Walthers will have their next production schedual out for April 1. This production scedual we are on was established before the merger. I will be pushing hard to get some into at Springfield as I did last year. Athearn's plunge into N scale took over 2 years to execute. Walthers is still rebuilding from the LL takeover. Give it a few months.
Walthers has a 30 year history of treating N scale like a red headed step child. Been lots of talk over the years, but not much product - repackaged over priced Heljan kits, and mediocre quality rolling stock at premium prices. I am not sure what makes any one think the LL buyout will be handled any differently?
Lets hope that because the market has changed in 30 years and there may be "new blood" making desisions at Walther's, that things may change there.
I started back in the hobby last year and purchased 4 Lifelike locos. I have to say they do not measure up to a Kato or Atlas. I probably will not purchase another one since thay have to be hardwired to make them DCC. It seems strange to me that they have chosen to not make a single DCC product. Maybe they are going to hold on waiting for everything to return to DC. Good Luck!
I disagree. My LL C424 and Y3 2-8-8-2 are up there with the best in my opinion. Unfortunately, not all the LL releases have been "equal" (for example the GP60 has oversize flanges while the C424 doesn't). FWIW, not all current Atlas locos are DCC ready (and I consider Atlas to be the DCC leader).
Two comments: 1) I am not holding my breath for anything that I would find useful from Walthers. 2) With respect to the tearing apart of items, I think that some of us have a vastly inflated sense of the influence of the Internet in this area. Taken as a whole, I view the entire spectrum of 'net chatter (including my own UMTRR) as no more than a fringe element in model railroading. For every frequent poster there is an order of magnitude larger body of N Scalers who may know about the 'net's numerous chat outlets, but don't care about it, have no use for it and find it a waste of time that could be used for hobbying or any number of other activities. Based on personal observations, I think that number is growing, not shrinking.
