've got a 3751, and am pretty happy with it, so as much as I can sympathize I'm not a potential buyer.

I've generally observed that Kato is very aware of some of their older tooling, and also aware that sometimes they have had a devil of a time locating it. The U30C and SD45 are a good example of that, it took a while. It has rather baffled me that Kato doesn't leverage the tooling they already have more than they do, either on paint schemes or different models with relatively few changes. I made a pretty good run of SW1's with minimal changes to the frame, they could have easily done that themselves, and let Bachmann eventually capture it. So far, of the models I've produced kits for, Bachmann has hit me twice and Kato zero.