jhz563 posted:Mallard4468 posted:I'm not sure that Mike has lost interest (if he's explicitly said that to someone, please say so), but he likes to make a profit and knows MTH's market and price points. He might have come to the realization that new (i.e. different) items can't be produced and sold for a price at which it would be profitable.
I'm tapped out on items which are simply remakes or repaints of something I already have. I would be interested in other tinplate - Marklin, Boucher, older Lionel / Ives / Dorfan, but they would all require new tooling and I doubt they could be made profitably.
I would guess you have summed it up pretty well. Repro's with different paint schemes got old. The old request of how-about-a-different-wheel-arrangement was done to death, with no results. A flyer brass piper in O would sell like hot cakes. A tinplate challenger style engine would be great, and no one would mind both power trucks swiveling.
I think cancelling the transition cars was a lousy idea.
But most of these things, even fresh rolling stock, require new tooling to make in appreciable numbers, not to mention fresh paint masks. And tinplate is still a niche within a hobby.
Perhaps newer manufacturing techniques will make things different in the future. But for now, hundreds of thousands of dollars in tooling can't be recovered selling 250 engines. And since the materials and construction techniques simply don't directly correspond with how other locomotives made, it will take a great deal of effort and ingenuity to rethink the wheel manufacturing process, all while trying to still innovative or at least competitive in your main product line.
I do think new tinplate will be made eventually, but I don't think it's soon.
As I tried to get MTH to reproduce the O Gauge Flyer Ambassador set, I can relate a couple of issues that are likely unknown by many.
jhz563 writes "A flyer brass piper in O would sell like hot cakes" The issue there is that MTH's agreement with Lionel specifically did not allow MTH to reproduce American Flyer steam engines in O gauge.
Although MTH did catalog the reproduction Ambassador set that I requested they make, they failed to get the minimum pre-orders required to reproduce the set and thus the set reportedly made it into a rough pre-production mock up status only.
NWL
