As near as I can tell, depending upon the leadership structure of the company, the process is often one where the president of the company, the owner, or the product manager makes the final decision. Leading up to the moment of truth, several people may actually throw projects on the table. Out of this pile will come the next round of products.
Several criteria emerge as this process goes along. Every project in any scale involves a huge financial outlay, often more money than buying a brand new house in an upscale neighborhood for cash. When you gamble that kind of money, you’d love to get a decent return. While there are no sure things, some things are more sure than others. So if you’re pining for a model based upon some obscure prototype, my advice is to not hold your breath.
This is good advice in any event, because the average product requires three years or more to complete. From the time the manufacturer arrives at the offshore factory, plans in hand, until the final products are packed into a container for shipment can take at least three years. It may take longer but rarely moves much faster. This means the model maker not only has to guess what model might be successful now, he will actually have to speculate which one will hit the jackpot three years hence.
That’s a long time to hold your breath. Model makers don’t always tell you when they decide to spec out a particular model. At that point, they don’t have plans yet, and a given model is just a fond idea. How fond? Research is the name of the game here. The original builder’s plans are nice. To that, you need to add spec sheets from various railroads, since so many cars and locos were modified by the receiving road. Paint diagrams are good, too. A surviving member of the group helps a lot, though here you must take care because preserved locomotives and cars may have parts missing or the wrong ones installed for display. Paint may be different, and this display artifact represents only one era in the prototype’s life. Sometimes, the display has been backdated from the fifties back to when it was built in the thirties. Or the twenties.
Only when the model maker is sure they have the planning resources does the project move ahead. Then comes the issue of problems to be solved. This model will have to negotiate curves far tighter than any prototype ever faced and concessions must be made. At some point, the concessions can badly compromise the model, and so the project ends there. Or it goes back for costly redesign.
Let’s take one of my favorite examples. Articulated steam locomotive models face this problem all the time. In North America, we nearly universally used the Mallet design, with the engine under the firebox fixed and the one under the smoke box allowed to swing on a hinge close to the other engine. This allowed a locomotive like a Big Boy to navigate track that would do for the 4-8-4 Northerns, even though it had twice the drivers on the Big Boy. Someplace back in the sixties, model engineers decided to employ a diesel drive system, using gear towers on each engine and letting each one swing relative to the boiler.
This, of course, challenges the prototype where the rear engine was fixed. Not only do we have the rear engine swinging, we also have the main steam pipes to the rear engine disconnected. I suspect a more Mallet-like drive system would work, though I’ve never had the chance to try such a thing in a large model. I know the soon-to-be-delivered Model Power “Mantua Classic” Logger has a fixed rear engine, and the sample I’ve seen I like very much for that reason. Intermountain’s new 4-8-8-2 Cab Forward is also said to have the firebox engine fixed as it was on the prototype, and our reviewer R. Dave Carr already has drool on his shirt. I can’t wait to do the photos and the test series.
Small wonder there are so many Geep diesel models running around in all scales. From one mold can come thirty roadnames, past and present. Model makers face many problems even here when it comes to paint and detail. Every variation of roadname leads to variations of detail parts. If you produce one-style-fits-all models, then no matter which one it is, you will probably be wrong. If you produce versions for each railroad and paint job (Santa Fe was notorious for moving appliances around on their diesels as they also changed numbers and paint jobs, just as an example), the individual cost of each model goes up. The third choice is to select a good basic model and offer detail parts to be installed by the new owner, if he’s so inclined.
Of course, with fewer and fewer fans prepared or desiring to do their own detail work, this could prove to be a deal-breaker. Fantasy paint jobs (a GP38 in Santa Fe Warbonnet/Superfleet, for instance) may appeal to folks who will buy anything so long as it’s in Warbonnet. It won’t sell to the rivet counters and may actually turn them off to your entire line.
How do you choose which model to produce? The same way you pick numbers at a roulette table. So we need to be thankful there are people out there who are crazy enough to invest (can you say “gamble”) their money so we can buy lovely models to give each other for the Holiday Season. With that thought in mind, have a very Merry Christmas celebrated with lots of trains and a very happy New Year that finds you joyously playing with your model railroad.