Decals to create three additional articulated coach sets. I think this is a recent add: http://www.katousa.com/N/Daylight/Artic-Coach-Decals.jpg First time I recall Kato doing something like this. May increase sales of the two-car add-on quite a bit. I'll stick with the basic 10 plus 2 car set.
New GS4s are "due out this month"; an early version in Daylight (SOUTHERN PACIFIC LINES on tender) as well as the BNSF black excursion version of 4449 from 2000
Walthers has been selling its factory decorated passenger car models unnumbered while including a set of roadnumber decals in the box. Fewer individual items for them to stock, but more work for the customer to get a finished model. To do a satisfactory job, you ought to disassemble the model, spray it with a gloss clear coat, then apply the decals and finally spray with a dull/matte clear coat and then reassemble - IMO, a lot of extra work that would be unnecessary if the roadnumbers were painted on at the factory. Also, if you happen to buy the model several years after it was produced, you have to hope that the decals will still be usable.
Kato is not selling the 2 car add-on sets unnumbered. They come already numbered and ready to run. Apparently, their customers wanted to be able to add more articulated coaches, so they are responding with decals to support this. I'm not really seeing how this is a bad thing....
Snap...ouch I would also like them to offer San Juaquin Daylight decals as well. Something to pull behind my 1/2 daylight MT-4 and GS-4.
It looks like the modeler has at least three viable options: 1) Run a 12 car consist (basic 10 car set plus 2 car articulated coach add-on) straight out of the box with all cars uniquely numbered and factory painted. 2) Run a 14/16/18 car consist with duplicate factory numbered articulated coach add-ons (since many of us can't see the numbers under any running conditions, the train appears identical to..... 3) Give in to the OCD and run up to an 18 car consist with one factory painted add-on set and three add-on sets that have had Kato's new decals applied. It is great to have options. It is also great to have Kato produce these prototypical passenger sets, as complete sets, and sell them to us at a very reasonable price. They overextended a bit on the earlier daylight releases, offering four unique add on articulated coaches. As a result, they had several linger around in inventory long after the basic sets were sold out.
actually, there are 4 different add-on articulated cars, all with unique numbers. I have the complete set, although three tend to never come out of the box. 18 car consist is a LONG train.
That's not how Kato is doing this run of the "Southern Pacific Lines" paint. One add-on set with an option to by decals to make other ones. Jason
you can still find the older two car set, there are like eight different set done. Guess they did not sell as well since not many can do the complete 18 car train. Also this is not the first time Kato has done the decal thing, they have been doing it with the HO superliners for a while now.
If you are referring to the word "lines" in the name -- there may have been a small window from mid to late 1946 - when the word "lines" was being dropped from all locomotives and passenger cars. The directive came on June 2nd 1946. They made the transition pretty fast. By 1947 the word lines was gone. Thanks, Wolf