bad product choice at walmart,someone dropped the ball!

[CANADIANPACIFIC2816]

In all my years in the hobby of model trains, I have seen worse stuff than this. Last December I had to make a trip up to the pharmacy of my neighborhood department store, and in the section of the store where they had decorative Christmas stuff, there were a few porcelain pieces that you would place around the base of your Christmas tree, they included buildings and........trains molded into the scene. They were even electrically lit up. But one such piece that I looked at had a train consisting of a steam locomotive and a single passenger coach, and get this, the locomotive's coal tender was placed not where it should have been, but on the rear end of the passenger coach! The fireman whould have had to walk through the passenger coach for a scoop of coal!! I think this was made in some place like Taiwan where the gooks don't a whole lot about trains.

CANADIANPACIFIC2816

"There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run, when the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun, long before the white man and long before the wheel, when the green, dark forest was too silent to be real." Gordon Lightfoot

[Andrew Falconer]

I am not holding my breath. Is this wallmart car an actual scale model (HO,O,ect)? Or just a toy.

It is near TT Scale. There is a thread on the MODEL RAILROADER forum that is on the same subject, but it is a much more intelligent discussion.

Andrew

[Anonymous]

I can show you a whole yard full of NYC painted stuff.  Benning Yard (CSX - Washington DC) holds coal hoppers (empty and full) there for area plants.  CSX and NS used the old reporting marks to divvy up Conrail. 

There is a difference between wanting to have a clean car and being able to protect thousands of pieces of rolling stock, plus locomotives.  Debris may also be another reason why they prefer the public stay off the ROW and out of the yards.  Not the right image (Of course, brainless wonders getting hit by trains doesn't help either!).  I don't see much rust going by around here.  Maybe one in 30.  Actually, I have been amazed at the lack of grafitti on cars I would expect to see it on in the past. 

Well, I'm not talking about the old reporting marks being used, I'm talking about the real deal, cars originally painted in NYC/PC green. The NYC logos were covered by PC logos and then by the CR logo. The cars usually are about 70% rusted, with paint peeling off and when it peels off in the right places, the old logo can be seen, sometimes it's 100% intact after all these years.

A few days ago, I was watching trains and an Eastbound went by, almost all rusted and grafittied hoppers, some really bad looking, some not so bad. Later on, a Westbound came through with about 30 brand new hoppers, a big contrast to the rest of the train, about 40 rusted up hoppers and about a dozen severly rusted up gondolas, and a few tank and box cars. Pretty much all the old stuff was grafittied except the gondolas. Probably too rusty to hold the paint!

I don't see how graffitti could ever be controlled, there's too much track and even if you fence off yard areas, it's still going to happen. Since it can't be stopped, it doesn't make much sense to me to worry about it.