brianel_k-lineguy posted:Along with Rapido's Jason Schron, here is a link to another article about this closure, written by Jim Conway, the owner and founder of Con-Cor Trains and posted yesterday.
It is a lengthy article, but written by someone who IS in the train business, and therefore an interesting read.
This is a well written piece. What is still weird about the factory closing down is the sudden nature of it, even if the founder is sick, usually in these situations they don't just shut down, they give suppliers notice, etc, even for China from what I know this is weird, to be honest whatever the guy who owned the factory was facing, to me it shows someone who didn't have much respect for his clients (and yes, this has happened in the US plenty of times, Railway Express basically shut down like this back in the early 70's and left behind chaos, stuff was lost, people had a hell of a time making alternate shipping plans, etc).
The article points out a lot of the problems with outsourced manufacturing and 'reshoring', that it wasn't just the big manufacturers that were moved away from here, when those factories and such moved offshore so did the supply chain..the reality is that the supply chain isn't here for most things any more, the kind of relatively small shops that small companies depend on. Yes, they could source parts from Chinese companies, but the cost of doing that, the lags in shipping and other logistics would make that difficult. I agree with the author that someone wanting to 'inshore' train production would likely need to be a multi faceted shop, ie making things for more than the train industry, trains are just too small a market. There is a kind of a chicken and the egg thing here, it would be hard to manufacture here without suppliers of common products like screws being here, but those suppliers can't come back unless there is enough clients. This exposes a myth I think a lot of people believe, that if let's say China disappeared tomorrow, there is the infrastructure in the US to immediately "take back" production, and what this shows is that infrastructure really isn't here for a lot of it. It isn't just tooling at the train factory (and places to make replacement parts for the tooling, or upgrade it), it is a ton of other things, the circuit boards they use, the screws, the tiny bearings, etc....it is what they call the 'supply chain', and the logistics behind that are complex. With more mass market products (something like a stanley tape measure, that now have ones put together here), they get around that with parts sourced elsewhere combined with some local produced stuff, and 'Assembled in the USA"), they can get away with that, they can stockpile parts because they are used in more than 1 product family, that isn't true of little guys.
The article does hint at one thing that holds potential, where the factory automated screw production, in the future with things like the way 3D and other forms of advanced manufacturing are heading, because these makers are flexible it would be a lot easier to get the supply chain either in house or via vendors who can make a lot of different things flexibly, so the same guy making screws for let's say a train manufacturer could also easily make screws for a car company, a widget maker, etc......but that is kind of a brave new world. It would not be a glory days kind of things, such manufacturing will require relatively few workers, so it won't be a return to large scale manufacturing jobs. Local production here in the US will happen, as with Japanese cars and European cars being made here, when there were reasons to do so (some political, with BMW cheaper costs, some because of hedging against currency fluctuations and the ease of sourcing parts locally was cheaper than bringing it in from Japan). However, problem is an obvious one, this brave new world may still not be as cheap (tallying all costs) as doing the same thing offshore. The one advantage of this kind of manufacturing is that if something like this happened, it would be a lot easier to move suppliers, current tooling and the like is clunky, alternate manufacturing should be flexible enough (if it comes to pass) that all they would need to do is send the digital scripts that control production to the new place, rather than having to move physical tooling.
