PRRronbh posted:MELGAR posted:In the 1940s and '50s, trains and railroads were seen and used by a larger percentage of the population than today. Hence the broader interest in model trains - which meant Lionel to most people. Thus, it was more cost-effective to invest in tooling and production of model trains than now. HO is doing better because its base, although a small part of the country's population, is much larger than O gauge and O scale put together.
MELGAR
Melgar, 100% right on! Plus the smaller HO tooling is less expensive. A boarder audience and more return on investment, simple math.
I think that is a simplification. HO material costs are a lot less, but their tooling may not be that much less than O..however, that tooling cost is a fix cost, so if you spread it over more engines being sold, the cost/unit goes down. The size of HO makes some things more difficult, for example, to detail them, to fit speakers and sound boards in them, is a lot harder (Mike Wolf in an interview I read a while ago said that miniaturing DCS/DCC for their HO line led to improvements for O gauge units, because that allowed more complex functions in the larger engines).
As far as trains being intrusive in people's lives and that led to the interesting in Lionel, that one is debatable, it doesn't explain why, for example, so many modern train modelers in all scales are still interested in steam engines, when many of them, like myself, never saw a steam engine in operation (they were rare even by the end of the transition era, c1960), so a lot of those kids who were born in the 1950's and 1960's likely never saw them, let alone younger folks. I think trains were more like airplanes, and while kids had toy airplanes and balsa planes with the rubber band propellers, it wasn't like all kids were into flying model planes.
. The real reason was back in the day Lionel was seen as a mass market toy that was tied to the holidays, and was part of mass culture. As others pointed out, Lionel sold their trains through all kinds of outlets, advertised them on tv, radio, newspapers and general purpose magazines, JLC in many ways was a marketing genius from what I have read, I suspect he was the one who helped promote the idea of trains as this holiday tradition, the way other things have come to be associated with the holidays....
for the reasons that have been talked about a lot on here and elsewhere, tastes changed, a lot of new toys were introduced in the 1950's and 60's, things like slot cars (which were directly tied into the car crazy culture we developed, it is a very different love affair people had with cars then most people had with trains as I mentioned above comparing them to planes), and the kids who grew up with trains didn't necessarily even try to pass it on to their kids, instead of that first train set it was other toys, for a kid who trains was about a train around the tree, which was a lot of the train market, it very well could be something they wouldn't pass down because perhaps it was nothing more to them than what the family did growing up.
As they say, it is what it is, HO is still chugging along, it has its hobbyists and seems to develop new generations. 3 rail has relied on nostalgia for the past and also cultivated a new group, those who like 3 rail for what it can do, they like the scale detail, they like the operating functions. The latter group also includes people doing hi rail but can't/won't buy the high end Legacy and Premiere kind of models, so they buy the railking and the like, and that if anything is what is going to keep going on forward, but it is likely to remain a small market, much smaller than HO. Likely HO sales help MTH keep going with 3 rail O, the way it likely does for Atlas and 3rd rail, lionel is the oddball in that it hasn't really attempted to do HO, so its profits are mostly 3 rail O (with a smattering of S).
The one nice part is if what I see with manufacturing going on, between flexible automated machinery and 3d printing and similar technology, there could come a time when you would have the ultimate lean production, where a manufacturer would have the scripts set up to produce a wide variety of products, you order it and they 'print' it...and it isn't that far in the future. Not sure if trains survive as a hobby to see that, but it certainly is a viable possibility for the future. Lot cheaper to create a script to produce an item from a printer than the tools, dies and jigs to produce new products the way they do today.
