Model railroader reported that Sanda Kan is sending letters to some small model railroad manufactures and telling them that they can not make stuff for them anymore. "According to industry sources, among the model railroad customers receiving letters from Sanda Kan are Weaver, S Helper Service, American Models, Bowser, Micro-Trains and Märklin/Trix." it says Micro-trains. Does this mean that there will be no more stuff from them untill they find anouther supplier for what they use them for. I think they painted the cars for micro-trains? It also says that: "Among those not getting letters were Bachmann, Lilliput, Graham Farish, Lionel, Atlas, Walthers and Aristo-Craft." Maby the n scale stuff from atlas will come on time now that tSanda Kan has less of a make. The tree engine that i was told is comming next week are 6 months late.
Micro-trains may well have already moved most of their paint jobs over to other companies. Sanda Kan has been slow for awhile.
SK only made Z scale track and locomotive mechanisms for MT - everything else is still molded, painted, pad-printed, assembled in Talent, OR. I would not be surprised if MT had already found another supplier. SK's financial and labor problems have been public for at least a couple of years, even pre-dating the world economic downturn.
This has been over on the MR boards for few days...Week now. I'm not sure I understand the distinction between Sanda Kan and Kader in this instance. Are Kader contracts seperate? Would they pick some of these up? Given that Kader/Sanda Kan makes something like 90% of all model Railroad Engines and Stock, one has to wonder if there is any other supplier left to pick up the slack. On the HO front, there was speculation that this could lead to a return to US manufacturing. And witht he cost of Chinese labor going up generally, perhaps a return to shake the box kits.
I'd love to have something akin to the Athearn Blue Box kits (recently discontinued in HO) available in N. Sometimes, I just want a mess of Geeps or SDs and I don't want to pay over $100 each for them.
There are other suppliers beside Kadar and Sanda Kan. Some are already being used by other manufacturers. Looks like they will be getting more business. Remember, some of the companies being dropped may be having trouble paying their bills. Others are simply generating too little business for Kadar to make a profit on. They also may not have the excess capacity they once had. A number of model railroad businesses got started in the Great Depression. Perhaps history will repeat itself. Always the optimist, Frank
We did have the freight car kits from InterMountain. I built quite a few. Engines are another matter. Boxcab E50
We did have the freight car kits from InterMountain. Assembly was a bit more involved than the Athearn HO kits which were basically put the underframe under the car and screw on the trucks and couplers. Atlas offered cars in similar kit form many years ago.
Roundhouse once made "kits" only. And they were shunned by the mid-80s. The non-builders didn't want to, what, cut a brakewheel from a sprue and glue it on and then attach the trucks with plastic pins. The builders preferred IM cars. After that, pretty much nobody was buying kits. So it's been proven to the manufacturers that shake-the-box kits are not worth manufacturing. We do have great builders on this forum and elsewhere, but their thing is bashing and scratchbuilding. There's plenty of unbuilt kits still out there in any case. One US-only manufacturer has said that kits were a problem because they had major trouble with being able to hire local people here that could be trusted to put just one sprue A in one box, rather than zero or two or three. Very sad. Very true for other US businesses, too. Following Frank Compagna's post, the new startups are already here. Here's (for example) Bluford and BLMA coming in with what looks like real success. Bluford has announced they have their own shop in China.
It's sad that more N Scalers don't like to build, but would much rather purchase fully super-detailed and finished stuff. That is the collector mentality, and where the money is today, but I remember the good old days when you could purchase Kaydee Micro-trains car kits in blister packs and assemble them yourself to save a few dollars. For a few of us, there is still the satisfaction of building models ourselves.
There is also be the runner mentality, if you can buy super detailed rtr stuff like that which is becoming available these days you can put more of your time to building a layout and running on it.
