Premium Instruction Re-releases, New decals sets, Our first Caboose, and maybe a Locomotive

It’s been a busy winter so far. Train show season is in full swing and Brick Model Railroader has been traveling to several, including the 2018 Amherst Railway Society show which we’ll have a full report on later this week. But as busy as we’ve been, we have not forgotten about our BMR projects. Here’s a run down of what is coming soon.

Premium Instruction Re-releases

Many have been asking when we will be restocking our first four Premium Instruction Kits, and we’ve been listening. Previously, we’ve made a batch of kits to sell, and when they’ve sold out, you would have to wait until we could restock again. We’re going to do things a little different this time though. Since it’s hard for us to gauge demand for each kit, this time we are going to do a pre-order run. Our plan is to open up pre-orders this coming Monday, February 5th and keep it open until Monday, March 5th, and how ever many orders we have for each kit is how many we will produce. We are doing this for two reasons. Firstly, we hope by doing this, that every one who has not had a chance to buy one or all of the cars yet will be able to get them. Second, as we are looking to produce new Premium Instructions for 2018, we want to focus most of our energy toward those new projects, so we are hoping we can do one last big run of the 4 original cars before diving headlong into new ones. Don’t worry, the original four won’t be gone for good by any means. We hope you’ll agree with us when we want to offer more exciting and new stuff, ideas for which are more than plentiful.

Look for us to open up pre-orders on Monday, February 5th at 12 PM noon Eastern Standard Time for the Pullman PS-1 Box Car, USRA 55ton Hopper, ACF Type 27 Tank Car, and AAR 70ton 53ft Flat Car. We will take pre-orders until March 5th. Once orders are closed, we will need a little time to get the instruction books in from the printer, parts for the wheel sets, and assemble kits. We hope to start shipping orders in mid to late March. Depending on sales, we also hope to have a few extra of each kit to stock in our online store, but if you want a kit, we recommend not waiting. This will be the last regular run of these first four Premium Instruction Kits for a while.

New Decal Sets

Our fans have also been asking us for new decal sets for the Premium Instruction cars, and we’ve been working to make that happen as well. We plan to release several new decal sets for each car, and especially the PS-1 Box car. We’re doing our best to produce a wide geographical range from all over North America, that are prototypical and accurate to each car. These new decal sets will go on sale the same time as the kit pre-orders, this Monday, February 5th.

Our Fifth Premium Instruction Kit: North Eastern Caboose

We’re also in the middle of producing our fifth premium instruction kit, which will be the North Eastern caboose. There have been numerous requests for a caboose for some time, so we’ve finally decided to answer those wishes! One of the problems with a doing a caboose model is that a lot of caboose designs are specific to one, or a small handful of railroads. We chose the north eastern caboose because it spanned dozens of railroads in the United States, and this will allow us to produce several decals to be used with the kit. Of course the North Eastern is still a little limited in geographical region, but it’s as iconic in style as any caboose design could hope to be, so we felt it was a good choice for our first caboose model. Look for a release date later this February. We’ll update you with more info soon.

BMR’s First Full Locomotive Kit

Yes, we’re still working on this project. Brick Model Railroader is currently in the home stretch of designing our first locomotive. And this will be our first full kit as well. All parts included, even the electronics. It’s been a huge undertaking, and it’s taken longer than we had originally planned. But we want to make the best model we can. As they say in the railroad preservation world, “It will be done when it’s done”. We’ve been doing plenty of testing at recent train shows, and we’ve been steadily solving problems, and making the model better each time. We hope you’ll agree with us the the wait will be worth it. We hope to have a full announcement coming in February, but like any steam locomotive projects, both full size and model, expect the unexpected.

We (Cale and Glenn) decided it would be best to take a brief break from working on the locomotive for January to allow us to focus time and energy into getting our premium instructions ready for sale once more as well as decals and the caboose. We’re still excited about the locomotive and will getting back to it soon, but, as mentioned above, it’s a huge project with a lot of things that need to be sorted out and tested. Our sincerest thanks to the community for your patience.

Lastly, a brief note from Glenn Holland, BMR’s number-two guy:

Hey guys! I’d like to announce that I will be taking a hiatus from Brick Model Railroader until further notice. While I’ll still be as active as I can with premium instructions and our kits, I won’t be able to post articles or much else for several months. College has once again become very busy so I need to focus my time on other things for a while. Thanks for understanding. – Glenn

Thanks for reading our updates. We’re glad to see so many new people joining the hobby and finding our page every day. Thank you all for your continued support.

Cale and Glenn