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I was a little surprised to see how expensive some of the Bowser kits had become. Bowser has a lot of history to the company. I believe the company has been sold at least once. Many of the steam locomotive kits are not of Bowser heritage. John A. English Company of Yardley, PA built a lot of Pennsy prototype steam loco kits in the early 50's. It appears that Bowser has resurrected these engines in their inventory. Also I find Varney steam locos now selling under the Bowser name. I'm pretty sure the Pennsy 0-4-0 is a English model, and I'm sure the Casey Jones is from Varney. The USRA design engines look very suspiciously like the old English 2-8-2 and 4-6-2 engines and I suspect that these locos have also been resurrected from old English dies. So there are a few engines in the line that don't share common designs in valve gear or even boiler castings and are not truly original Bowser products. I just read where Bowser purchased the Stewart Products line of diesels. Really nice models with accurate body details. I believe it's great that Bowser can keep alive the heritage and models of these early builders. While the dies and various components needed to manufacture the models have been paid off decades ago the costs in manpower to keep the models in production must be substantial.
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