I am continuing to think the Illinois Central set of 10 cars would be a nice addition to my roster of passenger equipment. I am looking an BLI E6A in Illinois Central for the locomotives; possibly two E6As.
Half assed at best. While the baggage, coaches, diner and dome car are also cars found on the Alaska none of these cars remained in the configuration they were built in painted in the blue with yellow stripe... the coaches and dome cars have had their window count increased with the greater seating capacity that they received when repainted into the most recent scheme, the diner lost windows and a door, and the baggage cars, well, for one you will not find more than one on any given train and then it is a rebuilt car turned into a HEP generator car. The sleepers and observation car are completely wrong... the ARR had nothing like this. You would think that this is a no brainer for anyone who would want to put a product out on the market that would sell but for some reason Kato seems to miss the point of such an exercise... remember the discussions and flaming spears thrown because of the City locomotive were found to have too orange of an Armour Yellow? It seems that consulting people who would be in the know is something Kato just doesn't understand (lost in translation???), especially since Mr. Vlk left their employment, and even when it was done correctly modelers took Charlie too task for things they "thought" were wrong, even when they weren't (i.e.: CNJ RDCs). Without naming names I have been contacted more than once in an effort to get a model correct and I am very pleased that, when I could I was able to help. I even go so far as to put up on the N-scale Varnish website pages that would help modelers and manufacturers to gain the information needed to model a wide variety of cars, with some of both using them. I do this out of the hope of making people aware of what can be done in N-scale, which is far more than I'm willing to bet some of the readers here are aware of. The point is this: there are people out in the N-scale community who car knowledgeable, who can help a manufacturer such as Kato to do things right... take advantage of it be ye modeler or manufacturer... it will pay off in the end.
