Did anybody buy them off?
Not that I've heard. But I still see kits at train shows, if you're looking for some.
Good luck
Paul
The tooling may have been scrapped.
Dennis Blank Jr.
CEO,COO,CFO,CMO,Bossman,Slavedriver,Engineer,Trackforeman,Grunt. Birdsboro & Reading Railroad
dinwitty Did anybody buy them off?
This question should probably be directed to the Bowser company instead of asking here.
I doubt that there would be a market for steam locomotive kits today, with all the offerings of assembled models from the likes of Bachmann and Broadway Limited.
I have a Bowser 2-10-2 locomotive kit that I purchased 15 or so years ago and will probably never get around to assembling it.
rdgk1se3019 The tooling may have been scrapped.
I kinda doubt that, but I also can't imagine anyone buying the tooling, either. I saw Bower's steam loco production area once, and it's a pretty labor intensive process. Even if they got the tooling at fire sale prices, it would take a lot of space, money, and time, and specialized skill to get production going again. it's not something someone could just stick in the garage and do on the weekends.
That would not surprise me since the PRR kits started life as Penn-Line 50 or more years ago as did the FM H16-44 and some of the trolley car kits.
The "Old Lady" 2-8-0 and the "Casey Jones" 4-6-0 started life as a Varney kits 50 plus years ago.
Larry
Conductor.
Summerset Ry.
"Stay Alert, Don't get hurt Safety First!"
Bowser stopped using most of the old Penn Line tooling 15 to 20 years ago, when they upgraded from lead castings to zinc. The updated castings were much cleaner and sharper, and allowed for separate details to be added more easily. The molds that were already for zinc, like the Challenger and K-11, I wouldn't expect to see used again. But a lot of the revised and newer molds still make a very nice product.
_________________________________________________________________
I forgot that I still have a couple of Bowser kits sitting in my storage cupboard, they were given to me years ago unfortunately they are both Pennsy engines, a M1-b and the G5. Now that I am into DCC it is very unlikely that these will ever get built.
At one point during the last year or so all the old tooling was (quietly) up for sale--one bid for all or nothing. One potential buyer was allegedly interested in taking all of it off their hands, but I did not hear if the deal was actually completed or not.
Don't worry--they would never just scrap it because it's worth too much money and too much time was invested--it only became very uneconomical to continue to make the metal steam engines (and all the associated detail parts) here in the U.S. with American labor. If someone else wishes to make a go of it, they were/would be perfectly willing to sell it all off.
I worked for them as a young man, 20 years ago now, and only get back to Montoursville a few days per year. They are still my friends. Perhaps the next time I see them I can ask...
John
I was hoping that some one would have bought up the tooling and started to produce the kits again. Bowser was really ahead of their time with these kits. They were not for the novice builder, and took some skill to assemble, but if built correctly they could pull the bumper off your car. I recently converted two Bowser locomotives to DCC, and was surprised how easy the process was in the end. Prices for unbuilt kits on ebay have went through the roof in recent times.
Yes Bowser locos can EASILY changed to DCC. the only deal is isolating the ground on the insulator plate on the brush carrier and hook the gray wire to it.
I've even run the old post war horseshoe magnet motors on DCC.
This begs a very interesting discussion.
I'm pretty convinced that the hobby benefited greatly by WWII. At the end of the war there were tons of very skilled tool and die makers who were essentially out of work. The aircraft industry had perfected highly detailed non-ferrous casting techniques for navigational equipment along with other investment castings for the war effort.
With this labor pool available a lot of these die makers fell into the hobby industry giving us Silver Streak castings, Kemtron, and a ton of other companies with great rivet detail. Most of the original companies are gone but the dies are still floating around. The Mantua and Roundhouse dies were paid for a dozen times over.
A number of Kemtron castings were lost in a fire at the Fresno California factory. The remaining dies are now held be Precision Scale in Montana.
Bowser today still holds a lot of dies and has been gathering up small companies over the years: Selley, SS LTD and Pennsylvania Scale Model's trolley dies.
Rick Steele of Labelle Woodorking recently bought the remaining Red Ball dies and rights but not the dies truck frame dies. He has reintroduced some of those parts and are available on his web site.
see ya
Bob
The challenge with any reintroduction of the kits is that at the end the sales were allegedly (this is hearsay only) down to 1/3 of the factory's yearly payroll. Obviously there may have been some overlap of the workers' hours into mail order, shipping, plastic freight cars, etc.--but the sales of the kits were reaching almost non-existent levels, definitely not enough to make continued production worthwhile.
Plus when BLI offers many of the same products in RTR plastic with nice sound...
OK... Now I'm going to climb up on my soap box...
I'm about half convinced that the declining sales of such older zinc cast locos can be attributed to the availability of low (relatively speaking) high detail quality of plastic shelled locos such as those offered by Bachmann, BLI and Blackstone, and a few others that I can't recall...
Coupled with all of that is a dwindling number of people who can or will take the time to assemble such kits in the face of the RTR stuff that is available.
Example... Design Preservation's growing product line of completed structure kits. I have no idea what their sales might be on some of these but they keep making them so they must be going off of the shelves.
I scratch build a lot of stuff just to see if I can do it but not everyone thinks like that. Not an indictment... just an observation about why manufacturers have seen a decline in some product sales.
OK.... I'll get off of the soap box now...
don7I forgot that I still have a couple of Bowser kits sitting in my storage cupboard, they were given to me years ago unfortunately they are both Pennsy engines, a M1-b and the G5. Now that I am into DCC it is very unlikely that these will ever get built.
Texas Zepher don7: I forgot that I still have a couple of Bowser kits sitting in my storage cupboard, they were given to me years ago unfortunately they are both Pennsy engines, a M1-b and the G5. Now that I am into DCC it is very unlikely that these will ever get built. Whaat would being "into DCC" have anything to do with building a steam locomotive kit? Is DCC taking up all your RR time?
don7: I forgot that I still have a couple of Bowser kits sitting in my storage cupboard, they were given to me years ago unfortunately they are both Pennsy engines, a M1-b and the G5. Now that I am into DCC it is very unlikely that these will ever get built.
I think he was implying that the extra effort it would take to convert the models to DCC, on top of the rather long and labor-intensive process of building the kits, makes it even less likely he will ever build the kits.