It seems to me that as difficult as the Sanda Kan issue is, I truly do not see an imperative from these manufactures to make a come back. You make a good point that AM, SSA and SHS are exponentialy smaller than Lionel, but economies aside, I think Lionel has a greater zeal to enter this market than they do to maintain it. To be fair,I am not criticizing any of them for the choices they have made, as we all have a great many priorities in life and are free to act on them as each of us deems important, but I think SHS, AM and SCA could "take-it" or "leave-it" at this point.
Please consider this: It's difficult to stage a comeback when your tooling is being held hostage and/or Sanda Kan doesn't even honor its commitments to complete what has been contracted for. This is the situation AM, SHS and SSA were in and it's taken the past year plus to remedy. There still may be some unresolved issues rattling around.
I'll admit, even at their peaks before the S/K debacle, they weren't the fireball that Lionel/Flyer is. But, they weren't in stasis, either.
I'm pretty sure AM and SHS are in S for the long haul, they don't have any other scales they're working in and these companies are their owners lively-hood. SSA's owner has the hobby shop, plus offers products in other scales to cover the dry spell, but Ron would have ditched S Scale a long time ago if he didn't think it was worth the effort.
It will still take time for AM, SHS and SSA to get sorted out and that puts Lionel in a position to take advantage of the situation. Plus, Lionel DOES have the technical and financial advantage.
Everything Lionel's introducing so far, the plans and technical files already exist, it's just a matter of recalculating the dimensions for S and getting the dies cut. A somewhat over simplification perhaps, but a lot of the legwork is already done at Lionel.
AM, SHS and SSA have to start form scratch with every new product, gathering the data, draw the plans, etc. Plus, there's considerably less staff to do all this work.
No doubt about it, Lionel's bringing good things to S. Their zeal and name recognition will benefit S in general, but let's not write off the others.
Rusty
