A ten-drivered Harmonic Convergence!

Dan's Train Depot is offering a whole slew of models (including the pilot models) of an all time favorite of mine, the D&RGW F-81 class 2-10-2 in two configurations: as they looked in the 1920s, and the 1940s (more photos here). Both were imported by Pacific Fast Mail in 1978, and all of these models appear to have come from the PFM collection, which Dan's seems to be liquidating. At 32 years of age they stand an excellent chance of outlasting the prototypes, which were turned out from Alco's Brooks Works at Dunkirk, NY in 1917 and went into the furnaces at Pueblo, CO in the early 1950s. When L.F. Loree surveyed the Grande in September, 1917 they were working between Minturn and Salida as helpers, but they soon went to Utah to lug coal drags over Soldier Summit. When they were built, they were the biggest nonarticulated engines in the world - and the Grande crews promptly nicknamed them "submarines." Someone composed a quatrain:

they built me for a submarine
but they had no guns
so they sent me to the Rio Grande
to haul ten thousand tons.

They did, too- they were rated for 81,200 pounds of tractive effort, which was big even for a 2-10-2.

There are some pictures of them as delivered in Jackson Thode's book of George L. Beam's corporate photography. There have been two runs of brass imports- the 1978 PFM Crowns, and a 2004 Precision Scale run. Neither captures them precisely as built, but for my money, the PFM early version probably comes the closest. Aesthetically speaking, the earlier version is more appealing - there are no awnings to conceal the curve of the arched cab window, and the engines themselves are cleaner - there are fewer appliances, such as the overfire air jets, which no doubt improved combustion (Brooks engines were notoriously poor steamers) at the expense of appearance. The earlier versions also include a tiny little Vanderbilt tender that's nothing but curves and catwalks, with a little doghouse perched slightly off the centerline just behind the coal bunker. These were always a reminder of just how far the infrastructure of the "Dirty, Ragged and Greasy" lagged behind its locomotive purchases, but they were a requirement - longer tenders would not have fit on most of the turntables the Grande owned in 1917. As an aesthetic thing, I think small tenders always improve the appearance of a steam engine - they make the engine appear proportionately larger, and it's nice when they have as much visual interest as these do.

Coincidentally, the Colorado Railroad Museum chose the same moment to announce its latest Rail Annual - Bob LeMassena's book on Decapod locomotives. It sounds as if they've stretched the definition of "decapod" to "five coupled engine," which is fine - save for the old PFM book on the Texas types, there aren't too many studies out there, and lots of interesting classes are almost unchronicled - the Northern Pacific's interesting pair, the Lehigh Valley engine that gave the type its name, and the Baldwin heavy, to name only a few - so I look forward to the treatment. And at $60, it's a lot cheaper than those pilot models!

Good news

Bowser assures me that most of the Cal-Scale parts will remain in production, and the Bowser parts will remain available.....for a while......which is very good news!

Cagney locomotives

So I opened Shorpy the other day and found....this! And I thought, wait, I've seen one of those before - and sure enough, I had!

There are still a few of these knocking around, and they're even more delightful now than they were when first built - after all, steam was pretty ordinary in 1905.

Report from the Great Scale Model Train Show

This weekend, I attended my favorite quarterly event: the Great Scale Model Train Show in Timonium, Maryland. I discovered it a few years back, in the sense that Columbus discovered America: it was a giant entity full of people who knew it well, and I just sort of happened to bump into it. I don't think it's the biggest show going, but it's probably my favorite, and it has a lot going for it. The target audience has traditionally been the brass-buying, scale-model-building hardcore model railroader, but it's not so narowly targeted that there's no room for others, particularly children. The show is the most kid-friendly I've seen, and they do some wonderful grace-and-favor activities for kids that must cost them some coin, but that return nothing but good will - for example, they put out a gigantic rug and a big pile of Thomas trains, and let the kids play under the supervision of their parents; they also had a little table where enthusiasts took a lot of time helping little children build paper-plate dioramas with some of the less expensive components of the hobby, like trees and foliage. These activities delighted my children, and I suspect that they're the product of the same mind that conceived the show in the first place.

That mind belongs to Howard Zane, the successful entrepreneur who retired to spend his time building his model railroad and and running the show he conceived. Howard's one of those one-in-a-million minds that you find in the hobby once every couple of decades. He was trained as a graphic designer and worked for Raymond Loewy's firm; he went into the Army and became an aviator. After building a successful aviation business (I believe he repossessed airplanes), he retired. The show and his Piermont Division are his retirement activities. What background could better prepare a man for a role as a model railroading kingpin? He understands how businesses are run, how they grow, and how they fail; he has the artistic ability to conceive, design, and build beautiful things, and I was struck by the fascination his table of model structures exerted on my children. The power to create delight is or ought to be the essence of artistic ability, and it's nice to see it combined with a real business sense, because in the cottage-industry world of model railroading, you need real acumen to keep a small business afloat.

I suspect that acumen is going to make a big difference in the coming year, because I was struck by the thinness of the crowds. It was not as crowded as it usually is, and my own very imperfect survey of the brass tables suggested that things were not moving much, either. It's sort of in the nature of things that shows are markets, with each individual seller making pricing decisions, and word of mouth and the Internet providing such information sharing as there is; voluntary efforts like pricing guides certainly help, but pricing information is naturally dynamic, and hard to capture.

I think I’m in good company if I say that I really come to train shows for two reasons: one is to find discounts (hopefully deep discounts) on items I already want. Another is to find those items that I’m not able to get elsewhere – particularly brass. I find as I get more and more deeply involved in the “building" (kit and scratch) side of the hobby that I have a greater need for both discounts and assistance in getting increasingly hard-to-find items at lower prices. Both the brass market and the steam detail parts market are increasingly subject to the economics of scarcity, complicated by the economic situation, and it’s anyone’s guess what this will mean.

There are some differences between the two markets, however. While the supply of brass models does continue to increase slightly, the overall market size should be fairly stable. Short of a trip to the basement floor or a poorly executed house move, the supply of 1950-1990 era brass models isn’t going to decline much. It will fluctuate slightly as the models come in our out of the market, based largely on factors that are, strictly speaking, external to the market – the number of estate sales, for example. Detail parts, on the other hand, will get used up fairly quickly. And they are already becoming scarce. It’s not clear what parts Bowser will continue to make, but some of the Cal-Scale parts are already off the market, and prices are rising. I will give you an example, from this week’s GSMTS. I found a very nice Cal-Scale Hodge trailing truck, and inquired about the price. On being told it was twenty dollars (and knowing that Precision Scale charges $17 for an unassembled brass kit), I asked the dealer why it wasn’t sixteen dollars, the price scribbled on the label. He replied, not entirely politely, that I now knew what he paid for it. I put it back; I’m not yet so desperate that it looked like an appealing price, and to be honest, I’m not altogether sure that this isn’t simply overpriced. But one of my favorite detail part makers, Greenway, is pricing their Hodge trucks at $45, which may be a sign of things to come.
Is this a permanent situation? I don’t know. The steam kit situation is pretty bad right now, the worst, in fact, that it has ever been. When Bowser exited the steam kit business last year, the domestic steam kitbuilding industry essentially died, and the trade now survives on Ebay and at shows. The detail parts business was collateral damage. There will continue to be a demand for detail parts, of course, because people will still want to redetail ready-to-run steam power, and the supply of kits and kitbashable locomotives will probably not be exhausted for a decade or so – although I would guess that the prices will continue to escalate on Ebay. But even at this lower level, at some point the supply will dwindle. If the prices become high enough, Bowser might conceivably decide that the economics are such that they warrant market re-entry, but I frankly doubt it – their inventory was largely Pennsy and USRA power, and those two classes of engine were among the first the RTR market provided.

Given the stability in the supply, the situation in the brass market is a little different. That supply will diminish somewhat in growing years, but I would suspect that the course of nature will mean a lot of stuff that’s currently off-market will return as big collections are liquidated. I think some of this is already happening; you can look at the frequency with which the results of estate liquidations now appear on the sites of the bigger brass dealers like Dan’s Train Depot. But part of me suspects that the question of supply will take a back seat to the bigger issue of the overall condition of the economy. It has long been a truism that “brass will always increase in value,” but I wonder whether that’s true. I don’t know whether anyone who will discuss it has researched the matter, but I would bet that the buyers’ market has contracted – which confronts sellers who have a substantial brass inventory with a real problem. They’re a low-margin operation to begin with; cut your price too much, and you trim that margin to nothing; cut it too little, and your inventory sits, maybe losing value, maybe gaining it. That’s not a retailer’s dream.

I admit to being a bit of a jackal on the fence on this. I didn’t buy any brass this weekend; I can’t help but feel the prices are still just a bit too high. Perhaps I’m right, or wrong – I had a few desultory exchanges with vendors who responded to my request by allowing they might be able to go as low as $Y or $Z – but only a few of those seemed attractive, and none was attractive enough to move me. I hope that's not a feeling that's widely shared - because a lot of the businesses that sustain the hobby are low-margin operations, and lean years can hit them hard - and in a hobby that's heavily dependent on cottage industries, we will regret them if they go.

Why a LaBelle model?

So this is the latest project I've managed to finish - a wooden LaBelle model of a circa-1902 Pullman observation car, painted and lettered as the Denver Northwestern and Pacific's "Marcia." Not a perfect model, alas: time constraints kept me from chopping it down from the actual length of 78 scale feet to the more prototypical 68 feet, and I couldn't add some of the "extras" that would have improved it. It's a presentation model for a friend who's retiring, and the overriding need was to get it finished on time. It took about a month of evenings, but it was time well spent.

Why bother with a wooden kit in this age of breathtaking resin-molded cars? It's a reasonable question. LaBelle kits have been around for a long time, and they look like it. They can be improved, sure, but it's hard to get the breathtaking perfection that's now available in a Westerfield kit, or even the better laser-cut wooden kits. They don't come with trucks or couplers, and when you open them, you're basically confronted with a sheet or two of plans, a handful of castings, and a big pile of sticks.

This is a real criticism in an age when you can easily get your hands on an easy-to-build and practically foolproof car kit, but it's also the secret to their appeal. A LaBelle kit is the perfect jumping-off point if you want to learn how to scratchbuild. There's no laser-cut built up core: you have to do it yourself, from the instructions they give you. That's a task, but it's not impossible, and once you're done, you have a very good idea of how you would go about building another car of the same type - or, if you felt like it, five of them, because a quick trip to the Northeastern website will get you much of what you need, and at an economical price. It's true that there are no tabs or prefabricated connections - but again, these are strengths, not weaknesses. These kits are forgiving of errors and do-overs in a way that a lot of plastic and resin kits are not, and the supply of stripwood is plainly calibrated for the needs of the ham-handed modeler.

They're great kits - and if, like me, you're interested in the wood coach era, you will quickly find that LaBelle basically owns the market. It's a niche, and very few kit manufacturers support or provide much passenger equipment for the 1890-1913 era - there are plenty of excellent open platform cars, and a few special-interest models of unique prototypes. But for the workaday wooden Pullman sleeping and parlor cars, coaches, baggage and RPO equipment, LaBelle is it - and I for one hope that they remain on the market for a long time to come.