Where do you see the hobby going in your crystal ball? Do you see a slide in those interested in building kits or do you think the market is so saturated it just seems that way at times? Do you thing there is a real market out there for detail items or is that just a sundry item? Just curious in your observations as you read a lot of the magazines and such which is something I really don’t have the time for.
To be honest, I really have no idea where the hobby is headed. I do think there is still a strong demand for craftsman-level kits - that sort of thing will always appeal to a certain group of modelers. If the market is saturated, it’s probably at the ‘low end.’ What I mean by that is this: I see ads almost every month now from new manufacturers that I’d never heard of before offering laser-cut kits, but the kits are typically inexpensive with few details or frills. Even Walthers is now in on the act, with a line of low-cost laser-cut kits. I just wonder how many of these new manufacturers will still be doing it a year or two for now.
At the other end, the ‘high end,’ I don’t see saturation. It may be saturated, but I don’t see it if it is. There are very few kit producers who put out kits in the $250 - $500 range. There’s Brett, Bob Van Gelder, George, Dario LeDonne, Carl Cornish, and maybe three or four others but that’s about it. Scott Mason is trying his hand at ‘high end’ kit offerings and apparently did okay with his two HO kits, although he really got burned on a large, expensive O scale kit he put out last year. As a result, he says he’s staying strictly with HO because that’s where the market is.
Where I think there is a noticeable gap, is in the 'middle-range.’ Nobody produces kits (at least not in HO) that are in the $125-$175 range. I don’t know if that’s because there’s no market for kits in that price range or if it’s just too hard for the manufacturers to produce kits that could be fairly priced in that range.
Personally, I think all the frew-fraw over R-T-R is the result of a bunch of grumpy middle-aged men whose idea of a “good kit” is an Athearn ‘blue box.’ Most of them have never actually built a craftsman-level kit and have no interest in one. In fact, I think a lot of those guys who constantly wail and gnash their teeth about R-T-R are just like [several people] on the forum. Their sole interest in the hobby is locomotives and rolling stock, but they generalize the whole R-T-R trend to the entire hobby, when in fact it’s really pretty much limited to locos and rolling stock. Even Walthers, which got into the ‘ready to plant’ (assembled, weathered, and detailed) line of structures a few years ago, got back out just as quickly. The line did not sell. And Woodland Scenics has been trying for the past 5 years or so to get a line of ‘ready to plant’ structures going. My impression is that they’re not selling well, and WS had only a couple of structures still on the market the last time I looked.
You asked about detail items. It’s hard to say on those. Building the high-end craftsman kits is usually just one or two steps removed from scratchbuilding a model. But at the same time, it seems to me the guys who buy/build the high-end kits don’t need the detail items because that stuff is already included in the kits.
A few years back, I went through my collection of Walthers catalogs and did a survey of the “Scratchbuilding Supplies” and “Super Detailing Parts” sections of the catalogs. All through the 80’s and well into the 90’s those two catalog sections typically ran 125+ pages. Then in the late 90’s, I saw that Walthers had started to cut back on what they stocked and the catalog pages diminished in number as a result. By the time the 2004 catalog came out, if I remember correctly, the two sections combined were only about 75 pages. I can only assume that as laser-cut kits became more popular, the interest in scratchbuilding and super detailing kits diminished - and that whole trend made no sense to me. Back when Campbell, Muir, Suydam, Magnuson, and a few others were the only craftsman-level kits available, none of them came with many - if any - details, just like the low-end laser-cut kits of today. As a result, a lot of kit builders bought the detail items to ‘finish off’ their models. For me, that was personally one of my favorite parts of building a model back then: going through the Walthers catalog and ordering a bunch of little detail castings and whatnot.
One thing I’ve found curious in recent years - given the proliferation of laser-cut kits - is that virtually no one is producing laser-cut craftsman-level rolling stock kits. I know of only one guy who is producing them. His stuff is pretty nice looking - it’s mostly ‘old time’ stock cars, box cars, and flats - and it’s not terribly expensive. I assume he’s selling them okay, and I periodically think about ordering a kit from him. But I wonder why more manufacturers haven’t gotten into that area of the hobby yet. It seems like everyone with a laser wants to produce structure kits.
Well, like I said, I have no real idea where the hobby is headed in general - or where any specific part of the hobby is headed. But then I can’t even figure out where I am in the hobby anymore. I know one thing: I spend way too much time sitting here at the computer day after day, and I spend way too much time on that silly forum. It’s time I could be working on my layout or building another diorama - but I’ve gotten lazy lately. It’s a whole lot easier to sit here than it is to go do something constructive.
