>>9808602Well that's primarily an issue with American model makers in general. Because railroads didn't really standardize their motive power until dieselization it doesn't really profit to make a model of a steam engine used by a single railroad compared to an E8 that can be easily repainted for 30+ different railroads. It's why in most cases unless you're getting a USRA/ALCO standardized steam locomotive or a railroad-specific locomotive that's super iconic to that railroad like NYC Hudsons or Big Boys or N&W Class Js, you'll have to resort to brass models or kitbashing/3D-printed shells. This isn't an American exclusive thing too, you can see it to a lesser extent in UK trains where most of the support is in the Big Four/Nationalization eras. It's very rare where anyone makes anything representing a model from the 1920s or earlier, asides from historical stuff like 4-4-0 Americans or Stephenson's Rocket.
The only country that has a pretty good stance on covering all eras is Marklin I feel, partially in part due to their Epoch/Era categorization that works something like this
>Era 1: 1800s-1920s>Era 2: 1925-1945 >Era 3: 1945-70 >Era 4: 1970s-1990s >Era 5: 1990-2006 >Era 6: 2006-Present There's still a preference for Era 3-6 stuff compared to 1 and 2 in what's available, but at least 1 and 2 get some regular attention in terms of releases. Meanwhile good luck getting Bachmann to release something that they can't repaint or reuse the chassis for. I'd love to see a Camelback in N scale but nobody fucking makes them because they stopped being used by the 20s/30s in real life.
