Walthers' new name train


Espeefan

Well-Known Member
Drum roll please!!...and it's...another Hiawatha. (cue extended fart sound of air leaving the balloon). I'm sort of underwhelmed. Not to disrespect the Milwaukee Road guys out there but really? All of those cars have been done before. This is a re-release of existing stuff with a price bump. $85.00 for the cars, $95 for the dome, and $550 for the locos which are an FP-7 and F-7B, and are new for Walthers (in case you missed the Genesis offering some years back). I was hoping for a little more imagination, and maybe something, oh I don't know, actually new? I guess it's my turn to be a curmudgeon! I generally don't bash manufacturers. It's counterproductive, but new is new and re-runs are re-runs. I'd like to see them do something for that very large market segment they've ignored. Rant complete! ;)
 
You'll probably find they've done the same upgrades to the coaches as they did to the heritage UP's. Factory installed grabs and lighting, frames/gaskets on the windows and Priesser passengers on limited editions.
 
It's all speculation of course, but this kind of tells me they had not much of a tooling budget this year, and they blew that on the FP-7. I could be full of beans of course. I just really would have liked to see something new. Know what I'd buy? A Sunset Limited. There's also a pretty good market for Southeastern trains that they seem to be ignoring, and they were sticking to trains pulled by their E unit until this one. Being a passenger train modeler is hard these days if you are trying to model accurately.
 
I only model the Milwaukee Road peripherally (I'm a Burlington Zephyr man, having ridden the original Pioneer Zephyr and others as a kid!). Somewhere, I picked up an HO observation model, a full-length dome model (which I rode on a couple of times in high school), a few other cars, and a Proto2000 E6. I have little doubt that the FP-7/F7B is probably more authentic for the Hiawatha, but at those prices, I will definitely PASS! What would be nice to see would be a Denver or Texas Zephyr, pulled by an E-5 (that's an E-6 with corregated skirting and a slightly different engineroom window pattern that either an E-6 or E-7. But NOT AT THOSE PRICES! :rolleyes:
 
I am a big fan of the Milwaukee Road and that is one good looking train but thankfully, it is for the Twin Cities and not the Olympian which cme through Montana, plus it would have been electrified. Looks like I'll be saving over a thousand bucks.
 



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