Industrial Rail at Costco?

[Anonymous]

Some months ago a string was going around that Costco may be offering the O-27 Industrial Rail line again. Has anybody heard any updates? I still enjoy collecting them and am up to 45 pieces, many with multiple numbers.

[Buckeye Riveter]

My Industrial Rail Cars are terrific. Good quality at a great price.

But I have question: What is a Costco? A web site? or a store? I've never heard of them in Ohio.[%-)][%-)][%-)][%-)][%-)]

[BigSteam224]

Costco is a nationwide warehouse club, similar to Sam's Club. Their website (www.costco.com) shows 4 locations in Ohio. I don't know about the trains as I have not seen any in our local store, but the website doesn't list a train set. -- At least on a quick search for "train".

[jonadel]

Buckeye,

Costco is on the same idea as Sam's Club, a little smaller but with slightly higher quality merchandise. It requires a yearly membership and the folks that use it seem to really like it, we have a Costco just a short distance from us and I'm going to take a look at it. When our boys were in college we used Sam's Club a lot but after they were through we rarely used our membership and eventually dropped it. Now some of our best friends (also empty nesters) are singing the praises of Costco, maybe tomorrow I'll check it out.

Jon

[Buckeye Riveter]

Obviously, Buckeye Land is not a target market for Costco. Their web page gave me this little bit of information:

We’re sorry, but we cannot locate any warehouse that falls within the area you have selected. Please review your selections and try again.

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[spankybird]

Buckeye, we have one here in the greater Cleveland area, about 10 miles from my house.

[Buckeye Riveter]

Tom, you probably have a Costco because they sell snow shovels. [:D] I have never seen or heard of one in Central Ohio.

[brianel027]

Geroge, I mentioned Industrial Rail on one of the other topics: maybe the Mike interview or one of the legal brew-ha-ha threads.

It appears that Horizon now has the Industrial Rail tooling, according to Allan Miller and some others. I too had heard the Costco rumor, as well as rumors that Hobbico would introduce some new cars.

I agree that Industrial Rail cars (despite a few flaws, like with small coupler openings) were the nicest cars intorduced for the so-called 027 market in a long time. Quality cars, good road names selection - including (gasp!) some modern current roads, changing car numbers and at a very decent price.

I only wi***hat when UMD had initially tooled the box car that they had gone with a slightly more modern looking box car instead of repeating every one else and everything that has been offered. An outside braced type of car with no roof walk and shortened side and end ladders... oh well. Even MTH when the introduced the Rugged Rails box car could have done something more modern instead of copying the UMD car.

There certainly is a glut of product to some degree on today's train market. But I still think, given the history of Industrial Rail under UMD that there is still room for some of these cars, especially if they were introduced in modern roads that no one else is doing in this size of train car: Norfolk Southern, Conrail, CSX, Candian National America, Canadian Pacific Railway, BNSF, Wisconson Central etc. and continued using prototype car numbers and then changing the numbers on subsequent runs.

Of course part of the previous success of Industrial Rail (in additional to quality cars for the 027 segment of the market) was no doubt due to UMD was a distributor as well as the maker of the cars: gave them good distribution as well as attractive prices. Whether someone else could continue in that direction, we'll have to wait and see.

[Anonymous]

There are Costcos here in Saskatchewan. I'm not a member, but perhaps I should become one. I've never been to one, but from what I've heard about Costco, it's a place where you buy things in bulk like food, say a case of 50 jars of peanut butter. Perhaps there's more to the place then I've been lead to believe, however. George, in your post you say that Costco may be offering them "again". Did they offer them before? Would they be at discounted prices?

[IRONROOSTER]

I belong to Costco here in No. Virginia. Trains are seasonal items carried between about September and Christmas. I have only ever seen sets. Usually there is one set carried each year, recently that has been an HO set, usually Bachmann. For a couple of years they carried Bachmann Big Hauler sets. Lately they have also had a On30 Christmas train set in with the Christmas decorations. I have never seen them carry individual cars, engines, etc. I don't think all store carry the same products as there seems to be some variation - but not much.

Costco's philosophy is to carry a few types of popular products of well known brands and bulk only for food and other commodity type products. Thus you'll see 3lb cans of Peter Pan Peanut Butter and no other, or it might be Jif, or some other national brand. Hamburger meat will be in 5lb packs. Sodas are sold by the case. You usually see only one or two models of washing machines. A very few products like TV's on the other hand might have 10 - 15 models to chose from.

I would expect that IF they have O gauge trains, it will one set from Lionel, MTH, or KLine. Of course the discount is usually pretty good.

Enjoy
Paul

[Anonymous]

I have quite a few I-R cars and would not mind selling for a fair price. I've been upgrading to MTH Premier series.