Can someone identify this USA Trains piggy-back car. The USA Trains packaging had no product code on it and I couldn't find it in the register. Thanks
wow, nice find. I have never seen this one, but looks real. This must be from the Charles Ro days since I have all the catalogs from USA Trains dating back to 1997. GovB may be able to help you on this one since he has some Charles Ro catalogs before 1997.
Is there anything on the car or the packaging I can look for specifically that would help place the year of manufacture? With LGB that I'm pretty familiar with, one can identify the manufacturing year of the old ones by the types of wheels, couplings, lettering, etc. and the newer ones after 1986 or so have a quality control sticker on the underside that has the month and year of manufacture encoded. Once you know when an item was manufactured it's probably easy to find it in a catalog although thousands of LGB items were never catalogued - don't know if that happened at USA Trains as well.
Charles Ro or USA Trains never put a year or any type of year identification on them. I believe, but don't quote me on this that Charles Ro trains did have either a Ro Trains or Charles Ro marking on the bottom of the flat bed car, but not all of the time. Piggyback flat cars are especially hard to dientify what year they are. One simple rule of thumb with trying to identify other Charles Ro cars is the road numbers were usually only 4 digits, but this doesn't always apply such as with the Piggyback flat cars. However a woodside boxcar always used a 4 digit road number, but if it started out with 19 such as 1906, this would be a early Charles Ro box car as Charles Ro did the same thing as Aristocraft in the begining by using the stock number as a road number, bu he eventually stopped doing this later and started puttin real road numbers on his freight cars. So basically trying to identify the year of some Charles Ro products can be difficult, if not confusing which is why I always buy old catalogs when they come up for sale.
The only items never cataloged by Charles Ro or USA Trains were special runs, custom runs and prototypes. USA TRains left it up to the customer to advertise these special items. Everything else was indeed either cataloged or put on a introduction flyer.
If it cannot be identified in any catalouge, can we assume it's a custom run piece? I mean like you said they didn't advertise custom runs since they left it up to the customer to do so.
Forgive my ignorance when it comes to USA Trains but is there not at least one collector catalogue that could be consulted? You know, like the Greenberg or Roth & Doggett or the five Christmann catalogues that exist for older LGB. Those cover all the special and custom runs that were never catalogued by LGB themselves.
krs, there is no collector catalog such as Greenburg to Lionel, not one that has every train ever made by USA Trains anyway. This is the main reasn why I started the USA Trains registry. With help from others such as GovB, dahlphe, solase, etc I am planning on making up a collectors guide, but much work still needs to be done in the research area. Charles Ro never kept or saved images on fle and deleted them as he sold out of items because he never thought his trains would be this collectable then.
The problem is that no one thought then back when Charles Ro or Aristocraft came out that 1:29 scale ratio G scale would take off like it has. It would be safe enough for me to say that the 1:29 scale ratio G scale market has captured the biggest part of the G scale sales, at least in America. Aristocraft, USA Trains and now Accucraft all make 1:29 scale ratio trains. I guess this is due to new generation collectors wanting early to modern era diesel trains and freight cars. I heard some people complain that there is no diecast cars in that scale ratio, but 1:24 scale ratio vehicles still look good next to 1:29 scale ratio trains. Even in Garden Railways Magazine you see more photos and articles based on early to modern era railroads with diesel power. About 4 years ago and previous you didn't see hardly any pictures or articles on these type trains, they were always steam powered locos being featured, most were LGB and some kitbahsed or home made. How times have changed. Who knows, in the next 10 years people may want to model monorails and bullet trains in a 1:38 scale ratio for example, don't laugh it could happen.
Why not? They already sell monorail toys for kids in Japan and I've seen several HO Scale Monorail modelers through the last century, all scratchbuilt. And let's not forget Mark Horovitz Tin Lizzy on his layout.
I used to collect die-cast cars to go with my trains and still have a bunch I want to get rid of. Most were 1:24 but I also had the odd 1:27 and 1:28 cars which scale wise did look better with USA Trains and Aristocraft than 1:24. One make of cars in 1:27 was Ansco - it's not marked on the package but it's molded into the bottom of the car. These cars were visibly smaller than the 1:24 cars - I never thought the difference in scale would be that noticeable.
