Blue Sky Digressions

Got the Walthers Flyer yesterday and had a question for almost every page. A sampling:

Why do most of Preiser's female figures look like hookers?

Why is Walthers still selling grass mat? Does anyone still buy that stuff?

How do they know when I change scales?

Are today's modelers so incompetent they'll pay $7.98 for a plastic, wooden loading dock they could knock together in ten minutes?

Same for ash/inspection pits, they're holes in the roadbed?! Getting the hole square is the Toughest part!

Is Fucia (Puce?) Really the current color of DT&I boxcars?

Has Model Railroader built their last 4x8 Central Project Railroad?

Reply to
LDosser
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Don't know, but there are less ... hooking ... ones, also ;-) Or did you manage to find their "nude" line?

Yup. Lots of people who want to "grass" larger areas (and only later find that doesn't work well on anything but flat areas). Actually many flat-board layouts use the mats. I find them a bit toylike, but you know...

Sure ;-) Well, it's a matter of convenience (I'd use the plastic one, if it came with a shed I like, but I wouldn't buy it extra ;-)

Obviously that kind of stuff sells?

;-)

What's a more interesting question for me: why do they sell BIG locos everywhere, but it's hard to find the small ones (which are much more apropriate for small layouts)? At least here you'll get the large road locos (and cheap!) while it's almost impossible to find the small switchers for less than a fortune...

And why do they sell thousands of road cars, but few (if any) nice train cars? You can buy the long intercity wagons, but none of the shorter cars - again for a small layout this is not good ;-)

Ciao...

Reply to
Bernhard Agthe

  • seemingly promoting such a destructive and uneconomic industry as corn ethanol - do they have money in it? relatives in it?
  • totally out of stock on the excellent Proto 2000 Type 21 tank cars?
  • unable to supply decals, at least, for an A. E. Staley transition era tank car?
  • trumpeting massive garage sized industries like steel plants, or comically tiny E. L. Moore looking "industries"
  • unable - like my LHS, also - to supply Code 70 or Code 55 flextrack

- part of their assuprtion everyone wants UP streamline passenger cars, double stack container flats and funnel flow massive toxic spill tank cars?

Reply to
Steve Caple

"LDosser" wrote in news:hju1rr$rd9$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:

*snip*

Thousands of people do each year, I'm sure. Grass mat is one of those things that look quick and easy, and if it's all you want it is. Parents of kids who got their first train set find it an easy thing to get and use. Mine did.

The proverbial candy store sticks enough sweet and sour candy to keep both lovers happy. ;-)

Building anything takes time to develop skills. Simple projects usually aren't.

Holes are just the start. There's got to be access underneath somehow.

*snip*

Puckdropper

Reply to
Puckdropper

On 1/29/2010 11:45 AM Puckdropper spake thus:

Access underneath? What on earth for?

Oh, you must be thinking of the Lionel Ash Pit Action set, with the crew that digs out the hole.

Otherwise, it's just a damn hole.

Reply to
David Nebenzahl

If you cut out small irregular patches and surround them with ground foam grass and bushes, it can look pretty good. Sort of like a particular species has crowded everything else out in that area. But you need the good stuff. The last stuff I used was some sort of pasture grass - it might have been Noch, but I'm not sure. I got it at the big train store in Denver.

Reply to
Larry Blanchard

David Nebenzahl wrote in news:4b633f68$0$4558$ snipped-for-privacy@news.adtechcomputers.com:

I haven't seen the latest Walthers flyer (they don't seem to want to send them to me, and I've been too busy to get to the LHS), but I'd expect a model of an inspection pit to have some form of access so the workers can actually get down and up. If the "model" is indeed a hole in the ground, then my comment can safely be ignored as "technically right, but not what we're talking about." ;-)

Puckdropper

Reply to
Puckdropper

In real life most of them had stairs at one or both ends, but I've seen some that seemed to have no stairs or ladders at all -but had a cross-connected tunnel that served a number of pits as a common access point.

Reply to
Twibil

That is a good one. But, I must confess I have a few locos that will not run on any layout I have space for. The best I can hope for is running them on a club layout or a test track.

Flash and Dazzle!

Reply to
LDosser

And the steel industry. Hands up all those who model the steel industry.

Reply to
LDosser

snip

A loading dock? Five year olds with minimal instruction, a glue stick, and some coffee stirrers could build one!

Access underneath what?

Reply to
LDosser

On 1/29/2010 9:28 PM LDosser spake thus:

I would if I had a layout. I loves the look of a huge steel plant.

For some outstanding examples, check out Charles Scheeler's 1930 photographs of Ford's River Rouge plant, complete with its own steel mill and foundry. Magnificent structures ...

Reply to
David Nebenzahl

Got a basketball court?

Reply to
LDosser

The problem there is that small locos need almost as many parts and as much assembling as large locos. The result is that a good quality small loco would cost almost as much as as a large one (per scale) An N gauge loco has (theoretically) only 1/8th of the volume of the same prototype in HO, but the price of the N loco is only a little less than the HO model for the same quality. US firms like Athearn have made small locos with cheap drives so you expect a small loco to be $9.98 so $99.98 small locos (probably) wouldn't sell. I just bought a Brawa 0-6-0 tank loco (European outline) for Eu 239-. It's beautiful and runs as it should, scale speeds through turnouts ... Eu 239- is an awful lot of money for a tiny, mostly plastic toy, but my layout needs it and I can toss out the nasty, cheap starter set 0-6-0t locos I've made do with up to now.

Greg.P.

Reply to
Greg.Procter

Agreed.

Interesting point of view ;-)

Well, you can buy $80 mainline locos. Which are basically empty inside - or filled with weight. Basically the same drive, just inside less weight would make a small loco - I decline to consider "space requirements" a problem, especially when I consider that there's always room for a decoder, even in Z scale. So, while there are a few switcher locos to buy (some of them actually in the below-$100 range), models for American prototypes are not readily available in Europe (especially in Germany!)

- and the European switchers and DMUs are rather on the expensive side. And they are difficult to obtain, still, because most of the shops I can go to don't sell them (I do buy locally as far as possible).

But locos are less of a problem compared to wagons - most of the short wagons they sell here are either two-axle stock (which I don't like much) or are loooooong (which don't fit my layout). One of the reasons for using American-style rolling stock is the fact that only American-style four-axle short wagons are available. Getting wagons in DIY-kits is almost unheard-of. The discrepancy between wagons and locos available in model shops and in the real-world is horrible...

As I said, there's stuff available, but it's rather limited compared to "the real world" - in reality there's likely as much switching equipment as mainline equipment - in the hobby stores it's almost exclusively mainline equipment. Probably this is due to the fact that most people only "see" the mainline equipment when they think of trains, but know (or "see") little of what's going on behind the scenes.

So big stuff sells - even if it doesn't even fit the super-small pizza's of the starter packs - mainline loco and two or three big wagons occupy a third of the track they provide in the box! Don't look to closely at the "train" from the outside of the curves :-(

Yeah, well, the world is a bad place to live - too many people, too little brain ;-)

Just as an on-season joke, I'm happy my model train layout is situated in summer/fall - I'd go crazy trying to model all the failures and delays that the real trains seem to be experiencing - and the winter's not even bad here... Every time a snow flake is lying cross-wise on the tracks, there's a delay...

Ciao...

Reply to
Bernhard Agthe

Brawa offers, or offered HO US stock. The US outline leaflet comes with the European leaflet from Brawa each year. I presume it's US "Lifelike", probably made in the same Chinese factory as Brawa models.

There's still lots of small models amongst the big stuff - between Maerklin, Trix Fleischmann and Roco there must be about 300 pages of new items each year but I buy one or two locos and a small carton of wagons etc.

Stay focussed on the trains - you can never have enough!

Mine are situated before Adolf - back when snow was an everyday occurance and trains got through.

Greg.P. Wuerttemberg had short 4 axle wagons :-)

Reply to
Greg.Procter

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