Scott Kay posted:Mike CT posted:Eventually one considers the cost. May be one of the most expensive, plastic, molded diesels available. Price is up another $50 or so dollars beyond the SD 7/9 models. West coast premium shipping to here in the east also adds considerable cost.
??? Are we approaching that $1,000 plastic diesel in a box???
Yes, the price of plastic models is going up and will continue to climb. Chinese labor costs are steadily climbing upward, especially for highly skilled labor that design 3D CAD models used for CNC machining of injection molds. Wages for machine operators making the actual molds are steadily climbing as well. Auto makers such as BMW and Mercedes have built state of the art factories in China to build higher end autos for the Chinese market since the buying power of the Chinese workforce has grown so much and has so much future growth potential. Even Ferrari sales are through the roof in China. Our quest for RTR equipment doesn’t help much either, labor to assemble the finished models is getting more expensive as well, usually due to the extensive turnover as workers become more skilled they leave to different companies, so the model manufactures have to constantly train new workers all the time and this is expensive. Worker safety is on the rise as well – look and see how many older You Tube videos of labor working in Chinese steel mills, die cast factories with molten vats of zinc, and spinning machine tools (lathes, mills) where workers are not even wearing closed shoes (mostly sandals) , let alone safety glasses – this is changing. The net effect are price increases passed down to the consumer to pay for this.
Except for reruns of old tooling, the day of the new grass roots $500 Atlas Master level O Scale plastic locomotive is over. If Atlas were to release a new Master Line diesel locomotive, the price will be near what 3rd Rail is charging for their currently road-specific models ($650 - $700). I’m sure this is one of the reasons Atlas is reluctant to jump into making a new grass roots O Scale locomotive model, it is a big gamble to invest close to half a million dollars in tooling in a model that may not pay dividends due to its high upfront investment cost to produce and reluctance of the market to absorb these new higher prices. Therefore, the safe bet is to continue to rerun old tooling that has already paid for itself many times over. Also, Atlas needs to recoup their investment for the acquisitions of their share of Weaver and all of BLMA (HO, N Scale). Therefore, the Atlas factories have plenty of Weaver and BLMA product to run so the need for a new grass roots model to fill factory production is not really high on their to-do list. 3rd Rail seems to sell more than it can make with the models they produce as shown by the reruns of the recent E and F unit release so the SD40-2 delay really does not impact any of their factory production obligations either and probably buys some design time for other models that have full reservations. Moral of the story... pay them now or pay them later because the price isn’t going down.
Scott Kay
Austin, TX
Well said but something nobody is considering is 3d printing. If you go on Shapways you will find that people are already creating engines in N, HO, and even O scale. As the technology gets better there may come a time when somebody wakes up and realize that if the components can be had. (Because right now you can't purchase powered trucks) It would be conceivable to build to order in real time or at the very least build your own.