08-13-2013, 11:57 AM
faraway Wrote:I am a frequent shopper at Trainworld http://www.trainworldonline.com. They ship with DHL Express within 48 hours to my doorstep and the customs paperwork is completed by DHL. A very nice and fast way to get stuff from the US at a reasonable price not much over the USPS shipping cost.
Their online catalog did not list the Athearn CR GP9 in the pain DC version. Only the expensive sound version was listed for all new engines. I called them and they added the plain DC version for within two days and I ordered mine. That happened some month ago.
My question is, is Trainworld is a rare exception of do you experience it more frequently to get only expensive sound versions in your local and online shops immediately from stock?
My understanding is that Trainworld operates on a different business model than most hobby shops. While they pre-order what they think will sell like other retialers, they specialize in buying up unsold production direct from the manufacturer/importer at a very low price. To be fair, M Klein does the same thing, but Trainworld focuses more on buying up and selling unsold production than M Klein.
At the same time, the importers/manufacturers have increased the ratio of DCC locomotives to DC locomotives in a given run. Blackstone and BLI have apparently stopped producing DC-only and non-sound versions altogether.
Given the changes, chances are that the quantities of importer close-outs available to Trainworld that are straight DC are not nearly what they used to be. And/or Trainworld is not having a lot of demand for DC-only of newer releases. I notice that Trainworld's ads still feature plenty of older new stock that is DC - where most of the production was DC.
On the user side, there is a lot of push in the mainstream hobby magazines and on the forums for anybody new or on the fence to leap into DCC. When was the last time you saw an article on DC wiring? Almost all the modular groups use DCC because of the ease of handling track configuration changes. Almost clubs starting a new layout are using DCC.
The DC user base is shrinking to mostly home layouts and legacy club layouts, where spending on new, high-end locomotives is predictably less than for modular groups and clubs with new layouts. And plenty of newer home layouts have switched to DCC, too.
Fred W
Still DC at home, DCC at the club. But the club is causing me to switch to DCC at home.