Roco/Fleischmann Future.

QUOTE What does it say?
Even after Steven's machine translation, I'm still wondering...

Only joking - well half joking. These machine translators do the words but they never catch the idiom which renders them near to useless at times.

Anyway, assuming that "brand" would be a better word than "sign", I come to the following conclusion:-

Roco N is dead; buy it before stocks run out. It may come back later as Fleischmann but don't hold your breath.

Fleischmann HO is pretty much dead apart from rare German outline and quaint historic stuff. Passenger coaches will continue to be a compromised scale.

Roco HO will be the scale modeller's choice with no more short coaches and lots of international models.

It's going to take two or three years for these changes to work their way through the two companies' portfolios of products but the product announcements for 2009 have taken these strategic changes into account.

I think that's reasonably close?

Over to you continental fans. Roco Swiss stuff looks safe but Fleischmann Swiss HUPAC lorry trailers aren't?

David

It is still being decided which and if to transfer some Roco N scale models into Fleischmann range. There are in particular some superb coach designs and some excellent wagons in the Roco N range which I am sure would warrant further production runs without requiring redesign. Time will tell, lobbying from modeller groups could well help and already certain Roco N models are very highly sought.

It is logical that the company should align the ranges of the two marques to be complementary sets and make savings throughout the manufacturing and logistics fields. This can be seen to some extent as turning to face the divergence changes at Trix/Maerklin recently. There are still plenty of players in the H0 market so I guess these changes can't hurt the future of model railways.

From the perspective of N scale, the writing has been on the wall for some time at Roco that something would have to change. It was either to relaunch or drop the ranges, as the most recent releases were old designs (and in some cases excellent old designs with close coupling and beautiful detailing e.g. Eurofima coaches) at bargain prices so it was either wringing the last out of them before investing in new or stopping. The current big players (and by big I mean big enough to come out with yearly new designs) in N will still be there: Fleischmann, Minitrix and Kato/Lemke. What Hornby will do when they tire of peddling old Arnold models remains to be seen...unlike Roco their prices have certainly been high for models of similar age. Yes they have in some cases added a DCC interface and close coupling but that doesn't change the looks of the model, on average the details not being anywhere as 'crisp' as the Roco models. Feels like the Arnold horse is at the glue factory... ...but of course better some Arnold than none at all and for that Hornby has been useful to some modellers.