You'd be battling...
Hi William and all,
I think you may be battling finding suitable feedstock to make these types of models today. The number of tinplate lines worldwide is way down on what it was even 10 years ago. I was working on the last one in the Southern Hemisphere when it closed almost 10 years ago.
Traditionally the tinplate toys were made from "seconds" from the tinplate process. Often you had stretches of coil that suffered imperfections in chemical or mechanical properties that caused rejection of that part of the coil for food grade applications. In the mid 1970's we sold a lot of "seconds" into Asia where the timplate sheets were stamped and painted into toys of all shapes and sizes. The "seconds" were also considerably chaeper than the food grade tinplate product.
Initially the shearing and sorting for quality was done at the tinplate plant. From about the mid-1970's on the traditional usage areas for tinplate was being undercut by other packaging materials and the canneries stated to take over the shearing process themselves. In the late 1980's there were only 4 tinplate lines worldwide that could offer suitable tinplate for 2-piece can manufacture that could compete with the aluminium beer/softdrink can. The place I worked at was one of them.
Also the thickness of the steel under the tinplate has decreased markedly since the 1970's. In the 1970's a soft-drink can was usually 0.21 mm thick, fruit cans were about 0.30 mm thick with some decorated ovenware running to 0.60 mm thick as the thickest tinplate we made. When the line closed in the ealy 2000's drink cans were down to .018 mm thick and in 6 months I didn't see one order thicker than 0.030 mm This means that todays tinplate is thinner, less strong and less durable as a "toy" than the tinplate of yesteryear.
Also the advances in computer control of the tinplating process, rolling practices and steelmake quality since the 1970's meant that overall the amount of defective material that would be classed as "seconds" was also way down when the tinplate line closed. The improvements in quality mean that feedstock for "toy" type applications would be scarce unless you wanted to buy a premium product at a premium price in coils of about 30 tons each.
You would have to stamp out a lot of timplate wagons to use just one of these coils (assuming you could find a works that would sell you "just one" coil. For the steelworks I was at the minimum order size was at least 50 tons, which would equate to at least 2 coils.
Also advances in the amount of detail afforded by resins/plastics have outstripped the capability of tinplate as a material to produce on a model.
While the idea of printed/lithographed tinplate wagons might have some personal appeal. the harsh realities of where tinplate is placed as a product and the other economic factors mentioned, to which you would then have to add the development costs of the dies to form up these wagons and the costs of printing/paining these wagons and locomotives. In short I think that there are a lot of reasons why tinplate wagons are no longer the "weapon of choice" for our hobby manufacturers. If such an idea went ahead, my feeling is that it would be to a very limited market and be very expensive "nostalgia".
