Originally Posted by Rusty Traque:
The Rugged Rails cars are pretty much early RailKing cars in different packaging. It seems Rugged Rails is falling by the wayside in favor of the Ready to Run branding.
Rusty
Well Rusty, maybe the flat car and the single dome tank car, but the Rugged Rails box car and covered hopper are from different tooling are NOT from the earlier Railking dies. The box car is much smaller than the Railking version, more in keeping with the Lionel 6464 series, or the K-Line 6400 or the Industrial Rail box car. the 4- bay covered hopper looks like a clone in size and appearance to the Industrial Rail version. The gondola too is also smaller than the normal Railking one, though slightly bigger than the similarly sized Lionel version.
Some of the Rugged Rails locomotives were absolutely from some of the eariler smaller Railking dies. But it seems over the past 5 years or more, that MTH has put litle emphasis on the Rugged Rails line up, other than what comes in train sets. On the last batch of cataloged Rugged Rails SD90MAC engines, most got cancelled and the few others were delivered years past their due date.
It's possible MTH decided to give this part of the market up to the Industrial Rail line. But the thinning out of Rugged Rails happened long before Atlas took over the IR line. And ever since the last big supplier shake-up/cut back at Sanda Kan, Atlas has been having a very hard time delivering nearly everything. I say that not as criticism, but actually with sympathy. It's kinda hard to make money as a company if you can't deliever the products the customers would like to buy.
That said, I also like the Rugged Rails line. For me a couple of standouts are the yellow RR Chessie System gondola (nice to have a painted yellow car than is actually opaque!) and the RR Railbox box car.
