MTH Shipping Schedule

WHo knows.  All the shipping schedules are 'swags' at best by the Manfs.

I had an MTH item on order for 16 months.  Kept sliding right, 5 times.  Cancelled it-another Manf made it in the meantime.

Your experience will vary.  Good luck

I was afraid that may be the case......

I should add it's not just MTH that has problems.  All the Manfs do from time to time.

Depends on item.

Hopefully you'll have a great experience.

I have pre-ordered everything for about the last 3-4 years. The orders have been mostly for MTH items. Everything was usually way late at first, but that has recently improved. The last year or so MTH has been within a month or two of most of the items I have pre-ordered.

Most of the items I have pre-ordered have been diesels and freight cars, all Railking or Premier. I have not pre-ordered any steamers and very few accessory items. There are occasional items that take longer, but you never know which one that will be, they like to surprise you. So far, none of my pre-orders have been cancelled.

Thanks for the input.  I'm just trying to get a gut feel for when it will arrive.  Hopefully, not the day after Christmas as I'll be broke. 

All I can say is good luck and it's really anyone's guess, but you have the added bonus of your item being one they have made before for what it's worth? Still you just can't be sure.

MTH is the closest to accurate.

Lionel is next closest.

Atlas O is very broad in the estimates.

Bachmann does not even post a shipping schedule.

Andrew

I pre-ordered an MTH steam locomotive in November 2013 from the 2013 volume 2 catalog; it was supposed to be available in June 2014, the date started slipping further and further and now stands at January 2016. 

I will be patient

Regards

Fred

The MTH shipping schedule says my MOPAC sd70ace to be shipped Sep 2015.  Its now October 1 and still hasn't shipped.

Nope, not too accurate.

In my limited experience with both MTH and Lionel pre-ordering stuff.  Would it be safe to say Lionel is getting product to market faster than MTH?  As stated above some some MTH stuff is taking over a year, while some Lionel stuff is under a year?

Watch for my postings from MTH and Lionel. My info is about 7 days before release.

To be fair, it's a crap shoot for all the importers.  Nobody has a stellar record for shipping product.  With the release of each new catalog, there's typically an estimated shipping schedule that is supposed to give us a general idea of when items will ship.  Rarely are those estimates EVER correct  -- maybe an exception here and there.  But in general delays are the norm... and sometimes numerous delays where dates slip a few months each time.

Lionel seems pretty good with their locomotive shipments.  Passenger cars?  Let's not go there.    Likewise, freight rolling stock has seen its share of delays too.  But nowhere near the delays for the aluminum passenger cars.  It'll be interesting to see how close Lionel will be for the new ABS 21" passenger cars.

MTH has been delivering "surprise" products (i.e., the Standard Gauge uncatalg'd Chessie 400E, and the recently announced Railking Holloween ES44 w/caboose) at a time where importers are moving high-end products to a BTO pre-order process.  Haven't pre-ordered much O-Gauge from MTH in years, but I did pre-order the NS OCS train and CSX Safety Train from the last catalog.  Those items are supposed to arrive later his year, so we'll see what happens.  I have ordered some Standard Gauge tinplate items, and those products have shipped reasonably close to the original estimates -- perhaps just a few months delay.

Atlas-O... HUGE delays for lots of product.  It'll be interesting to see how quickly Atlas-O can finally wrap up delivery of all the CZ items.  And locomotives have been a disaster.  There's been some improvements for some freight cars, so there's a silver lining if you need something to hold out hope for. 

I guess we all have our horror stories for various products, as well as a few good stories as well.  But I gotta believe it's no fun manufacturing product overseas nowadays.  The devil is ALWAYS in the details, and the devil has been making his appearance known quite frequently these days.  I wouldn't want to be a US-based product manager with so much control lost to the instability of overseas manufacturing environments nowadays.

David

I always do.