Intermountain / Fox Valley Update from HogTrainz

[jonklein611]

Copied from their newsletter:

We sadly announce that ALL N SCALE INTERMOUNTAIN LOCOMOTIVE RESERVATIONS are going to be canceled. Hogtrainz gets at least 10 calls/emails per week as to delivery status of one of the Intermountain locomotives that we took reservations for. We have many reservations going back to 2016 and thus we felt the need to contact Intermountain to shed some light on what is going on.

First - Intermountain states that there are NO N SCALE LOCOMOTIVES IN PRODUCTION AT THIS TIME. Considering that we advertised product going back to 2016 we have come to realize that these items will most likely not materialize.

Secondly, the few products that came in recently (HO Scale hoppers for example) came in at higher price than when they were originally announced. We shipped out many items at about .75 above cost. Considering the 3 percent credit card fees and .30 per transaction that credit card company charges us - we LOST MONEY on those projects!

This led me to my second question - will Intermountain honor the prices that were advertised on various N scale locomotive projects? The response was - we cannot answer that!

Considering manufacturers that were in same factory in China that closed and have been up and running delivering product (i.e - Atlas) we have not seen a single N scale loco from Intermountain.

The dilemma of having unfilled reservations because:

a) customer no longer in hobby
b) customer might not be willing to pay higher price than what was advertised
c) contact information on reservations going back five years is no longer valid - and we cannot get in touch with customer
d) no idea when asked as to when product will be delivered if at all

For reasons above - we are canceling all N scale Intermountain Locomotive reservations. Fox valley will not be delivering locomotives - so all Fox Valley Locomotive Locomotive reservations will be canceled too!

Over the next few weeks - Hogtrainz will be addressing by email that reservations will be canceled on those locomotives! We hope that we will get new announcements from Intermountain in the future as we love to carry their products. When we get concrete information regarding availability and pricing - Hogtrainz will be back onboard with New Reservations to be announced!!

We wish Intermountain great success and hope that soon new N scale Locomotives will be announced!!

[riogrande]

That's not good news. I know Intermountain has produced N scale SD40T-2's in the past and have announced a new run of them. But sounds like those are a long way off yet. I am glad I was able to obtain some Intermountain SD40T-2's during the past year knowing that any future productions are questionable.

[llxlocomotives]

This is an indication of the fault with the reservation system. I suspect that we are not talking about one model from each of these manufacturers. I would question any future projects from these people. Because of the out of stock nature on most of their product line, the viability of the companies has to be a concern.