Just a little vent! (Walthers)

[GrampysTrains]

Hi Eric: Sorry about your misadventure with Walthers. I had the same problem with 2 Life Like diesels, a GP-7 and a GP-30. Like you, I had these 2 for a couple of years, while building my layout, before I actually had a chance to run them for any length of time. When they started to run rough I was about to start tearing gear boxes apart, but I saw a thread on another forum describing the same problem I had. That's when I learned about the cracked axles. I believe someone suggested calling and asking for Steve. I did and he asked me how many cracked axles I had. I told him I had 6. But that evening, I checked again, and discovered 2 more. The next day I called Steve again, and told him I had 2 more cracked axles, and he told me he would send me a total of 8 replacements. A couple of days later, I received 8 axles in the mail. But, I've also heard of guys who couldn"t get any without a sales receipt, etc. Go figure! It looks to me like it's hit or miss with Walthers. I agree with some of the other posters here, customer service is becoming a rare commodity. BTW, I took the virtual tour of your layout, outstanding work, and I still love your photos!

 

[Rotorranch]

William, some of the hobby shop's delay may have came from them waiting to fill a minimum order for shipping from Walthers. This happened to me once and after I waited a week with nothing coming in, I asked and the guy said he was still waiting for enough to order to meet the minimum. I was P.O'd.

That's one of the issues with "exclusivity" among hobby distributors.

Before Walthers bought Life-like, you could get Life-Like from any of the major players in the hobby distribution industry. Afterwards, only from Walthers.

The same goes for Horizon/Athearn-Roundhouse. Now Horizon is the only distributor.

Instead of having a couple of $2000 dollar weekly orders to 2 distributors, now you have four or five $300-400 orders to several different distributors. That can cause some distributors to decrease the discount, or increase shipping cost. This affects the bottom line at the LHS, as well as cause delays until the LHS has a big enough order to meet the minimums.

Rotor