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
Rusty, Granted on all counts, except I get the feeling that it requires more effort on Lionel's part to make new stuff. At least that is the impression I got from Jon's post regarding the development of the U33C, which also existed in 3 rail before comming to S. That being said, I wonder if S may see its own unique ideas come out regardless if Lionel has made it in O before or not. You are also correct in that I am tending to write off the others. I will try to keep your level of optimism about this. I just hope the circumstances are different at this time next year for them.
