Testament of Customer Service

Good for them for owning up, but more importantly in my mind, not accepting substandard product from the manufacturer. If they rejected 2/3 of the production run for faults I don't think they need to apologize. They are the heroes.
The Amazon/Ebay model where foreign companies are allowed to sell anything, no questions asked, and leave QC to the consumer is not a good direction. For example just last night I ordered Cedar Grilling Planks, the first thing I did was pull up the least expensive option, then I did a little research and realized all of the cheaper options from one particular country were composed of laminated boards! Unbelievable. Who would want to grill on a board made of burning, smoking, glue. It is dangerous and extremely unhealthy. And the least expensive option was also lying about the size of their boards, claiming to be a little bigger than all the others untruthfully. So I paid more for Made In USA boards. Well, we all have stories like this. We have to be firm with foreign or internal suppliers that don't fulfill their contracts. Good for these guys.
It is also appropriate that this post is made on AZL's forum. A company which is quick to cover faults, give solutions, and I imagine they don't pass faulty products either. I'll bet they have stories like the one in the video as well.

Hi, I would agree with Dazed's assessment of the GP-38. I have six of these from that run and two of them had broken chasisses
so it cost me a lot of money to replace them and that should not have been the case. If someone sells a defective product it should be replaced at no cost to the customer afterall we spent a lot buying it in the first place.

More recently (Jan. 14, 2023) I purchased a new ES44 two days later (Jan. 16) it stopped running. I've sent AZL two e-mails regarding this and have received no reply so far. I don't think returning it to the store is going to be an option since it's closing it's doors in May.

Glen hello! Not sure what email address you used, but you can always reach me at sales@ztrack.com. You can also message me through the forum. I did send you a PM. I will need information so we can help troubleshoot or ES44AC.

Rob

My bad, I should have left AZL out of it. The OP and video are not related to AZL.
I am relatively new to Z scale and model trains as well. Not long enough to know about the GP38 ugliness described here. I think this forum, their participation in it (see above) and their “fix it” type videos indicate a responsible company. But I don’t have a lot of experience…

Haters gonna hate.

So let's talk about the GP38-2 first run. I say first run because it is important to understand the background here. There was actually an "original run" of GP 38-2 made by Hans at Rouge Locomotive works in Oregon. Those were brass chassis made by hand with the current injection molded GP38-2 shell.

The first production run was made by Sanda Kan in China. We have always said that we warranty our locomotives (legally for 90 days, but in practice for a year - and please don't jump on that one - the reality is that we take care of it for AT LEAST a year, and usually longer - depending on circumstances. Example: we had one guy who ran his RDC every day, all day long in a doctor's office waiting room - it failed after almost 4 YEARS of continuous operation. Yes, we charged him to fix it - that seems reasonable. We had another guy who plugged his locomotive into a 110v socket. We did not honor the warranty on that one.)

After Sanda Kan held us hostage (and kept the GP7/9 and SD70 tooling) we moved to another factory. The new factory produced the second run of GP38-2. At that point in time, we started to notice that the frames of the original GP38-2 were failing - crumbling - due to a poor casting technique at Sanda Kan. what did we do?

1) We immediately halted sales of what remained of the GP38-2 first run. We alerted dealers about the problem.

2) We contacted the new factory to see if they could produce replacement frames for the first run. Since they did not get any tooling from Sanda Kan, they had redesigned the chassis with a different motor, gears, etc - so their new chassis was incompatible with the Sanda Kan made chassis. Re-tooling a second Sanda Kan type chassis was cost prohibitive, and we were concerned that swapping parts (motors gears) was beyond the ability of many of our customers, so we came up with a "next best" plan:

3) We asked the new factory to make extra mechanisms of the new design GP38-2 - it had a better motor and was mechanically superior - this happens over years as new design techniques are developed.

4) We decided to OFFER the new mechanisms AT OUR COST / NO PROFIT because at this time the first run of GP38-2 was over 5 years old, and we essentially providing a whole new locomtoive. Since it was a not for profit offer, we just asked to confirm that you were actually a customer who had the chassis crumble problem by some sort of proof. We're not in the business of producing locomotive chassis at zero profit. This was done to support our wonderful clients.

5) it is POSSIBLE that some folks purchased New Old Stock from the first run from some dealers, and got a bad loco. For those folks, you SHOULD HAVE BEEN covered under the warranty and provided with a new chassis. Of course, we do need a bit of evidence to confirm this is the case. Second hand sales from ebay and the like are still eligible for the chassis upgrade program at any point in time.

6) The First run locos that we had in stock had all of their chassis upgraded and were then re-released for sale.

7) Our normal process is please see if your DEALER can fix the problem first. If that doesn't work out, then contact Rob at Ztrack (who is our DISTRIBUTOR) and he can fix it for you - but yes, he may ask a few question to make sure it was not user error / 110 volts / bathed in cat hair / dipped in acetone before he gets about fixing your concern.

8) This forum was set up to talk about Z scale, AZL / MTL / Rokuhan / Atlas / all of the z manufactures, building layouts, prototype trains, new projects - essentially the hobby. We do have a contact page on the company web site (americanzline.com) where we handle customer support - we just don't do it here.

9) Let's all remember that this is supposed to be fun. Z scale is small - it can be a bit frustrating, especially if you are using the envelope on what's possible in such a tiny space; but it can also be very gratifying and pleasurable. We promise to be straight with you, we ask the same in return. Believe it or not, we've had some people go on this board and say "I tried to contact them a bunch of times and nobody responded" well, we are a 3 man crew who live in different cities and we all have "day jobs" we also occasionally take a holiday. Because of this, we keep pretty darn good records of Direct messages (I don't respond to DM folks, but Rob Kluz does) emails, text, voice mails, and the like. We do respond - hopefully with news that will make you happy - but please don't complain about us when you have not really even reached out yet. Maybe you meant to contact us ran out of time, forgot to actually do it, got frustrated and said that you would "teach us" a lesson by embarrassing us on a public forum. Well, that really doesn't work when it's not true. We want to get along and help. Please allow us the opportunity to do so.

</rant>

Thank you for supporting us here at AZL. We are not a big company. We do not have any full time employees. The money we make from AZL goes back into creating new models to support the Z community. We do this because we love it, not to feed our families, and because of all of our wonderful clients who make this fun!

Best
Rob(A)
-AZL