Model Railroading > Rapido Trains and L&N HO Sleepers

I just want to put in a word of encouragement for any HO scale L&N modelers about the Rapido Trains L&N Pine Series 6-4-6 sleepers. I am not connected with Rapido in anyway but would really like to see this product produced and hope that they can receive enough pre-orders to warrant the production of this really fine line of passenger cars in the L&N Pine series road name. If you are a fan of L&N and a fan of passenger train equipment please consider ordering a few of these cars. It may be the only opportunity to get the L&N road name on these 6-4-6 sleeps in a Rapido Product. Again, I have no interest in Rapido Trains and my only interest is in trying get enough of these cars in pre-order so that they will be produced. The L&N had 22 of these cars in service, the most of any North American post WWII road.

COFLZephyr Wrote:
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> I just want to put in a word of encouragement for
> any HO scale L&N modelers about the Rapido Trains
> L&N Pine Series 6-4-6 sleepers. I am not connected
> with Rapido in anyway but would really like to see
> this product produced and hope that they can
> receive enough pre-orders to warrant the
> production of this really fine line of passenger
> cars in the L&N Pine series road name. If you are
> a fan of L&N and a fan of passenger train
> equipment please consider ordering a few of these
> cars. It may be the only opportunity to get the
> L&N road name on these 6-4-6 sleeps in a Rapido
> Product. Again, I have no interest in Rapido
> Trains and my only interest is in trying get
> enough of these cars in pre-order so that they
> will be produced. The L&N had 22 of these cars in
> service, the most of any North American post WWII
> road.


It's kinda strange that Rapido chose to do these cars in NC&StL, but not in L&N.

http://www.rapidotrains.com/schemes_ho/ln.html

They are ready do them in L&N but as of yet not enough pre-orders for them to actually proceed. Hence my posting. This is off the latest email update I received last night.

Speaking of which - Jason and I are once again confused! When we announced the new 6-4-6 sleepers L&N modelers emailed us by the dozen asking us to bring out the L&N version of this car. With such vocal support we decided to add the L&N cars to the line-up. Well... Guess what? The C&EI and NC&StL cars are each far outselling L&N. In fact, we have sold three times as many C&EI and NC&StL cars as L&N! C&EI and NC&StL had seven "Pine" Sleepers between them, and L&N had 22 in service. L&N modelers bombarded us with requests but from what we have seen so far, in the end it seems that very few have actually ordered them. Given the current level of pre-orders, we may actually have to cancel L&N, the single biggest owner of the post-war 6-4-6 sleeper in North America and the one most asked for in our email in-boxes. We give up trying to predict this stuff.

So, L&N modelers: please, if you're interested in these gorgeous Pine Sleeper models make sure that you get your pre-orders in today. Unless significant additional orders come in we will have to cancel the L&N altogether.

To give you some hard numbers...

The advance orders for L&N "Pine" sleepers are well under 200. That's it. We were very surprised by this, but Bill Henry pointed out the other day that our 10-5 looks quite similar to the Pines and we did release it as a stand-in for the Pines back in 2007. It's possible that it's close enough for most L&N guys and they don't need the correct 6-4-6 car (well, 97% correct - it's missing a little window at the end). Maybe we've been hoisted by our own petard in that people are so happy with the foobie that they don't want the accurate car! :-)

We need closer to 300 ordered to do a paint scheme. We're behind schedule at the factory so we've got a couple more months to build up orders for these. The LRC coach production is taking three times as long as planned and this is throwing everything back a few months. We've had all sorts of issues with the LRCs from extremely complex pad printing to real rubber diaphragms that have a 35% reject rate because they are so thin!

These are among all the wonderful, daily headaches that you face as a model train manufacturer...

-Jason

I am not certain of this but I think the only remaining in service car of the L&N Pine series is the Plantation Pine, now the Colorado Pine, a PV operated out of Denver, CO. It appears that the color of the Colorado Pine is very close to the original L&N colors as is the script style lettering. Would be really nice to see enough cars ordered and to have Rapido add the "Plantation Pine" to the list of car names (or replace one of the others). Here is link to the Colorado Pine (ex Plantation Pine) website.

http://www.cozx.com/