Much as I hate to see the BB era end, the comparison between BB models and the RTR line is unfair. The RTR line has mostly new or revised tooling, the details are much finer, the paint jobs are better, the lettering is very crisp, there are the proper car end reporting marks and numbers, and they have metal wheels and knuckle coupler. Most of the ones I have bought have been correctly weighted and there's even some decent underbody detail. Even the brakewheel is the correct color. The BB kits are using tooling that's anywhere from 10 to 40 years old so that cost was paid off a long time ago. The amazing thing is not how much RTR cars cost but how much they still want for the BB kits. The relatively high price is because Athearn tried to keep some production going in America.
Athearn is really the tail end of the demise of easy to build plastic car kits. Roundhouse has been absorbed by Horizon and is all RTR. Accurail is still hanging on by the skin of their teeth and are switching more and more RTR. Tichy Train Group still makes plastic kits but they hardly fall in the same category as the Athearn BB kits and cost as much RTR kit with no couplers and no paint. Don't even get me started on some of the kits issued by Walthers, like the miserable "easy to build" Mather double deck stock cars.
The only company that is still successful with kits is Branchline and their kits, while well detailed, are not shake the box kits, and cost as much as most of the Athearn RTR line. The Yardmaster series is about as close as you can come to an Athearn BB but they are about $4 more to pay for the metal wheels and knuckle couplers. Even at that, the Yardmaster series has a fatal flaw that wil eventually kill them off. You want a transition era boxcar - no problem. You want anything else, too bad, we only make boxcars. Even Branchline is starting to make more and more RTR cars, at a pretty steep price, I might add.
If we really want to support kits, we should all be buying Intermountain and Branchline kits like crazy to let them know we still want plastic car kits. How many of us are doing so? I suspect not a lot. If you're a modern era modeler, you don't even have much of a choice, since all the container cars and other intermodal cars only come RTR. Just ask a guy like Josh Mader how many orders he gets for Branchline or Intermountain car kits compared to Athearn, Arlas, and other RTR models.
We can blame accountants, and big corporations all we want but, as Pogo said. "We have met the enemy and he is us". We are the ones who have been giving BB kits a pass while buying up gobs of beautiful RTR models in all sorts of types, roadnames, and car variations. Most of them are even pretty faithful to the prototype, a concept unknown to Uncle Irv, who cranked our engines and cars in whatever roadnames would sell and changed nothing on the kit to match the real thing. I even have an Athearn BB NKP F-7. Bob, you know how far away from any protoype that was. Model companies are simply responding to the market. We created that market, not them.
A final observation before I get off my soapbox. The one thing I've noticed in the past 10 years is the rise of really well detailed layouts. I mean city scenes that look real, roads that look real, rural scenes that look real, and mountains and sky that looks real. When I first got in the hobby, most layouts were either plywood praries or had some lichen, sawdust grass, and few terrible looking trees. Mountains looked like what they were, giant hunks of plaster with some rock molds stuck in. I was floored the first time I saw a photgraphic backdrop. My point is that, back in the days, we were so busy building kits for everything from rolling stock to structures, that we never had time to really detail a layout. I'm sure I'm different than a lot of you but what gives me real pleasure is detailing my layout and not bogged down on the workbench assembling one freight car kit or a month building a fiendishly difficult wood structure. I still like building structure kits and the occasional freight car kits. However, I bought my first ever RTR structure, the WS Municipal Building, and it is a way better looking structure than the vast majority of us, including me, could build and paint. Yes, we are entering a new era but I can't label it good or bad. It simply is what it is. Some people who really like building complex rolling stock will be left behind (although there will still be these kits available for a long time) but many others, who never had the skill to do this, will be drawn into the hobby. As long as the hobby is growing, which it is, for the first time in decades, I think we are on the right track.
All just my opimiom, take as being worth what you paid for it.
