Dear Rapido Customer,

Jason Shron here. I'm the president and founder of Rapido Trains Inc. I'm writing to give you an update on the situation at Rapido HQ.

As Bobby has mentioned over the last few newsletters, we recently did a major update of our website, accounting system, and inventory management software. This will speed up our processes to ensure our dealers and direct customers get their orders more quickly and more accurately.

When I started Rapido in 2004, I made my invoices in Microsoft Excel. We eventually moved to QuickBooks, but we've grown so much in the last few years that our systems could not keep up. An upgrade was long past due.

There were so many parts to the upgrade that we expected there would be a lot of bugs to iron out. We were right - there have been dozens of bugs to fix and we're still at it. The major reason we have had such issues is that we've had to move tens of thousands of orders from our old system to our new system, and a misplaced comma or other doo-dad can throw the whole thing off.

As of right now, the admin team is trying to ship out the X72 boxcars, EP-5 locomotives and Barrel Ore Cars using a brand-new system, while simultaneously trying to read and answer over 300 emails from customers. The number of unread emails is still at 300, despite the team working constantly to answer emails. They answer one, and another comes in. As you can imagine, they are completely swamped. Many of the team have been working evenings and weekends to keep up.

Please bear with us. If you have a question, please send an email through our website. We will get to it as soon as we can. We will extend the E8 locomotive and Turboliner order deadlines until everyone's emails are answered. But before sending an email please read the rest of this newsletter as it may answer your questions.

You can still order the E8 locomotive and Turboliner from your dealer and from our website. We will not send the final numbers to the factory until next month. Even after we've sent the numbers, we can still add to the order as long as it is a DCC/Sound model. We always make a few extra DCC/Sound units.

If you have an online account with us, please use your email address to log in, not your username. Our new system only recognizes email addresses.

If you have open preorders with us, don't worry - we still have your order. The orders are in our accounting system, but unfortunately the data is not showing up on the web site. That will take us another couple of weeks to complete as it requires manually updating the data. There is no need to send us an email if your orders are not showing up. We are aiming to have them all there by the middle of March.

We very much value each and every customer. And I promise we will reply to your email. But we are short staffed, and we are losing one member of our admin team this week. (He's going to play with real GO trains for a living - apparently the HO scale ones weren't challenging enough for him.)

Please be patient and we will get back to you as soon as we get to your email in our ever-expanding inbox. And if you live in the Toronto area, we are looking to hire two new people: a warranty repair technician/customer service rep and an admin assistant. Both jobs are full time and are based at our Markham office. Please reply to this email with your cover letter and resume if you're interested!

Dan Garcia is working overtime fixing all the bugs in the website, most of which are caused by the website software not playing nicely with the inventory management software. If something is not working, please use the form on the website (or click here) to report the bug and we'll get to it ASAP. Some bugs take longer to resolve because we need help from our software providers.

That's about it. The good news is that so many of you want to order the E8 locomotive, Turboliner and other models. We'd much rather be swamped than hear crickets when we announce an order deadline.

Thank you very much for your huge amount of patience as we struggle through this. We always knew it would be a challenge to change over our systems, and that's why we put it off for so many years. Big kudos to our IT manager, Howard Chong, for steering us through this.

We hope to have our next newsletter out to you around March 10th, including some exciting new products!

Thanks again,

Jason