RTR? I just realized...

[Green_Elite_Cab]

I remember the title of a clinic at an NMRA event: "Ready to Run it Ain't". The fact is that to do any sort of justice to a ready-to-run car, you need to look at minimum improvements like painting unpainted underframe and truck sideframes and bare metal wheels, replacing plastic couplers, replacing the Athearn clip-on coupler pockets where applicable with Kadee boxes screwed in place, and then paint improvements and weathering. Plus bringing it to NMRA weight. I picked up a Walthers Trainline car over the holidays because I liked the paint scheme, but when I got it home I discovered the $15 car had plastic couplers and trucks that snapped onto the bolsters. Plus the usual issues with the bare plastic parts that needed paint. At least it had metal wheels, which are getting to be pretty universal with RTR. So in a lot of cases, you have to turn an RTR car back into a kit to bring it up to standards and then reassemble it. So I don't make too much distinction between kit as in Athearn bluebox or Accurail and RTR -- they're about the same time and effort. Resin or craftsman wood, of course, are very different.

To be fair, Walthers "Trainline" are the very basic low-level Walthers equipment, and if its an older model, it won't have all the "upgrades". for ~$5 more you can get a Walthers Mainline car with metal wheels, metal couplers (at the right height) inside of screw-in coupler pockets, trucks screwed into the frame, and the proper weight. In particular metal couplers are becoming standard on all very recent Walthers cars.

Indeed, the only flaws with some of these cars is that they are using some old tooling (as in the case of the Evans 50' boxcar / X72 types). The car in functional without any modifications.

Besides, there are many levels of RTR cars out there, and even if they do require some extra work, they can run as soon as they're out of the box 99% of the time, and don't require any additional parts (kadee couplers, metal wheels, etc.) 90% of the time when we're talking about "new" stock. Most of the time, the kind of improvements you mention can be saved for a rainy day, and don't require major surgery to complete.

For stuff like weathering, it doesn't really matter if the car is RTR or a kit, it will take time to do.

Older RTR is a different story, but for the most part you can rely on an RTR Atlas or Walthers car.

Again, when time and resources are at a minimum, RTR makes more sense then buying the equivalent kits, since you'll never be able to build them all up.