What I would like to see is... Every manufacturer sell ONLY undec locos and cars !! They could easily enough include decals for whatever road the customer wants. This would stop the complaining about how hard paint, numbers, roadnames etc are to strip off the shells before they repaint it anyways !!! It would also eliminate the complaining about how whatever is made is 1 to 2 shades off color of the prototype !!! No bleeding paint or stripping or even crooked decals to be complaining about. Let the customer decide...and paint the danged things in whatever color they think is right...and apply declas as they see fit...because the customer is always right and knows best !! The detail manufactures would be happy to sell whatever itty bitty little parts the consumer wants to glue on their model to make it right in their eyes also...LOL !!!!! As a BONUS they would have to sell cheaper...as the manufactures arent painting each one and applying decals. This alone would make most of us happy buyers !! Win...Win for everyone. But then again...how boring would Railroad Forums be with all the complaining about such things....roflmao !!!!! :teeth:
An SW-1 !!! I'd also like to see Atlas retool the shells of their older locos and get rid of those one piece handrail- walkway assemblies. Would be wonderful to have the old Geeps, SD's, and U25b's with one piece sills and separate handrails. Did I mention an SW-1? Bob
I would love to see a nice, curvy PCC on shapeways that could maybe fit the Bachmann Peter Witt chassis, or something other chassis of good quality. And while I`m at it: boxcabs to go with the Little Joes but, most of all, I would love to see a Milwaukee Road steeplecab emerge.
I think the reason they are shied away from is that the manufacturers are afraid of success. Kato had to use plastic drive components on the NW2 so it would have limited sales. LifeLike had the poor pickups on the SW classes so they wouldn't set the sales ticker on fire. A company could survive alone on all with S series, SW series and NW series switchers. Look at all the roads they would cover and all the paint schemes. Seems like a pretty fast way to make big time sales. And if done right, they could use a common parts list so that the costs of materials and manufacture are reduced. Atlas still has the S2's coming with DC, DCC and DCC Sound, so you know it can be done. But not even Atlas really appreciates the market for these switchers, or they would be going big time on them. And to Georges point, it would be great to have undecs ready for the folks that want them. A properly executed small switcher has been waiting to come to life. But the onrush of the cash flow is too scary for the manufacturers to handle. And I firmly believe they they could be made cheaper than the current pricing on the Atlas S2's.
I wouldn't want them to include decals...mostly as Microscale and others make plenty of decals. Plus if the manufacturer included decals that could do any car/loco that fits that scheme, the decal sheet in theory could be the size of a large novel. Also manufacturers do not apply decals, they pad print.
If you order a BNSF locomotive...they would only send you the BNSF decals. Or like you say...companies like Microscale and others would be happy to sell people decals. Other people print their own. I dont think the decals would be an issue. Then you have the modelers who are going to strip the paint and pad printed lettering off a piece of new equipment they bought to repaint/decal in the road they want anyways. The 'pad printing' is going to be disolved in the stripping process eitherway. WHY pay for something ya didnt need in the first place is all I am saying. Buy the raw unpainted piece of equipment and do some 'modeling' and detail/paint it to your taste. Cant scream at a manufacture if the paint is a shade too dark or the printing is crooked that way ! If manufactures DIDNT offer both a painted and an unpainted version...everyone would have to 'model' more because we all start with a blank canvas undec. Just one less thing to complain about. I guess those who complain about a shell being a scale 3 inches to wide or tall...or the ride height being a scale 3.5 inches off...would still keep the forums alive however....LOL.
(Alternate universe where this was the case) "Why can't the manufacturers put anything out except undecorated locos and cars!? I mean they are already halfway there. All they need to do is setup a few paint booths and we could all avoid the hassle & headache of having to paint & apply our own decals. Come on, they could do it a lot better than I can and it would look profession and more realistic than most of the homemade livery that everyone is doing. There are always only a few real talents in this area and the rest of us are poor substitutes. I just wan't to buy my locos & rolling stock already decorated in the roads that I already model. I'm tired of kits & decorating. Give me something I can run right out of the box and that I would be proud to show my friends & family. I want to run trains! I don't want to have to do a bunch of homework before I can enjoy the ringing of wheels on rail!" HeeHee. How's that for "complaining"? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I'd just like them to do undecorated correctly. To me it means bare plastic, not painted grey or a generic paint scheme and not having everything glued together so it can't be taken apart for painting. Some manufacturers get it right but others don't get it.
Most manufacturers do offer undecs. From what I've heard, some companies stopped doing runs of undecs because people weren't buying them. Look at Kato for example, go back a few years, and you can get undecs with pretty much every run they did, now its buy a painted unit and strip and do your own. So in order to get manufacturers to make more undecs, more undecs need to be sold.
The undecs sell for the same $$$ as the painted. Logically...they should sell for less as there is less involved...JMO.
I'd like to see something replace the relatively light cast split frames of today or at least some improvement on split frames. No ideas on what the replacement would be like, but an improvement would be to cast the frame with recesses to take tungsten weights of a standard type, say, fishing weights. Then we'd probably want motors a bit beefier; we'll see what that Kato coreless motor turns out to be.
Well, my default answer in the past was always a Burlington E5 (which I never believed was possible). Now that I'm living in the post dream-come-true era, I had to think about this a bit. The following come to mind as top of the wishlist: a) an accurate Kato NP NCL b) E5 B units to complete the dream (let's finally reunite Silver Pilot with Silver Mate in 1:160 - Q fans better understand the reference.....) :sweat: Beyond that, just a bunch of random wishes: a) Twin-cities zephyrs and/or Nebraska zephyrs b) Kato empire builder in either original (E7 powered, non-great-dome) or later versions c) Kato 20th Century Limted with Dreyfuss Hudson and many other great loco options d) any other prototypical "name" passenger trains from the classic era
