N Scale Supply has a notice on their site about one of MT's state series cars having a misprint or a mis-spelled word on it (It has "Bismarck" spelled wrong). See it here... http://www.nscalesupply.com/MTL/MTL-StateClub.html Now, I am not a collector and typically do not go for any type of collector car or series that is not based on a prototype. Beyond a basic understanding, I really have no sense of what makes something more or less valuable from a collector's point of view. The aforementioned notice almost seems to make this out to be a good thing. Does this make the car even more special or collectible? Can someone help shed some light on this, perhaps from an actual collector's point of view? Thanks! Russ
In the case of the "state" series, I'd say that the misspelling of "Bismarck" is meaningless, these cars will never be rerun, as all the North Dakota cars carry the same error. I got one "error" car once, a Transcontinental Oil tankcar that had the red printing on both sides but the black printing on only one side. The dealer offered to take it back but I put it on his monthly auction and got over twice what I paid for it. But, this was a printing error confined I would imagine to only a few cars, not the whole run. Now, if you had a car with "Bismarck" spelled right, that would be valuable! The "Main", "Maine" Central dated from back before Kadee (pre Micro-Trains) adopted monthly runs. Same with the "feet" on the goose.
This can be a "gray area" in the state car line. Several different events can come into play. 1) Did MTL go ahead and release all of the cars with this misspelling? 2) Did MTL recall the misspelled cars and will re-release cars with the correct spelling? 3) Were these cars supposed to be released at all? Or did they get by Quality Control at MTL? MTL very seldom releases any cars with misspelled words on their cars, so if this cars is a misprint it could be worth some extra money to serious collector. The thing is that MTL produces a certain number of any given car(called a run) and after this run is over, will not rerun this same car without making some change in the car. Usually changing the car road number or such. I don't know how many cars are in any given run, but suppose MTL makes 3,000 New York Central 50ft boxcars. On 2,990 of the cars everything is right, nothing wrong with the cars, painted and printed the way they were meant to be by MTL. On those 10 other cars, somebody goofed up and the cars read "New Central York". Nobody at the MTL Quality Control catches this mistake and all 3,000 cars on the run are released. You buy the car and later notice that it is not printed right. You have one of the 10 misprints out there. If you paid $15.00 for it, I would guess it would be worth at least $30.00-$50.00. It all depends on how many error cars were released, sometimes only one or two in a whole run of cars. Sometimes there are cars released by MTL by accident that were NEVER supposed to be release at all. This event doesn't happen very much at all now, but has happened in the past, mostly pre-MTL and under the KADEE brand. This is only a couple of ideas about the in & outs of KADEE/MTL error/misprint cars. Most real misprints can be worth some serious money to a KADEE/MTL car collector.
I concur with Thirdrail & Porkpine52. More than likely the entire run was done with the misspelled word. If there are others printed with the correct spelling; then, that could mean that one of them may be rare. I kind-of doubt it though on these cars. In the early days of Micro-Trains ("Kadee" pre 1990), it was common for a mistake to be made and corrected during the 'run'; therefore, some misprint cars were shipped together with the correct cars. But, this also slowed the production and usually led to fewer cars of both kinds to be made. These created a certain 'hype' which seems to continue today with virtually every release. Collector/Investors looking for the 'short run' or 'short print' cars which could command a premium in the future. It seems to me that now-a-days these accidental 'short prints' due to errors would be less prevalent because of the advances in computer graphics employed in most manufacturing. Yet, it happened in this case, apparently because no-one knew the correct spelling of the capitol of North Dakota. Now... they could have caught the mistake and corrected it... but... until we see cars with the correct spelling we won't know for sure.
I was weathering my cars one day, and had gotten to an MT SP 50 footer. Happily weathered the one side, then flipped it around. Argh! The SP in the logo was missing on that side, misprint! Oh well.
SMART MARKETING??????? Maybe it is called smart marketing,You see you have a 4 year college degree and are a Graphic artist,and nobody checks your work!!!you release the run of 1000 cars "mispelled" all at your dealers,no recall just sell them and now you have a real big buzz everyone wants that Bismark car, How many are out there?? now you can make the proper spelling car you could make a 1000 run and now who ever has the mispelled car has to have Proper spelled one TOO.. What excitement they created in the state series with only 9 more cars to go...Maybe they will be worth something,maybe I should by 5 of them?...sometimes you have to shake things up to keep the collectors market strong. Some mistakes are intentional and some are well..truely just mistakes...
Is it possible "Bismark" is an accepted spelling? See, for instance: www.timezonesforpcs.com/locations/bismark_north_dakota_united_states.html www.americanhomeguides.com/apps/data/go/ahg/city/North_Dakota/ND-/Bismark.html www.northdakotabankruptcy.com/court.html www.uscitydirectories.com/nd/bismark.htm And there are more. You have to enter Bismark -Bismarck in order for Google to cooperate. Ben
It depends on the market. Between Trainboard and the Atlas board postings, a surge in demand has been made. We are not talking about Tiffany lamps, here.
Not in my book and I suspect not in a lot of others. The only thing it does is increase my awareness of the continued growing issue of Quality Control in the industry. More specific the the lack of same. If I was into the collector end of things, having a car that was correct in every aspect of its printing, coloring, and alignment of the lettering would be more valuable to me. A few years ago I happened to be inspecting a newspaper plant at the time that printing for the next day was just getting fired up. They would run off a few copies then stop and the crew would examine every page for alignment, color, and correctness. Then they would do adjustments and run it again if not right. Over in the graphic layout the same thing was going on, spell checking, content, and article size to fit the available space. They were doing something that the folks at the model producing end should be doing and this effort was going into a .25 cent a copy newspaper not a $20 caboose or a $125 locomotive. How much trouble is it to run a few and then check that the production is right before continuing? How much trouble for the graphic artist that wrote the program to check layout and spelling before sending it to the printing line? Nothing is more frustrating than to see that Atlas has some GN cabeese out on the LHS shelf, purchase one and get it home to finally notice that the danged car numbers on one end are printed out of position right across the carside end grab iron. Or the LL E-7 in GN livery that has the wrong size roadname on the side. Or the newer runs of MicroScale decals that are poorly printed, either alignment or fuzzy lettering, that really become evident when applied to the side of a car or loco. Or how about the MT trucks with couplers sets recently acquired that have issues with flash, and poor quality pins. Then there are the top of the line resin kits, carrying a hefty price tag, that upon removal of the LHS shelf and closely examined, reveal more defects and pinholes than a strainer in my kitchen. Or the steamer released a few years back with no obvious way to get any water in the tender and bragged up about all the fine details. OOOPS. So collector value to me? Don't think so. Just another example of what is rolling off the assembly lines somewhere in East Ababa by people who haven't the foggiest idea of where North Dakota is, much less the capital of same, or how to spell it, or could tell North Dakota from South Dakota on a map of the States. Marketed by folks whose vision is obscured by $$ signs, and who figure that somebody will plunk down the inflated price for same item, in enough quantities to allow them to afford a new Beamer this year. Unfortunately they are dead right in that. I hold my head in lofty disdain everytime I walk past one of those tables filled with those rare collectables, sitting there all smudged, fingerprinted and grime covered with who knows what. Heck even the Factory Air has long since turned stale and leaked out! Now these will be collectables some day. Both are one of a kind in the N scale world, hand crafted each, with about 100 hours tied up in both and details everywhere. Not some pieces of mass produced overpriced hunks of plastic with poor detail quality. :huh: :confused2: Well enough of my Sunday Morning sermon and soap box rant on the subject of collectables.
Flash You must have missed the January, 1904 special run. The paint job was exceptional but the couplers were not up to today's standards.
Wherever it is made and whoever is actually manufacturing the items is doing it off blueprints, drawings, and pictures made by the company that puts its name on the product, whether it is MT, Atlas, MP, Bachmann or LL. The QC issues are here, not at the point of origin. The spelling error is an obvious one that could have been easily corrected before production. The engineer that designed the MP 4-4-0 first run with the wire problem should not be hung out to dry unless he was the one who approved the test batch of 10-20 that should have been thoroughly tested before the full run was produced. If "we" encountered a problem with broken wires consistently after 15 minutes of running, someone must have just run the test engines a few times around the test track and gave the nod to produce. Was it just Kato or Bachmann snap track or were tracks set up with Code 80 or 55? Were there any turnouts. were there 9 3/4" radius curves going in BOTH directions? Were they tested "there" or here and by whom? It is pretty frustrating for me, personally, that one week after I purchased two MP Moguls that the company announced that the second run would have improved tender pickup and a retrofit kit would be available to better the same "problem". This was done after they read the reports here and at the Atlas board. Why on earth did they release the engine if it had not been thoroughly tested and passed? The interesting thing about that single issue is that MP took the reports from a very few people as the gospel and have embarked on a fix. I had only one hangup point on my layout with the Mogul and you know something, after breaking the two engines in for about 12 hours each and a soldering job at the rail joiners at the hangup point, they run just fine over some of the worst trackwork ever laid. Cleaning the track helped, as well. QC issue at my house, too.
Well... this is why I complain about so many items being released without being properly tested or check for acuracy. But... lots of people are willing to accept and pay for mediocre products... and complain about the ones 'blowing the whistle' on manufacturers that don't do the job right. Then we have manufacturers that don't care about the mediocre products they produce and others (like MTL) that do it on purpose to create a market for collectors that want products with errors. So... I'm guessing there are a lot of happy people with over-priced junk either to run or collect. Did I step on enough toes yet???
