Hello Bachmann,
Please send this to the chain of command for a product suggestions: Thank you.
Now that you have a very good heavy Mountain chassis may I suggest you utilize it to creat a New York Central Mohawk, which has never been done in N scale in plastic. All you would need to do is manufacturer the boiler, cab, tender to get there, along with the appropiate details like the lead and trailing trucks. In looking at this again, the Mohawk had 69 inch drivers, I believe your mountain has 63" maybe this would be the best idea. but then again who knows? Maybe a survey would answer that.
Suggestion number 2:
There is a good market for New York Central hudsons (all versions) The concor units are long in tooth, poorly running (most of them anyway) and poor representations of the prototype. You could do the Chassies, Make all variations of wheel types, Cast three different boilers/cabs, the oriiginal non streamlined version, the bullet nose hudson, and the Empire state express. Additionally you could also make the pt4 tender which was used on many of the New York Central engines as well as some other railroads.
Note: there is a serious demand for these, as one could observe on ebay,they don't last long and command premium prices.
Another suggestion: The Niagra, it hasn't been done in plastic either, and since it used the PT4 tender, you would already have the tooling done (as per the NYC hudson used it also. be aware that the Central switched tenders on various units during their lifetimes. This would maximize you use of the tooling, and since they are great sellers yield a bigger profit than
just producing a single prototype.
Another suggestion: and although I am not a Pennsy modeler, here is an opportuniity to jump on an opportunity. Kato is coming out with Pennsy passenger cars, for the GG1 many of which were once pulled by the Pennsy
K4 Pacifics. If you make the Pacifics, the passenger cars will already be available to the market place. Its nice that the GG1 is going to be made, but my concern is how many Pennsy modelers are going to buy them, because they Require the overhead wiring to attain any semblance of realism. The K4 will fix that, in that the catenary will not be required. Given the choice of the two, if I was a Pennsy modeler, not having to build catenary and using the K4 instead would be a viable alternative.
Your use of metal boilers with added details are what was needed in N scale, good show keep up the good work. and please, do send the above information to the teams responsable for the decision making processes.
Robert
WILCO!
the Bach-man
Here's another suggestion - offer the USRA Heavy Mountain with the CORRECT USRA tender. Will builder's photos help?