I fully expect that the collector side of the hobby will continue to be a driving force - and the varied Heritage schemes are made-to-order for that. We can hope that they make enough additional sales to keep the scale features going in the SHS line (and Flyonel as well), but I do not think that enough purely scale buyers will magically appear to float the line without the collectors.
Maybe some day in the future a newer group of S gaugers will abandon compatibility with ca 1950 Flyer, but not next year or the year after. I'm sure MTH also hopes that some O gauge collectors will become interested enough to add S to their collections as well. Pieter E. Roos --- On Fri, 7/6/12, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: > The fact that they are promoting these vanity schemes makes me think > they don't understand the scale model railroad market as well as they do > the toy train /collector market. > Scale modelers want to model the typical, not the unique. If NS has a > 100 diesels in plain black for every 1 loco in heritage scheme the > modern NS scale modeler is not gonna run out and buy a heritage loco. > Well, these are prototype schemes. The fact that Lionel is doing scale-wheeled covered hoppers in combination with a variety of bizarro fantasy paint jobs indicates that they are the ones who really don't get the scale market. I've ordered one of the gray cars.Stan Stokrocki
