@Loose-Caboose posted:I am sorry Jonathan, I do not agree with your hypothesis that the manufacturers of train products are loosing money or barely making money. If they are they would be forced to close their doors. They can not day after day hemerage money unless they have a benefactor that is extatic about throwing their money away. Most rich investors are more inclined to find places to invest their money that has a payback. I do agree that the American worker does not like doing repetitive tasks. That is a job now better positioned for robots. Have you seen an automotive production line? It is very highly automated. Japan has taken the robot to new heights and the US better get on board to coin a phrase. The American population needs to excel with ingenuity not manual labor.
I never said the train manufacturers are losing money, I stated that no one is getting rich in this industry. Let's be very clear on that point.
It is not a high-profit business and that is not a hypothesis, but actually a fact. Sure one can make a living at it and even a decent one. We are going to begrudge that? In my minor role of consulting to the industry, I can say I do it as a labor of love and not for the money. I do much, much better in my full time employment. The knowledge gained about how this industry truly works has been worth quite a bit.
Robots can do lots of wonderful things and in turn bring good paying jobs to those who are trained to properly operate them. The challenge is who would invest the money into developing the robots to build our model trains when a typical run for even the "big" manufacturers of an O locomotive is at best 1000 units and more typically 500 for a locomotive during a single run? Lionel went to the brass hybrid concept because brass has no tooling. I can't speak to their specific numbers but in brass typically one can make as little as 100 units and still walk away with a little profit. Postwar Lionel was efficient in that over that period, they didn't produce a huge variety of tools. All the profit was in replication.
Simply put, the business model that most want to apply to this hobby simply doesn't fit. It's not like trains are being produced anywhere close to the numbers that TVs, computers, cell phones, cars, home appliances, and other mass produced product are.
3D printing has come a long way, but does not yet have the benefit of scale to mass produce. It's great for a few models and even then it takes massive amounts of labor to properly sand the finished product into something workable. Until such time comes along, and I have no doubt it will, where 3D printing really hits its stride, we are still stuck with the basic injection tool for most trains. That tool costs between 50k and 100k and only pops out a body shell that still needs manual labor prep, detailing parts applied by hand, a drive train assembled by hand, electronics sourced from somewhere and installed by hand, and paint with graphics.
Someday perhaps we will walk up the the replicator made famous by Star Trek and state, "PRR K2s, as appeared in the early 1940's" and one will pop out. That would be awesome for the hobby but I don't expect to be around at that point.
