I enjoy the hobby and have all decades of Lionel, plus new computer run Lionel and MTH and it is all great. Considering that O gaugers run their trains until death, I'm am just making the observation that at some point that $2-$4K buck loco will be dead as a post when the components are no longer available, while the $27 E unit loco keeps on ticking. Hopefully someone will come along with an electronic E unit that bypasses the computer for that situation so they could run again. I repair comm gear, one particular model is still manufactured and sold. Some of the IC's in it are marked as 'obsolete' by Newark, Mouser, Digikey and others, and can only be found in places that sell obsolete IC's, or from Taiwan and China via ebay. Function specific chips for a particular item are made in a quantity that supports the planned number of manufactured units, and and amount for possible repairs over a certain period of time. Would venture a guess loco's are the same way and the chip supply does have an end point.
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