A chat with Lee Riley, or why Bachmann N has dummy couplers.

[John]

ROTFLMAO ... ;D

[Pomperaugrr]

Huh????

what do you mean "huh?" have you ever dealt with a factory in China - i have and it's a PITA.  the owner is not the owner and the labor is not hired by the factory.  it's like migrant farming, but in a factory. 

Steve, the person going by CVSNE is none other than Marty McGuirk, formerly of InterMountain and Model Railroader, so I would think he certainly is familiar with dealing with Chinese factories. We have several IMRC "alumni" on The RailWire.

I guess he never saw that one coming!   Heh heh heh.

[asciibaron]

Steve, the person going by CVSNE is none other than Marty McGuirk, formerly of InterMountain and Model Railroader, so I would think he certainly is familiar with dealing with Chinese factories. We have several IMRC "alumni" on The RailWire.

does that mean i have no idea what i'm talking about?

-Steve

[3rdrail]

Steve, the person going by CVSNE is none other than Marty McGuirk, formerly of InterMountain and Model Railroader, so I would think he certainly is familiar with dealing with Chinese factories. We have several IMRC "alumni" on The RailWire.

does that mean i have no idea what i'm talking about?

-Steve

No, but you implied he did not know what he was talking about. I would think that as a Vice President of InterMountain he had more than a passing acquaintance with Chinese assembly practices. BTW, according to the article that appeared in MR, Kader owns its factories, which produce far more than Bachmann, Graham Farish, Liliput, etc., so the Bachmann model may not fit the other importers.

[asciibaron]

No, but you implied he did not know what he was talking about. I would think that as a Vice President of InterMountain he had more than a passing acquaintance with Chinese assembly practices. BTW, according to the article that appeared in MR, Kader owns its factories, which produce far more than Bachmann, Graham Farish, Liliput, etc., so the Bachmann model may not fit the other importers.

i implied nothing - i simpled asked if he knew - why are you answering for him?  i'm sure on paper kader owns the factories, but in reality they most likely do not.  take a trip to China and see what it's like over there - there is no free market capitalism like here in the States.

-Steve

[soo]

"It employs up to 18000 workers and annually produces over 1.3 million train sets for the U.S market alone!"

Golly, if all other mfgs, like MT, Athearn, and the LHS who put together train sets for Xmas match that number, we might have 3-4Mil kids (or Dads) buying their first train set each year.....Seems to me like if we keep 1% of those in model railroading, the future is bright.  Hard to imagine 30,000 new modelers a year when MR subscriptions total 167,000. Even 3,000 new modelers would be pretty good (0.1%)

BTW, got to ask a few questions, even if you probably can't know the answer....

If MT couplers cost us about $2.50 per car/loco, adding those to a Bachman car for $0.76 isn't that bad a deal, is it?  IM and RC put them on their cars. When Atlas offered both types couplers, the price difference was about that of the retail of MT.  Why would he have to add more than say 115% of his actual coupler cost to offer MT couplers?

The tooling costs sound about right, but I have heard some who supposedly know say that now that tooling is done overseas to similar quality of US tooling, that the prices have dropped, by a third to half or more.  To be competitive, it sounds like they have to re-engineer their business model a bit.  Just MHO, as I am looking at this from afar.

Thanks for the interesting info.

I was in an LHS yesterday, and I saw the BMann catalogue, so I picked it up to look at it.  They have several different Thomas Tank Engine train sets....I suppose that accounts for most of the 1.3Mil in train set sales.  I doubt there is a lot of crossover from those to "real" model railroading, but I would hope there would be some, lol.

[daniel_leavitt2000]

Steve, as a former HK company, I belive they do indeed OWN outright their own factories. They used to have facilities in Thailand as well that was a contract producer for Mattel and Disney. In 1993, four buildings in that factory complex burned down to the ground in the worst industrial fire in world history.

Kader was one of the defendants in the case as the building's outright owner. There are other companies that own their own factories in China such as Great Wall and Cherry car companies.

I belive there are two business models running in China currently. The first is the  old state owned contrected factories that many toy makers use, and the other model is a more western approach where certain companies own their own facilities and have their own factory workers on payroll.

Those with a better understanding please correct me if I am wrong.

[Chris333]

So about Bachmann. They did say some announcements are coming. And there are photos of a new On30 railbus (a guy overseas already bought one) with no mention of it at their site, so maybe there really is something new coming.

[asciibaron]

I belive there are two business models running in China currently. The first is the  old state owned contrected factories that many toy makers use, and the other model is a more western approach where certain companies own their own facilities and have their own factory workers on payroll.

ok, than this makes sense and i stand corrected.  the vendors i dealt with must have used the old model and it was easily the most corrupt thing i had ever seen (and i was a former federal gov't employee) it was very difficult to get things done and half the time they had already run the production based on the pre-production sample (as in, there is no such thing as a pre-production and they spent a good deal of time opening boxes and "fixing' things).

even with the ipods, those factories use the older model with a little tweak, they move around after the exhaust the work force.

-Steve

[CVSNE]

Steve,

Sorry I didn't reply sooner - my internet access is extremely limited now that we've move to the our new house (apparently Manassas, Virginia is some sort of nexus of the universe where DSL, Hi-speed cable modems, etc . . . have not yet reached. So I have this brand new house completely wired throughout  . . . and no where to plug in to as of yet.  Hopefully the issue will be resolved in the next few weeks.

When I worked for Intermountain I was most familiar with two Chinese manufacturing outfits - one called H K Sanda Kan, which was originally a Taiwanese company (the founder is a Chinese national who became a US citizen and settled in Baltimore, where he became good friends with the individual who owned Life-Like).  The second company was started by a former CEO of Sanda Kan and is called "AFFA Technologies."

When I was at Intermountain Sanda Kan handled our assembly, painting, and decoration - we used AFFA as a jobber mostly for etched metal components.  AFFA now offers complete services to the various model railroad companies (I'm almost positive Matt at FVM is using AFFA for tooling, molding, etc . . .).  AFFA also made the Intermountain HO scale AC-12 steam engine.

I visited Kader once or twice while I was in China and didn't see anything noticeably different about the factory.

For the record, Sanda Kan is independently owned (in fact is controlled by Wall Street investment banker money - JP Morgan if I recall correctly) and is not controlled by the government.  Sanda Kan is also exclusively a model railroad manufacturer - the same production line that makes Intermountain products does Red Caboose, Deluxe Innovations, USA Trains, and even some "overflow" work from the Atlas factory. 

Sanda Kan employs (as nearly as I can recall) about 10,000 people in a number of factories just over the old border from Hong Kong.  I always enjoyed my visits there as the people were incredibly nice and easy to work with - and always strove to make a quality product.  The biggest challenge they faced was they had no idea what an American train should look like - the direct English translations of some of the Mandarin notes on the car and locomotive artwork was always fun - the "MoPac eagle" logo was notated as "stretched chicken" and the like!

The biggest challenge Intermountain continues to face is that no one there currently seems to really care what an American train looks like, but I digress.

Marty

[asciibaron]

When I worked for Intermountain I was most familiar with two Chinese manufacturing outfits - one called H K Sanda Kan, which was originally a Taiwanese company (the founder is a Chinese national who became a US citizen and settled in Baltimore, where he became good friends with the individual who owned Life-Like).  The second company was started by a former CEO of Sanda Kan and is called "AFFA Technologies."

we worked with Samhongsa and Waytecsan (sp) which were Korean based companies that contracted out to Chinese vendors - maybe this is the difference - going directly to a Chinese vendor vs. using sub-contracted factories.

-Steve

[wm3798]

Manassas?  Marty! You're within striking distance of the Inner Circle...  You're on the list for the next ops session on the Shore.

Welcome to the Mid Atlantic!
Lee

[central.vermont]

Manassas?  Marty! You're within striking distance of the Inner Circle...  You're on the list for the next ops session on the Shore.

Welcome to the Mid Atlantic!
Lee

Well now I know why I can't reach you on the phone Marty!!!! : :

We need to chat. PM me with your new number Marty.
Thanks,
Jon

[Bob Bufkin]

I'm  closer then you Lee.  Marty,  they hold train shows at Chantilly quite a bit. 

Bob