People’s Republic of China N Scale trains

[Lessigen]

For anyone who's curious about the process of ordering from CHANGMING's Taobao storefront for the upcoming CR200J, it's a bit involved but this is how I understood it (with a bit of DeepL/Google Translate). Of course, if you want to avoid this hassle you have wonderful people like Stephan and Vincent at J-Scale (link | link) or Jacky from CNRailModel (link | link) to basically make this like any other online purchase, which is my recommendation. Khaho is another option but I have no personal experience from them yet. Anyways, I mainly did this because I already had a Taobao account set up and verified.

 

Here are the steps:

1. You need a Taobao account. Getting one ranges from moderately to very annoying depending on your luck with account verification as you may need anything between your phone number to your passport and support is useless for most account suspension/locking issues
2. Go to the CR200J page and select your flavour of green: link
3. Click "add to cart" (the lighter orange button)
4. Go to your cart (the link with the small cart icon in the header) and select checkout (the orange button underneath the ¥200)
5. Under 跨境段物流方式 (cross-border logistics), select 跨境段物流方式 (contact seller for overseas shipping) - if you select the other options you'll pay for overseas shipping which will not apply on a reservation, so you'll be wasting your money 
6. In the right box, select either AliPay (the top one) or Credit Card (in my case it said CAD as part of the text) depending on which one you have available
7. Enter in your credit card details, optionally save it using the checkbox. I chose not to. There's a small fee associated with using a CC, something like 0.6% but it does convert directly into your currency
8. After payment, CHANGMING will "ship" the reservation item to you. You have to accept this shipment for your non-refundable reservation to be locked in, it'll do so automatically after like 50 days I believe
9. When it's time to pay for the remainder, CHANGMING will post a Taobao link on their Wechat where you can pay for it. Be sure to select the same car variant as you reserved. This time, ensure you're paying for overseas shipping (跨境段物流方式 section, select whichever one you prefer)
10. CHANGMING will ship you the actual train and eventually, with a bit of luck, you'll receive it in a timely manner

Edited 15 hours ago by Lessigen

[Nozomi329]

On 4/20/2025 at 4:47 AM, Lessigen said:

kind of reminds me of the EMD F59PHI

China actually had a few double decker E/DMUs in the early 2000s with double deck height power cars that's even closer match:

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/神州號NZJ2型柴油動車組
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/新曙光號NZJ1型柴油動車組
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/金輪號NZJ2型柴油動車組

[disturbman]

@Lessigen Yes, dealing with TB is not for our simple Western minds 😄

Joking aside, that's about the process. This is how it was done for the CR400AF, the DF4D-3 and DF4D-4.

Beside the language barrier, if things haven't changed, the big problem with TB is that they offer international shipping to only a limited selection of countries. Which then limit the use of TB to proxy services, who works well but don't offer many cheap international shipping options and often skimmed about 10% of the item price as hidden conversion fees. Customer support will also be extremely limited if anything is wrong with a model.

That's the other big reason why J-scale set up a direct relationship with CM: we can offer full support without much language barrier (at least if you speak German, English or French). And though it might take some time due to shipping, we always get parts, replacements and guidance from Liuzhou. I believe that Jacky and CNRailModels would too, but my experience with Khaho is rather that they might not.