There’s a new player on the block, ExactRail.  I don’t have a whole lot of information about them, so the primary purpose of this entry is to bring your attention to this new player in the N Scale market.  They are also new to the HO market, getting out their first HO releases on February 1st.

From the pictures and prices these do appear to be highly detailed state of the art models.  Of course we’ll need a few people to get them in their hands and test to be sure.  It’s also interesting to see the choices they made in car selection.  The Vert-A-Pack is a conversation piece, a bit of railroad and automotive history not likely to be repeated.  The Hi-Cube is a fairly safe choice, any modern era modeler probably could use another 20 random Hi-Cubes.  The Trinity grain hopper is a bit of an odd choice to me.  While I’m not a grain expert, my feeling is there is no shortage of grain hoppers in N Scale, and I don’t see that many modelers having fleets of grain cars.  Maybe I just live in the wrong part of the country.

The cars are not the most interesting aspect of this new venture.  The most interesting thing to me is they are starting off with direct sales.  This probably has a lot to do with them being a new player and having to set up a distribution channel; but it also may provide an interesting glimpse into the future.  After all, as brick and mortar shops disappear and modelers to turn online stores, why go to a middle-man when you can go to the manufacturer directly?  It isn’t that simple of course, shipping costs can be a significant part of the purchase price, and the economics are quite different if you have to buy from 5 different places to get what you want.  There is also the customer service aspect of explaining things to the customer, and helping the customer find the right job; some of the middle men have made a career out of this and it will be tough for the manufacturers to keep up.

I do have one small rant for the ExactRail guys: Be more descriptive!

I don’t know if this is just an N Scale thing, or across all scales but we obsess over which trucks, wheels and couplers are installed, and are they body mounted or not.  If you’re going to launch a new product somewhere there should be a blurb at least as long as this post describing the features of the car, the history of the prototype, and other details.  It’s not just ExactRail that short changes us on this information, many other manufacturers do the same thing.  I just don’t get it.  Being verbose is a good thing when describing a product, and far too many err on the side of only providing the most basic information.  You would think after months or years of research and design that someone in the company would want to show off all that knowledge!

Anyway, watch ExactRail.  New products stand a good chance of moving N Scale forward, and that’s always a good thing!