03-11-2009, 01:23 PM
It would appear from the email posted to the thread on building a Bowser Mikado on the ho forum that Bowser is not simply discontinuing the steam locomotive kits, they are dropping all steam locomotives and detail parts completely. If it was any other company except English, we might have a hope of some of the tooling being sold to another manufacturer, but English seems to keep their tooling in case there is a demand in the future for the products, but once out of production, there is little hope of it coming back. Even if they don't put steam engines back into production, I would like to see the Cal Scale line of steam engine detail parts continued, but I fear that this may be only the first of many detail parts manufacturers either discontinuing production of the detail parts or going out of business completely. I'm afraid "model railroading" is rapidly moving to "layout construction" with r-t-r equipment rather than model building.