- The current price of a Bachmann boxcar at The Favorite Spot is $36, and the current price for an AMS On30 boxcar at RLD is $37. Look at the two!
- Bachmann really had something going there. And perhaps the price increase is unavoidable - they do need to make a profit after all. But I am guessing the On30 market has plateaued and at the current street prices, I don't forsee many newcomers to the scale.
These are both good points.
At a hobby shop over the weekend, I heard someone compare Bachmann and On30 to a drug dealer. He said that Bachmann came out with inexpensive, good On30 stuff to get people's teeth into a gauge they'd normally never venture into, then jacked the prices up once people had a layout built and really couldn't afford to switch to something else.
Honestly, I got into On30 (and back into model trains since I left the hobby in the 90s) only because Bachmann made the prototype I'd always wanted (ET&WNC ten-wheelers) in a scale I could do something with. Heck, someone later came out with HOn3 versions of the ame locomotives and I might have gone HOn3 if they'd come out with their brass engines with a price tag I could justify to myself.
But if someone else had come out with the same locomotives in, say, On3, that's what I'd be modeling right now. For me, it was never a mindset of, "I wanna build a layout, what should I model?" as I only would have ever built a layout if I could model the specific RR I wanted. Bachmann just happened to be first in On30 so that's where I am now.
Again, I'm glad I bought all my rolling stock when you could easily get freight cars at about $20 each. As Scotty pointed out, they're not that great as $40 cars, but for $20, they were great for that price...
