Results of the Lionel product survey from last Fall:
The biggest thing that sticks out to me is the low number of votes. That is the problem IMHO. If you want an importer to do road specific details on an engine for example they would need to have quantities in the thousands. Scale Trains in HO does engines in runs reaching over 10 thousand depending on model. If you follow any of Jason Shron's (Rapido) videos he goes into great detail about what it takes to build trains overseas. I had a post on the S scale FB group about the S scale passenger cars that Scott at 3rd Rail/Golden Gate Depot wants to make and got ripped to shreds mostly due to the $1800 per set cost. He isn't close to having enough orders to go forward. Not enough S people, and not enough people willing to spend the money that these low volume runs will require.
It's purely economics. I'm glad Lionel found the Pacific tooling and has been able to fit Legacy. I want to know if they will have a fan driven smoke unit synched to 4 chuffs per revolution and Kadee coupler option. For the price increase over the Berkshire I would hope so.
I have converted the original Pacific to DCC with a TCS WowSound decoder and I'm pretty pleased with it. Having a Legacy version with synched smoke unit would be even better as Legacy is just more fun and easier to use IMHO.
