Bowser E-mail

[River Run]

I got this e-mail from Lee English President of Bowser today:

Just a little note to all our customers,

Bowser has discontinued HO steam locos, turntables, Standard gauge and O gauge replacement wheel production.


We will continue to make our HO diesel locomotives, HO freight car, N freight cars, HO trolleys, Cal Scale, Selley and Cary detail parts


We have plans for many new products but, they do not include any steam locos in any scale.


Steam loco parts are still available but when our supply is exhausted I do not plan to restock.

Thank You for all your interest over the years.


Lee English, President
Bowser Mfg.

 

[jbaakko]

Guess that means I better buy that PRR E-6 Atlantic I wanted right now! Wonder what the motivation is here? Are there many companies still making steam? Not that many I can remember off hand, and most are making large steam, save for a few small units from Roundhouse...

 

[Espeefan]

Lack of demand. Nobody (or not enough bodies) wants to build steam engine kits anymore. the bowser kits are nice, but require some skill. They aren't exactly "shake the box"!

 

[kbkchooch]

I got the same email passed onto me from a friend. I've got an old Penn Line (pre-Bowser) Atlantic that runs like a charm. I never did get the superdetail kit for it, guess I better now! I've built other kits over the years, the most time consuming was the M1A with the superdetail kit.
I think alot of it is the fact that by todays standards, the kits are crude, and you can almost buy an RTR plastic steamer that runs better and looks better for less money. Just like with cars, cheap imports kill the home market.

 

[pmeyer]

Dieselization all over again.Paul

 

[UP2CSX]

Bowser steam engines are hard to assemble and their detailing is crude. The mechanism runs fine but installing a DCC decoder is not an easy task. In addition to the whole question of kit vs RTR, I suspect Bowser was faced with the problem of retooling for both better detail and maing the engines DCC ready. Given the market domination by Athearn and Bachmann, I just don't think it would have been worth the investment, especially in this economy. The turntables were always slow sellers and I imagine standard gauge and O Scale replacement wheels were even worse sellers.

 

[blownoutcylinder]

I did not find the Bowser kits hard to put together---but then again I model in N scale---which is fiddlier by far---

 

[kbkchooch]

Bowser steam engines are hard to assemble and their detailing is crude. The mechanism runs fine but installing a DCC decoder is not an easy task. In addition to the whole question of kit vs RTR, I suspect Bowser was faced with the problem of retooling for both better detail and maing the engines DCC ready. Given the market domination by Athearn and Bachmann, I just don't think it would have been worth the investment, especially in this economy. The turntables were always slow sellers and I imagine standard gauge and O Scale replacement wheels were even worse sellers.

Jim, possibly unbeknownts to you (and others) is that Bowser redid the Pittman motors a few years back to make them DCC compatible. All they did was to take the old brush holder plate and make it in a non-conductive material. With 2 wires leads coming from it DCC was just as easy as any steamer with a can motor. I put one of their re-power kits in a Bachmann GS4 with that motor and it runs great!
Yes, their kits tested your skills, but they wern't all bad! Once done, they were durable strong engines that ran forever. With the failure rate I'm starting to see with my Spectrum steamers, I'm starting to rethink if I'm going to banish all the plastic steam to excursion service only, and with diesel backups!

 

[UP2CSX]

Karl, I did not know they redid the Pittman motor. I know the older version was a real pain to convert to DCC. I'm kind of surprised Bowser didn't make a bigger deal out of advertising this (or maybe I just missed it) since it was one of the things that made me not want to buy a Bowser steam engine. After putting together about 20 Bowser engines over the years, including back in the days when you had to rivet the connecting rods together and quarter the drivers, I got better at building them but I still never liked the sloppy fit and finish of the parts. I haven't built one in about 20 years so maybe they got better but I was kind of turned off by them. The level of detail was always lousy and it took a lot of work (and money) to bring them up to any kind of modern standards. They were strong as horses once you got them running right and were always good pullers. I've got two Spectrum steam engines and haven't had any problems so far and they sure look beter than any Bowser engine I ever built.