As you you say, should be no surprise. I assumed everyone knew that they bought tooling to produce what that tooling can produce, not to start investing in design and production of other models unrelated to this tooling. Unless a survey is for selecting among the tooling they own, I believe it would only build reluctance about S. A wide open wish list survey or even emails to them of this nature would just demonstrate the scattergram of desires that I regularly see on all of the eight S scale forums on which I participate. That certainly would not motivate me to invest in advancing an S project when I have new steam loco and other tooling to play with in an HO market that is at least 50X bigger. I even saw a suggestion elsewhere that such a survey should include track related items and structures!?! Not only have they have never made either in the massive HO market, they didn't buy any structure tooling.
On a related note, I will not be running a survey, but I have the opportunity to send my recommendations to Scaletrains mgmt. for which tooling they should fire up for their first releases.
So feel free to post your thoughts here (hope you don't mind doing this on your thread Rusty). Let's make the assumption that the SHS approach with regard to wheels, couplers, power and controls (except obviously the Locomatic) will be followed.
I'll start with my views:
1) if they have the tooling for the E7 that was never produced, I think that should be first. I think this would be incredibly exciting for S.
2) Consolidations - these still regularly command $500 even for the non DCC ones and sell fast.
Bottom of the list - Billboard Reefers. SHS made 34,000 of them, far more than any of their other models. Then MTH made more. Ebay is regular full of both SHS and MTH reefers. Then L-AF piled on with more in recent years.
