New Freight car Suggestion: Thrall High Side Gondola

My first inclinations is YES, 100% agree that these would be nice to have. You are right, AZL will have just about every major locomotive ever used in the coal hauling regions except for the SD70MAC and perhaps one or two others. So coal gons or hoppers are definitely a needed item. (hello quad hoppers for the D&RGW guys...)

One of the coal trains that ran on the line I model is a (mostly) solid set of utility cars that ran between the Powder River Basin in Wyoming to the Fayette Power coal-burning power plant in La Grange, TX near Austin. They ran for almost 30 years on BNSF or UP via a few different routes. The cars were mostly the Thrall cars, sort of an olive drab green color with yellow ends and FPPX reporting marks. There were other Thrall cars mixed in that were black with orange ends and LCRX reporting marks. (Lower Colorado River Authority) And there were some non-Thrall gons too, some similar in design but others that were railroad owned bethgons or triple hoppers.

However, these cars are really boxy, squared off, simple shapes. They lend themselves very well to be 3D printed, (and have been) and with the simple decoration for most of them they can be created fairly easily. So I wouldn't stump for AZL to do these, in lieu of many other freight cars that are more complex or have more complex decoration where AZL shines.

Would I buy them? You bet. If they did the FPPX and LCRX cars I would buy 40+ of them. But just not something I'm going to push for. At a minimum, I really want AZL to produce a myriad of Bethgon schemes on their current tooling first.