Hi Dave -- Yes, Athearn sold zillions of boxcars of only one type with huge door guides. Would you accept those today? It also sold zillions of tank cars with a dome that was not right. And F7s with windows that were wrong and truck sideframes that weren’t right. And GPs with way too wide hoods. And they did that for years and years. But they were generally available like you say... How many models did Uncle Irv have for years before expanding the line? Two diesels, boxcar, tank car, 4 truck flat, gondola, caboose, streamline passenger cars, stock car, reefer and maybe a couple of other things (Crane, maybe). It wasn’t until Irv had been making these few things for many years that he added PAs, GP35, more variations of boxcar and heavyweight passenger cars. And it wasn’t until Horizon acquired Athearn and production was moved to China that you saw a real variety of rolling stock and high fidelity – AND limited production. AM is as close as we get to the original Athearn, not a bad thing. Perhaps the newcomers should be happy with AM?
Even the original Athearn (while Irv still had it) ran all its models in batches. Usually two or three were in productions at any given time. Athearn did not warehouse their products; they were warehoused at the distributors. If you needed a part and the model was not currently in production you were out of luck unless the LHS had the part on hand. Frequency of reruns was based upon sales, of course. These days, practically nothing is made in quantities large enough to last from one production run to the next – IF there even is a subsequent run. Kato was the originator of this system, and the rest of the industry has learned the lesson very well. It creates an artificial demand and inventory costs at the maker and distributor are kept low. The flip side is the hobby shop’s inventory costs go up, unless the shop owner is astute enough to gauge his future sales accurately. I doubt you will ever see an era where you will always find a particular high fidelity “staple” model item on the shop shelf. It is a difficult thing for a shop to do, as the orders have to go in months, or even more than a year, in advance of distribution, and a small shop just doesn’t have the space to hold enough inventory to last the cycle or the dollars to buy it. You are seeing one of the major factors in the demise of the local shop in this paragraph. And your E-bay comment is telling as well. Your comment about a complete new cycle of products in HO every couple of years says the same thing – if you missed it, you really missed it. How many times do you think the Milwaukee Hiawatha set will be produced? And how expensive will it be the next time? In the meantime, let’s just hope that MTH and Flyonel find it profitable to make high fidelity S products and that the variety of products increases -- and look for those once produced items on E-bay. Have fun! Bill Winans (former hobby shop owner and glad to be out of it) --------------------------- .... Athearn probably sold more plastic boxcars in a day than the average number of cars in a whole brass run. ... Newcomers to S need to be able to buy common items from stock and not be told too bad you weren't here last year or 5 years ago when they made that. I don't see how we can expect to attract new modelers when we make it so difficult to get into the scale. I've been debating whether I should build my new layout in S or just de-compress the design and build it in HO due to equipment availability, so I can imagine how a newcomer can feel about it when I've already got a lot of S stuff and it still seems hard to me. It's depressing when you make a list of things you want for an S scale layout and find they are available cheap and in quantity on ebay in HO scale yet they have not been made in S yet and they may never be. Maybe MTH and Lionel will fix the problem but if they just cater to the high rail segment of S they won't help much. American models and SHS did a good job getting the ball rolling but they lacked the deep pockets to keep the motion sustained.How long has it been since AM has made a new model? I see the same offerings now that I saw when I first looked at S scale many years ago while HO has added a complete new generation of models every couple of years....DaveBranum
