Our First Container Shipment of Cars Arriving

North American Railcar is pleased to announce the arrival of our next product release at Pacific Western Rail Systems in Surrey, British Columbia. This marks our second release and builds on the industry leading features of our first release, the Hawker Siddeley 4 bay cylindrical hopper. Our commitment is to produce the most prototypically accurate models possible at a competitive price: accuracy and detail, in scale.

While our first product release was of a single version of this car in the distinctive 2008 Saskatchewan Grain Car Corporation scheme, this release includes many of the other “Heritage” schemes and structural versions of this car owned and operated by a variety of railroads and private operators. In prototype operations, there are a total of 15 variations of this hopper currently in service, including cars for both potash service and grain service. Though they initially were primarily seen in Canada, they now travel the rails of North American from Canada to Mexico, with operations in many parts of the United States.

When this release was announced more than two years ago, we could not have envisioned the events that would lead to its eventual arrival. We had recently brought to market our first release of the Hawker Siddeley 4 bay cylindrical hoppers with an overwhelmingly positive response from both HO & N Scale modelers. We had a efficient working relationship with our manufacturing partner in China and were confident of a smooth second product release.

As is common practice among the major manufacturers, we had been working with a specialized manufacturer, Sanda Kan, in China to facilitate the production and assembly of our products. This type of arrangement allows for efficient assembly and high quality as the manufacturer specializes in the production of this type of product. Shortly after we announced this release, Sanda Kan was acquired by a large international toy manufacturer. Initially, all seemed to proceed smoothly. Then 18 months ago Sanda Kan cancelled all future work for most of their customers due to management and transition problems from their acquisition. When this occurred, they had reduced the number of manufacturers they would work with from approximately 200 to 20.

At the point, Sanda Kan promised its existing customers, including North American Railcar, that they would complete all work in progress. At this point, we had already been working diligently to provide all the relevant information necessary for the 10 different paint schemes and all variations of the car announced in this release to Sanda Kan to enable them to produce accurate models.  This involved many hours of research both in reviewing technical details of the car variations and in researching the proper paint colors, fonts and graphics of each scheme. With our commitment to accuracy and detail in scale, we had decided to produce the tooling necessary to make all 15 variations of the car in HO Scale and two highly detailed versions in N Scale to provide the most prototypically accurate model possible both for this release, and future releases.

During this time, we received test samples of the cars and art work for the different schemes. We had regular discussions with Sanda Kan regarding the corrections that were required for each model. By December 2010, we locked down all the colors and shades for the 10 paint schemes, as well as the car configurations. Following the 3 week Chinese New Year vacation in late January and early February, we were asked to travel to Hong Kong and China to visually inspect the shipment in March of 2011.  After carefully inspecting samples of the 12,000 cars (6,000 HO Scale and 6,000 N Scale), we rejected the entire production run.

Sanda Kan had not correctly implemented the changes we had requested after reviewing both previous car sample and art work samples. One of the major variation on these cars is the grain outlet gates. There are two major types; Toggle Lock and Spiral Cog.  Both the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National assigned Saskatchewan Grain Car Corporation cars in our first release had Toggle Lock gates.  However many of the prototype “Heritage” cars are equipped with the Spiral Cog gate. There were problems with the Spiral Cog gates on the first set of samples we received. This was a major problem, but not the only one as there were several other errors in both car structures and paint schemes. Essentially, none of the cars were at the level of quality we had contracted for or that we had seen on our previous run of the green Saskatchewan cars.  Our expectation was that the our second release should meet or exceed the quality of our first release.

At this point, Sanda Kan suggested that we “take the cars as is” at a discounted price because, “it might take a long time to redo them". North American Railcar is not interested in releasing inaccurate, poorly made generics products that do not properly represent the prototype and immediately rejected this proposal, even though it would mean a significant delay in releasing the product.

Since April 2011, revised samples have been coming and going from China as we review and correct the errors until the cars were fully in compliance with the specifications we originally set. The final corrections were made and approved by North American Railcar in July of this year, and production and final assembly took place over the next few months. Shipment occurred in the second half of October, and North American Railcar took delivery of our cars on Wednesday, November 2, 2011, at the Pacific Western Rail Systems warehouse and corporate headquarters in Surrey, British Columbia.

Once the cars were inspected, we began to process orders and have already begun shipping existing reservations  for these cars. There are only 50 copies of each road number for each scheme in both HO & N Scale. The brown CN Roman & Block lettered cars with the url address (11-10002003 & 11-10002004 below) only have 30 copies of each road number, so they are even more limited.

Reservations of some of the schemes have been very heavy and there are only limited supplies still available. These road numbers will never be repeated, so modelers interested in these cars should order now.

Looking forward, North American Railcar would like to assure our customers that we were just as displeased with the delays in this release as they were. The delays not only delayed this project, but also impacted other projects in the planning and development stage. This is unacceptable both to North American Railcar and to our customers. As a result, we made the decision to cease any future product production and development with Sanda Kan.

This was our decision, as we own the tooling for our cars, so we are not starting over from scratch. North American Railcar has already begun working with a new company, Yongde Metals Production, who have been producing model railroading products for almost two decades. One of the prime reasons for our decsion to go with Yongde was the fact that many of the best engineers from Sanda Kan had begun working at Yondge in January 2010. They have already proven to be more quality oriented, responsive to our requirements and time sensitive.

Our first release with our new production partner will be the Canadian National Rotary Coal Gondolas announced in July 2011 at the National Model Railroad Association convention in Sacramento, California. Below are pictures of the initial pre-production N Scale samples of the first four versions we intend to produce in both HO & N Scale.

All four versions of the Rotary Coal Gondola cars placed side by side

Underbody view of all four versions showing underbody and brake rigging detail

The prototypes were each built by different companies and while the same basic design, each has significant differences. To accurately produce the different versions of this car, North American Railcar has developed tooling allowing for each version to be produced. These are not a one size fits all car, they are individually tooled products designed to match the prototype.

In the coming weeks, we will be releasing a series of articles on the four variations pictured above. These articles will contain information on the features of the prototype and model, operators and typical uses of the cars. This will provide the modeler with a resource to learn more about the specific features of the individual cars, their history and the way they can each be operated to model prototypically correct rail operations in the era of the modelers choice.

These cars were used, or are used by:

• BC Rail
• BC Hydro
• Sultran
• Procor
• CN
• CP
• CSX
• Herzog
• Helm
• AMGX
• GACX
• ECXX
  

While the pictures are of test samples not ready for production, we think you will agree the level of detail and quality present indicate these will be an excellent, and accurate model of the prototypes cars. We will continue to improve the tooling for these and ensure the paint schemes for each owner operator are just as accurate as the body detailing. As we work towards production, we will continue to update you with more pictures and information.

We remain steadfastly committed to accuracy and detail in scale. North American Railcar regrets the delay in the release of our second production run of Hawker Siddeley 4 bay cylindrical hoppers, however we make no apologies for our commitment to outstanding quality. After customers inspect and operate our new cars on their layouts, we are confident they will agree these cars were worth the wait.

JMP