Con-Cor out of retirement? Seems some while ago they were having a retirement sale, now they have new couplers/trucks and reintroducing a lot of the old stuff again.
What's really interesting to me is that particularly on the HO side, darn, I think I see some 'new product' that really, really, looks like old Rivarossi tooling. Wasn't the story that all the Rivarossi tooling went to Marklin, or got scrapped, or nobody knew what happened to it? It is possible? There was always a close relationship with Con-Cor after Atlas quit being their importer. I'm probably wrong, I'll admit it, but a guy can wonder.
I think Rivarossi's tooling went all over after they went bankrupt. I think Mehano picked up a couple of HO items. Although this might have actually happened a few years earlier when IHC and Riv began to part ways, and Mehano began manufacturing more of IHC's stock. As for the name, it was Hornby that got it, not Marklin. They haven't re-released any of Riv's old N scale products, to the best of my knowledge. And if they have rereleased any HO, it'd only have been european prototypes.
I think Con-Cor is winding down, but in fits and spurts. I hope Big Jim is having fun. It looks to me like there are projects coming to fruition here and there.
Con Cor, Red Caboose and Intermountain have teamed up so they can use each others tooling this way they have a chance of surviving this crapy economy.
They are not sharing tooling. They are sharing distribution networks. Intermountain has struck deals with many of the smaller companies to distribute them under one big umbrella. It saves the smaller companies the headache of dealing with the larger distributors individually. Now they just deal with IM and IM acts as the distributor. Each individual company still deals with tooling and production although I think IM might be helping by grouping all these smaller orders together to leverage some buying power in China. That is prue speculation though. I for one am glad because it allows our shop to get stuff like the ESM and Red Caboose cars that we would not have been able to get before due not being able to sell enough to order them cases at a time.
You can see this at some train store.com. Things are in stock that were quite hard to find a year or two ago - the smooth side and Budd passenger cars, the heavyweights. What's the story on the new coupler?
No that Retirement Ad goes back some five years ago now when Jim C was thinking about Retirement. He has since produced several Models of which one is the M54 in HO and the M10000 as we all know of. So Con Cor And Jim Conway are still alive and well there in Tucson AZ. :tb-wink:
now we just need him to see the light of 2010 better paint better locos (u50,turbine) and relistic prices no con-cor car is worth $21.95
Well according to the latest gossip they have retooled most of these new runs; if you want to believe that one:tb-confused::tb-err: I must say that the new couplers do look nice. But they are still dummy couplers so. You can only get but so much blood from a Turnipwink::mtongue:
I found that they track better once some weight is added; hence most use an Alan kit for the chassis and then change to MT's, also while your at it might as well buy a Plano kit for the side panels. But other than that there okay:tb-err:
i like my con-cor 20 or so auto racks just fine! for what they are if i had $30 a clip for rc or mtl i would buy some of them but the see through sides is not a big enough seller for me!
Yeah. Don't know much about Con Cor. I think that was before I was involved with MMR. I'm kinda of a MT or Intermountain guy when it comes to rolling stock.
I've owned several of them both Rollingstock and Engines, I worked there briefly and it was quite cheap to purchase that way. They are about equal with Bachmann in running details are slightly better, and there fantasy schemes are sometimes nice slant. Used to have to change couplers since they used Rapidos, but no more since they joined all the rest with a version of a Knuckle Coupler. The wheels I change on most rollingstock so it all matches up better and tracks with the same ability. Just my quirk. I run a few Bachmann pieces in HO but then the scale is more forgiving in this authors opinion. In closing I would buy some Con Cor pieces again in reference to rollingstock anyway. For the price you are getting what you pay for, so that's all good.
In 1967 Jim Conway (Con-Cor) brought a Kato made PA-1/PB-1 to the US. To this day it is one of the finest runners (and lookers) ever made, especially for the era. It redefined N scale--and maybe even saved it. Without it (and the Roco 2-8-8-2) I would have returned to RC airplanes in about a year. Or gone to HO scale. Over the years, Con-Cor brought many fine models into the US. Yes, purists scorned him for "fantasy" paint schemes--but that was the hobby 40 years ago, and not only in N Scale. And some models weren't the finest or latest in detail or running quality--but all were pretty decent. Others are still pretty magnificent, in my opinion.
