Not again ....

I'm expecting non-limited editions of the Compound to become available in LMS and BR liveries at a lower price. At least I am hoping that this will be the case but I have to admit that it hasn't happened yet with the GWR "City".

Riddles

Suspect you will be waiting a long time, high price with low numbers appear to be the latest business model. Wonder if development costs have dropped by outsourcing and or technology developments.

Cheers, Simon

The reason for that model is simple: too many times in the past manufacturers over-estimated demand, produced more than the market could absorb, and tried to dump the over-supply at below-cost prices. This had several bad effects: it created a "wait until the price drops" mindset in the market, and encouraged the "manufacturers are ripping us off" cranks. It also often left retailers and wholesalers with stock they couldn't sell at a price that reflected their costs.

So now many manufacturers have gone to the pre-order model: they won't even begin manufacturing until they have enough orders to pay for the first run plus a reasonable profit (they do have to eat, you know.) That's why you'll see a certain proportion of models announced but never made, and special editions of existing models (which is a way of re-using molds that would otherwise gather dust).

The fact that Chinese manufacturers have raised prices doesn't help either. They can do this because in the pursuit of short-term "increase in share-holder value" manufacturers have shut down facilities in Europe and America, etc, and transferred technology to China. What's worse is that the necessary skills for rebuilding capacity and using it in the West are disappearing as people don't want to learn jobs that no one wants them to do.

BTW, development costs are lower in real terms, thanks to CAD/CAM, but they've been offset by a demand for higher accuracy and detail. Suppose you want to offer a protoypically accurate train of a locomotive and a dozen carriages or so, instead of reworking existing models to be "good enough" stand-ins. Development costs will run you around $300 to $500K, depending on the amount of variation in the rolling stock. (Source: a manufacturer who is finally starting production on a well-known train.) A goodly part of that cost is field work, not surprisingly in these days of widely scattered preserved stock.

HTH Wolf K.

Yes and no. Costs have remained in the same ball park but we are now getting much better models. I still Hattons, et al., deep discounting models after a while.

MBQ

This isn't a pre-order model, announced a few days ago and will be available within few weeks. Snip ...

Is it still expensive when they do laser scanning of a complete loco ? Then there may be outsourcing of the CAD/CAM work - there have been suggestions that it would happen.

I still don't understand how they can get enough profit after whats been a massive price rise in the last year or so. Even the discounters seem to be holding prices of some models high (new liveries not new models) - that suggests there is less stock about.

Cheers, Simon