To Check on What has Sold out recently....... CLICK HERE!

Our Releasing Philosophy

We do a LOT of releases. Our unit train products are in 10, 20 or more road numbers, our freight releases run from 2 to 10 road numbers, and our stackcars and containers come in 2 road numbers each. We do this for several reasons. First, we want to offer the largest selection that we can. People are much more interested in operating now than they ever were, and more roadnumbers allow this to happen. We do repeat releases, but never the same road numbers. For instance, we have had Santa Fe 48 foot containers in stock for the last 4 years. Within that time, we have released 3 different schemes and 8 different road numbers. A person who wants a Santa Fe container can get them, and the person who wants to build an accurate Santa Fe intermodal train can always add more numbers. We can't do this with every product, however, as the dealers don't have enough shelf space for that many releases. So, with roads that are not normally released, we do smaller releases less frequently. Since we can release a small amount, it is low risk for the dealers. This is important, as the dealer part of the chain is important to all of us.

Many folks decry the "limited release" pattern of modern N Scale. Our philosophy is that we need to provide what people want. We start with Pre-Orders, so go to your favorite DeLuxe dealer and place an advance order if you see something announced that you want. After we close our Pre-Orders out we add a cushion based on our experience and estimated final demand then lock down the size of the production run. This sometimes works out, and sometimes it doesn't. When we have a product that is much more popular than we estimated, we need to go back and make more road numbers. This worked well in the case of the BN Twin Tub gondolas, with a total of 50 numbers being released.

This methodology is may be difficult to understand, but is has given us the variety that we have in N Scale today. The variety is driven by having the tooling money to reinvest in upcoming releases. Like all businesses, we do have to think about money.