Re: Locomotive reviews

Duh...

That's not the point! The industry is geared to publishing reviews well after the release of the products. That needs to be changed, especially because of such limited runs the manufacturers produce. They literally lock you into a purchase without knowing very much about what they're locking you into!

Look at the videogame industry as an example of how this should be done. And there are a lot fewer products in the model railroad industry that need to be reviewed. The manufacturers need to get their act together and start sending pre-production samples to the magazines for review, and the magazines need to change their policy about only reviewing shipping product.

"Frank Eva" <

And the magazines need to start giving *honest* reviews, and not gloss over duds just to protect advertising revenue.

-- Cheers Roger T.

You are missing something here......... First. The importer doesn't usually get a special air mail shipment of models before the big shipment arrives by boat. Perhaps thay should, but they don't.

The container comes in, it is opened up, inventoried and then models are shipped to the magazines and the distributors.

The distributors get the models and ship them out ASAP. Time is money.

The magazine gets the model and gives it to someone to write the review. Sometimes it is an in house person writing the review, sometimes tha model has to be shipped to Joe Doakes in West Whatever, Montana. All this takes time. The reviewer writes his review, and sends it back to the magazine. Sometimes it gets back in time to be put in the next issue, sometimes that issue is already in the can. Time passes.

With all these things going on in parallel, there is a really good chance that the product will be reviewed on the internet before any magazine can get it in print.

The importers certainly want their item reviewed ASAP, but some magazines are more alert to this sort of thing than others.

Hope this helps, John Glaab Peach Creek Shops

Obviously, if this was going to work right, it would be up to the manufacturers and the magazines to make sure that the reviewed sample was essentially the same as the release. I can't believe that manufacturers can go from a fully functional prototype to a shipping version in a matter of a couple of weeks. So, it would seem to me that this would be possible, and because it didn't work once in the past is no reason to think it could never work.

Well Peach, you aren't telling me anything I don't already know. All I'm saying is that there should be a better way to get the word out without making hobbyists commit to buying something sight unseen.

Let's not wait for it to be a "chance" event then! Let's see a review of every new locomotive released online instead of waiting for their normal print lead time. I think they could even sell online subscriptions to the website if they did this, and did it at a reasonable price! BTW, by "every new locomotive", I do not mean the next in the F series of Athearn Genesis releases... unless something drastically changed. I mean stuff like the upcoming DCC-ready GP60M in the Athearn Ready-To-Roll line.

I fail to see that anyone is asking you to "commit" to buying sight unseen. You can wait for the model to come out, view it at your local train shop and make your decision accordingly.

Regarding the reviews in the magazines as being useful to the modeler. Not always. A recent steam loco was recently brought in that lacked a detail so significant that the prototype could not run without it! Not one of the reviewers caught it. This was not some tiny little valve.

Magazine reviews are "first look" reviews. They do not and cannot really tell how the loco is going to perform. Example. Rivarossi's first run of Alleghenys had traction tires. They were a maintencance problem (they broke). but no reviewer mentioned anything about that not did anyone make an editotial comment when Rivarossi decided not to put traction tires on the later run of Alleghenys.

My advice. Do not place any credence in reviews of pre-production modle. Someone pointed this out in a previous message. Put only a small amout of faith in in reviews of current production models. Reviewers are human and often under pressure to say something nice and do it quickly.

Check the model out at your local shop and make your own decision.

Best Regards,

John Glaab Peach Creek Shops

British Bachmann have been showing the British magazines their pre-production models and getting feedback which has been incorporated into the production models - starting with the raw mouldings.

Some of us are not lucky enough to have a local train shop.

Odd review details like "skew wound motor", "flywheel", "single axle drive", it's a dog" etc can give us information that even viewing the model "in the flesh" doesn't impart.

Build me a local model shop!

Regards, Greg.P.

models and getting feedback which has been incorporated into the production models - starting with the raw mouldings. I wonder why they can do stuff like this over in the UK but not in the USA???

I can give you a few good reasons. Reasons that have been provided to me by people who make the decisions for the companies that import the models.

Keep one thing in mind, if you forget everything else. This is a business. The object is to make money.

The object is not to make the most accurate, or most democratically approved model, but to make a model that will satisfy a large number of customers and that can be produced and sold at an acceptable price.

John Glaab

Virtually every product of any consequence is reviewed - sometimes by dozens of people - on line the minute someone gets their hands on one. No need to wait for the magazines. Of course some people don't trust the internet. Someone might say something negative about the Product Of The Year. But if you are reasonably capable of sorting out what is said on line, qualified to your own wants and needs, you should have enough information to make a decision.

Then again, by the time someone is receiving product at retail, it may be too late to make a decision. A little battle I wrestle with day in, day out.

Andy

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That's exactly what I was thinking when I read your first paragraph. Only the magazines have the influence to get the word out before a limited run is gone. Waiting until folks who have pre-ordered get their locomotive could very well mean that they will never be able to buy even if they decide they want to. So, this is a double-edged sword. We really have a problem with both the manufacturers and the magazines, but the long and the short of it is that the magazines should have a lot more clout and could get something done here, if they saw the need and realized that they were losing money by doing nothing.

I'm asking that magazines be responsible for obtaining product as soon as possible before it's released - plain and simple.

How do you propose that the magazine does this? The magazine is going to get what the manufacturer gives them. The magazine cannot demand they get a model!

Let's hold the magazines' corporate feet to the fire and tell them what we want. I havealready done this, but my one voice hasn't had any effect.

And it won't.

(I've refused to renew every magazine I subscribed to)

Doesn't this effectively eliminate you from the marketplace? How do you know what is coming out? So if you don't know what is coming out haw can you complain about it not being reviewed promptly?

I don't believe hobbyists should have to pay up-front for merchandize they know almost nothing about,

I agree. Who says you have to pay up front? We take orders for models and the customer pays when he picks it up. (This does not apply to brass) Risky? Not really. Virtually EVERY new locomotive sells out so we rarely get stuck with a few models that are slow to leave the store.

and they should not have to rely on a local hobby shop that knows no more than they do about the product,

Now you are getting to the heart of the matter! You aren't getting good support from your hobby shop so to compensate for this you w3ant the magazines to pick up the slack! Right?

or has the model sequestered away behind a glass door, or worse yet, has no inventory beyond their own pre-orders.

Again, you are not getting good support from the hobby shop.

I recognize your frustration. A hobby shop that cannot, or does not, choose to provide service gives you few options, unfortunately trying to get the magazines to provide real time reviews is simply unrealistic.

We spend a lot of time on the phone talking to customers about the nature of new products. we don't know everything, but we do have a knowledgable staff and we try to help. There are other shops like us around the country. Do a little on line searching, make some phone calls and develop a raport with a shop that suppoorts your particular interests. In the long run it will be more use to you than 1000 magazine product reviews.

Best Regards,

John Glaab Peach Creek Shops

Oh, I think you give them too little credit for the kind of influence they COULD wield... if they wanted to.

I can find out as much as I need to about what's coming out just by checking the corporate website. I don't need a magazine to do that for me. What I need is for the magazine to give readers what they can't get otherwise, namely decent, timely reviews of products that I've developed an interest in.

Perhaps I should have worded this a different way... They have to make a commitment to buy before they see the merchandize in person.

Wrong - you're putting the cart before the horse. Each person who operates a hobby shop isn't going to give their customers the kind of support Peach Creek obviously can. It's still up to the folks who CLAIM to be the experts in the field, and actually work full time and get paid for what they write, to give this information. After all, a magazine is nothing more than a glorified promotional tool if it's not for info you can't get (or can't rely on) from the manufacturers.

Why? Because they're not doing it now? That's defeatism at its best!

I'm saying this for the benefit of everyone; not just me. If no one chooses to take up the "cause", I won't be crushed! ;-) Furthermore, when YOU admit you don't know everything, and you have a good track record for knowing more than most hobby shop owners, can't you see the need for someone to take up the slack? And who better than the magazines?

There are two kinds of r&d - the model itself, and researching the market which is part of marketing. Knowing the customer. Most manufacturers don't really do this, they just react to perceived demand, or better yet just copy someone else's success - or potential success, since manufacturers often have a duplicate product in the works before the original is even seen.

Yeah, if you run to the demand and price to the run, technically there is no way you can lose. But only if the product continues to live up to expectations. Burn people a few times and the pre-orders will dwindle big time.

Andy

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Or it could be all the time in the world. We've seen products being shown as test shots, even some painted and complete, that were 3 years away from retail availability.

Basically the magazines do get an advance copy of the product, almost all the time, but it's usually production product and not test shots - or early pre-production but more or less made with production components. A cobbled product is not going to yield an accurate review, since it's not what the consumer will end up buying. And a pre-production/early production sample isn't available until production starts. And as we've seen sometimes the product comes ashore ahead of the typical publishing lead time. Overall I think it's the goal of both manufacturer and publisher to have a product review (or even better, a feature articule using it) the same month a new product comes out, but the number of uncontrolled variables makes it a rare occurrence.

Andy

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I think you are giving too much credit to the magazine reviewers. They are just regular people like anyone else, and when it comes to things like accuracy, if they aren't knowledgable of the prototype they are only as good as the research legwork they do on their own. And a lot of reviews are not written by staffers, but just by people known to the magazines and they send off their sample and get a review in exchange for it.

If you search for a perceived "expert" in almost any area, when you find the handful of people who qualify, chances are none of them will be on a magazine masthead. There are a few - Andy Sperandeo for instance and his knowledge of steam locomotives... but he's not on the masthead anymore (well sort of!).

I even once got a phone call from an expert modeler who wrote reviews, and he had been given a sample of a product he knew nothing about, so he called me. I pulled out my books, and an hour's long distance phone call later, he had what he needed for his review. Neither of us were on the staff of the magazine, nor got paid, nor even got freebies as this was based on only one sample being passed around. But it was easily the best review published of that product, if only because it was the only one correctly identifying the prototype.

The hobby's few full-time professionals in publishing do a lot of the grunt work to put out a magazine, and certainly get to do fun stuff as well, but without the support of the modeling community - much of it gratis and or bartered just for the sake of getting it done - there would be far less information available.

Andy

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I agree, but would add that they need to work at it to make it . . . less rare!

I believe that all of these things could be changed. Why shouldn't MR have a full-time reviewer on its staff, rather than getting away with publishing virtual freebies?! Why should any of the magazines be able to get away with it? After all, everyone knows that the subscription rate is relatively high, compared to other magazines, and again using the videogame industry as a benchmark - magazines cost a lot less, and yet, they do all reviews in-house. This is an industry that has eclipsed the movie-making business in total sales. So, they are obviously effective at what they do, and one thing you can be sure of, they always have a review available at the time the product is released, so people aren't buying blindly. BTW, on one has to commit to buying a game before reading a review, either, and these games can get quite expensive, sometimes as high as $50 a pop.

Because there isn't going to be one person qualified to review every single product, at least if the reviews are to be of any value.

You just said it right there... model railroading has yet to eclipse basket weaving in total sales. It's still largely a volunteer hobby, and supported by very small manufacturers. The largest entity in the hobby, at least in the USA (Walthers) would be a penny-ante player in the video game market, dollar-wise.

Andy

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