Country Joe, I agree with you. As do the facts. Ryan Kunkle at the TCA Museum presentation at YORK said that although the starter line trains get little attention, they in fact are what keeps Lionel in business. Off all the newly tooled locomotives in recent years, I have no doubt the starter set Dockside and 0-8-0 have been the best selling of the entire lot of newly tooled locomotives. Richard Kughn said the 4-4-0 Flyer set was the single best selling item in the Lionel catalog during his years.
So obviously, there WOULD NOT even be any high end scale trains were it not for the starter, entry or traditional lines of trains, which pay the bills.
Mike Wolf just said that his colorful, lighted up Christmas cars were the best selling items in his line. Mike Wolf is a train guy too. You'd think everything in his product line would reflect accurate prototypical realism. But Mike is also a businessman, which makes him something of a bean counter too. And if colorful, lighted cars sell, he's going to seize the opportunity. And wisely so.
Millions upon millions of traditional type trains have been made over the decades. Whereas we've seen high end scale engines get cancelled because they can't even get orders for 50 of them (I heard at a LCCA presentation that 50 was the minimum number).
So obviously there are a multitude of folks out there still running these types of trains on small to midsized layouts of differing levels of detail. Most folks don't have the space or the wherewithal for large layouts with sweeping curves to handle large scale locomotives.
JohnGaltLine wrote: "additionally, these sets are basic affairs with cheaply made parts and engines not designed to be particularly robust. They are children's toys or talking pieces for folks not really into model trains, for the most part."
Now for one thing, in almost 30 years I have never had one single defect or DOA. My very first Lionel 4-4-2 is still running after all these years, albeit with a replaced smoke unit... after 30 years, to be expected. I have MPC locomotive over 50 years old with plastic gears that still run exceptionally well. Needless to say, I do take care of them with regular maintenance. And I'm really into model trains: I repaint, scratch build, kit bash and add details, albeit on a suggestive versus a scale level.
And how about MARX Trains? For inexpensive trains, those tin ones have an amazing attention to accurate detail in the lithography. Not even to mention their durability. Yeah, they may have been toys, but they were certainly well made for what they are.
BUT we've seen an abundance of threads about high end products that didn't work out of the box, or failed within a year, or had detail parts break off, and replacements parts ARE NOT available. Are they superb nice models? YES. Are they worth the aggravation? To me, NO. But your mileage with vary. My trains do everything the feature loaded high end trains do, BUT in my imagination.
And probably most people buying LionChief Plus engines are not worried about being able to run 98 engines off one remote. I had a very large dealer who supports this forum tell me that in their experience, LionChief and LionChief Plus are the biggest innovations in decades. They allow more people to experience a level of remote control, versus the higher end models of which fewer people buy, but those fewer people are buying more, which is what keeps the scale end of the hobby going.
If I was really into scale, I would have gone with HO or N scales years ago. I don't have space for a large layout, but you can still do HO or N in a smaller space, which is why those 2 scales have the majority of the model train marketplace.
