Alan Hummel posted:Way back when Atlas had about a 4year time when basically nothing was available in any scale,they were supposed to pull everything in China and move it-what happened to that dream?
I surely give Lionel credit for keeping the Lionscale project in North Carolina. I think they could easily take over the Atlas O Scale line and I think O Scale would see BIG improvements in availability,but that's just my opinion for what little that's worth.
Tooling in China will pretty much always stay in China. The Chinese government is very protective of any intellectual property made in China, even if engineered by a foreign entity. And in the case of Atlas, or any of the other model train manufacturers for that matter, very little engineering is done outside on these models anyways... The "importers" generally supply prototype research such as dimensions (drawings), photographs, paint color, lettering data and a check to pay for the factory to make it and then let their Chinese factory have at it, sans an occasional factory visit or video Skype meetings with the factory engineering teams. Therefore, all the tooling is designed and engineered in China so that tooling is pretty much guaranteed to stay in China. Now... the tooling can be moved to another factory in China (which is what Atlas had to do several years) but trying to get that tooling out of China takes an expensive legal battle that you are pretty much guaranteed to lose.
The reason that Lionscale equipment is made in North Carolina is because that tooling was the original Weaver tooling that was made in the USA. A deal was made that seemed to satisfy both Lionel and Atlas with the split up of Weaver. Atlas got the Chinese half of Weaver, e.g. recent troop cars, because Atlas only has manufacturing in China and Lionel got the US-based Weaver tooling because they already had US-based manufacturing so they just rolled the Weaver line into the North Carolina factory and everyone was happy.
Scott Kay
Austin, TX
