|
Closing Message Dear Customers and Friends, The year of 2024 will be our 32nd and final year in business. We will be closing our doors for good at the end of the year. The exact date is still to be determined but it will likely be towards the end of December. We will let you know the exact date later this year. As regular visitors to our website know, we first made this announcement back in the spring of 2023. We wanted to allow a solid 18 months between this announcement and our closing date so that we could fill as many customer reservations as possible. If you’ve been in the hobby more than a few weeks you are already well aware of the exceptionally long lead times between product announcement and product delivery with many of the manufacturers and importers. Some of them are now taking 5+ years to deliver previously announced products which is in our opinion quite ridiculous. Please note that we are NOT bankrupt and none of the management or staff have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. The decision is not being forced on us. It was made based on changing market conditions which are are not likely to improve in the foreseeable future. Rather than rant and rave at the many challenges our hobby and the industry that powers it are facing, we are going to keep things on the positive in this final communication. To those of your who have supported our efforts for all these years, we offer our sincere thanks. Our mission was never to offer “everything” since there are plenty of others who do that. We purposely limited our dealership to those offerings of very high quality with a special emphasis on European models which also happens to be our personal passion in the hobby. In that spirit, we will post the 2024 New Items brochures from Fleischmann and Minitrix as we have done for the last few decades however, this time it is just for the purpose of sharing this information with fellow enthusiasts. We will not be creating pricelists and we will not be accepting any reservations for the 2024 new items since delivery of new European N-Scale models has pretty much become a 2+ year cycle. Most of the 2024 new items won’t be delivered until 2025 or beyond so it makes no sense to accept reservations since we will be gone by the time most of them are delivered. If you are an enthusiast of the MARKLIN group which includes TRIX, MINITRIX and LGB then we encourage you to contact our very good friend Doug who is an authorized dealer at:
Doug's Trains Toys and Hobbies website: https://www.trainstoysandhobbies.com e-mail: daofde@aol.com For FLEISCHMANN and ROCO we recommend finding a reputable dealer in Europe to do business with. Sadly, there isn’t a single FLEISCHMANN/ROCO dealer in the US that we can recommend with confidence. So with that we encourage each of you to continue this beloved hobby and to please make a special effort share it with young people so it can hopefully continue for many more generations to come.
|