The Economics of Kitbuilding

Model Railroader has a review up of Walthers' new (well, relatively) USRA Heavy 2-10-2 in HO, with video, here. I haven't seen one in action yet, but the dead-tree review was pretty favorable and they include DCC, sound and prototype-specific detailing. The MSRP from Walthers is $425.

This sorta raises an interesting point for me, because I recently finished kit-building a Bowser model of the same engine; I reviewed it here. The basic kit cost $127, and the superdetail kit added another $56 to that. The engineer and fireman figures added another $11.40, which comes to $194.40. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a pretty significant savings. Now, the non-DCC and sound version of the Walthers model chips $100 off the price. So the difference between the electrically comparable Bowser and Walthers models turns out to be $131. For that price, incidentally, you could go out and buy a second kit - for example, a Bowser New York Central K-11 Pacific and superdetail kit and still have enough left over for a small snack (reviewed here by noted locomotive surgeon Darth Santa Fe).

I realize that I have left out some hidden costs - for example, I haven't included the cost of decals, paint, and the modelers' tools (although those are all useful for multiple projects - so any honest economic accounting would have to take that into consideration). But you really don't need that many of the latter, even for a Bowser kit - a set of small screwdrivers, hex wrenches, a flat file (and I got by with one), some very fine grit sandpaper, glue, and a pin vise with associated drills pretty much cover it. This goes a long way toward suggesting that even in the age of cheap Chinese imports, kitbuilding is still a viable means of saving money.

As an aside, for my fellow model rails: isn't Walthers' search engine kind of a pain? Every search term I tried turned up an N scale Con-cor model, and using "Walthers" as a search term just brought up what appeared to be the entire stock of Walthers, which is like getting everything at Sears: it's unimaginably vast. But I got the exact page on the Walthers' website I needed in thirty seconds with Google - and using the exact same search terms, too.