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| Recently-released/announced Rapido Products on display. |
This Past Sunday I had the opportunity to attend the annual Canadian Association of Railway Modelers show at Copetown, ON. This show is quite different from most other trains shows in that the theme is the display of high-quality modeling and prototype research rather than the typical flea-market wheeling-and-dealing at your average train show. I particularly like this show because it often features many operating layouts, something that seems increasingly less common at the flea market shows. It is always inspiring to me to see a completed layout, or even one that is partly completed to see how other modelers innovated or overcame obstacles to create a model of something that they are passionate about.
One downfall of the show is that given its’ time in the year, it often suffers from bad weather which seemed to be the case this year. There were a handful of empty tables and it was noticeably less crowded in the aisles. Only one operating HO layout (the Ontario and Quebec Railway) was present but a handful of larger-scale switching layouts were in attendance; I tend to think the poor road conditions kept a lot of people from going to the show. As always, a number of historical societies and photo dealers were in attendance as well as several model manufacturers, such as Rapido Trains.
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| More Rapido goodies! |
Rapido brought samples of several of their recent projects, including the LRC locomotive, FPA-4 (A and B-units), FL-9 and F40PH-2. A small test track served to demonstrate the models’ operating (and to me, more impressively) sound performance. They indeed put a lot of effort into each of their products. Surprisingly though, there was little mentioned about their recently-announced RDC project. They did however bring a small switching layout to demonstrate their Rail-crew recent announcements, a magnetic uncoupling gizmo and switch motor (with operating switch stand). It will be interesting to see how this goes for them, though I can’t imagine that having another supplier of switch motors is a bad thing.
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| A pre-production sample of their MLW FPA-4; despite the room full of people, the sound was still quite impressive on the unit. |
Another noteworthy item at the show was George’s Trains line of new acrylic paints (Proto-Paint), which fortunately features a number of Canadian railway colours.
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| Prairie Shadows' custom run of CN-painted Intermountain F7A and B units were also on display. |
‘Til next time,
Cheers,
Peter.
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