Athearn Announcement

[lock4244]

I think MTL is going to do just fine.

[sirenwerks]

Time to invest in a 3D printer and learn modeling I guess. Locos are one thing but freight cars seems a bit more doable. Not too mention there's a lot I know will not reach the market before I lose the eyesight to model in N scale (lots of Hill line cars I want). Athearn hasn't been getting any money from me anyway, since they're been so focused on contemporary models and since they never pressed their Blue Box models out in N, so no loss. The only thing I will be challenged to source is decals.

[Spades]

I think I may switch over to collecting Fabergé eggs. Model trains are getting awfully pricey 

-Mark

There would be tariffs and sanctions depending on where they were sourced.

[Southern1970]

Well Athearn cancelled the items I wanted so I guess I’m saving there…

[jagged ben]

Interesting that Scale Trains said they have not seen tariffs leveled on model trains and now Athearn is implying there are.  I wonder if something changed, or if there is some difference in how they do business.

[learmoia]

I believe Rapido touched on this... The 'Tariff' is applied on the import value not the Retain value..

Rapido importing from Canada into US would be 25% on the wholesale value (which includes and Canada-China Tariffs along with Rapido Profit.)

But a 25% Tariff imported from China directly to United States is on Rapido's import cost and only yields about a 6-8% cost increase to the consumer.
So... Rapido opened a warehouse in the US to account for this..

That said.. Any MFGs that are adding more than 10% to the prices are likely profit grabbing..
.. Adding to 'in stock' items is blatant profit grabbing..

My thought all along is the companies could have raised the prices by 10%.. said nothing about Tariffs, and we wouldn't know the difference..

And what if the Tariffs go away? is all of this going to be reversed?... I doubt it..

[learmoia]

This. And to pull even further, my US supplier sourced base material for the stampings is from Germany. So my supplier input costs will likely go up as well, and everything gets passed along.

I hope that things settle down and some amount of certainty can be established, but probably the only thing that’s certain at this point is that prices are going nowhere but up, substantially.

Well.. get your products to the border before April and we won't have to deal with the tariffs 

~Ian

P.S... We want Couplers!!!.. We want Couplers!!!.. We want Couplers!!!.. We want Couplers!!!..

[dem34]

This probably has more to do with Horizon's unforced error to contractual commit to buying back unsold inventory in the RC sector.

[Dwight in Toronto]

Folks here have already managed to get a pretty good handle on how disruptive this whole tariff thing is, and we’ve only been discussing a hobby.  Toy trains is one thing, but methinks we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. 

[nkalanaga]

Dwight:  True.  Very true.  Worst case, we can do without our trains.  There are a lot of truly essential things facing the same price pressures.  There are going to be problems.