This comes up all the time, and the gist of the conversation is we are paying a lot for trains made in China that many of us feel are poorly made, and would love to see them made here. GG1 made some really great points about why this won't work, the companies sell too few a product and have too high a fixed cost basis, even with cheaper labor, to bring it back here at affordable prices; it isn't they are price going, the train companies have costs, including the people in tech/design/marketing/ vendor relations/parts/repair that make I would assume decent salaries and benefits added to the costs of tooling and production. They are likely making a decent profit, but gouging, I doubt it.
The reality is that China despite all the talk of rising wages, simply is cheaper to build in, and it is labor costs that make it cheaper. Those are a factor of large populations, but also reflects lack of organized labor of any kind and a government dedicated to keeping costs low (not to mention the government is also partnered with almost every business in China). The prime cause isn't bureaucracy, lack of skills in the US population, the EPA, Taxes, it is labor costs (and yes, people give examples of all kinds of horrors that happen, just saying on a big picture scale those fall by the wayside, companies didn't go to China for EPA regs, lawyers, lawsuits, taxes alone or as a whole, they went for the cheaper labor, and also not having to run factories themselves, they leave that to the contractor).
Automation can bring jobs back potentially (though doubtful with the train companies, unless someone using 3d technology develops lean production on steroids, where they literally can produce anything cheaply and quickly using flexible assembly), but that won't bring back the large score of jobs I suspect many envision, like the old Irvington plant in the heyday. Automated plants require few workers and even maintainence and tech jobs are few, modern automation machinery is designed to keep going with little maintanence and a lot of it these days is self diagnosing (someday may be self repairing as well). Not going to happen unless as I noted we have truly
Then, too, we have to ask what does it mean to be made in the US? Are we talking final assembly or all the parts/components? It is unlikely all the parts would be made here, as has been shown with supply chains during the current pandemic supply chains are literally all over the world; you might make a drug in the US, but the components come from India, China and the Philippines for example, so a Lionel engine is not going to have circuit boards made by a jobber in Peoria, body shell casting by a company in Pa, truck frames and wheels from a place in Georgia, just not going to happen. So is final assembly alone okay? The other thing I do know is that if it does, it won't be the equivalent of Henry Ford's model T plant, likely it would be as I noted before a heavily automated plant with modern techniques, and yes I think people in the US can handle that, much better than workers in Chinese plants do (bit of inside information, friend of mine operates in operations research circles, and Chinese plants in terms of lean production do much poorer than comparable plants in the US and elsewhere)
The reality is I doubt you will see the trains made in the US in any kind of large scale, as much as we may want it. Even assuming it could be done at a premium acceptable to buyers (let's say 10%), I doubt it is going to happen.
Quality is a totally different issue, though people usually associate quality with more expensive goods, and that isn't necessarily true. Quality is about 90% management influenced and it represents something where quality matters, it has little to do with where it is produced. In automobiles quality does matter, it is why the US industry went into a tailspin in the 1970s. Before that time, the US industry didn't necessarily produce great cars in terms of quality , it was more in the 1970's people had choices and comparisons. A US car of the 1970's would in places like the northeast rust out after a couple of years, the engine would be failing at 30k, 40k miles, you name it. Before that time people didn't really notice because a lot of people thanks to payment plans, would buy a new car every couple of years. People noticed, and the US companies were forced to make quality a priority because they were losing market share over it.
The truth is that in the current model given that you have pretty much a monopolistic/oligopolistic market where buyers don't have a choice, and the companies know that the cost of quality (really cost of poor quality) won't cost them much, so driving down the defect rate isn't worth it, pure and simple. Under the current system even if let's say the cost of labor was the same and the companies came back to the US, I don't think the quality would improve much if at all (though travelling 9000 miles on ships can't exactly make the product better). We forget that there was a lot of junk made here, too, poor quality cars, poor quality appliances, MPC Lionel wasn't know for quality , we only assume it was. The funny part was by the late 60's, the reputation for US made goods wasn't good. Back then Sony opened a plant to build TV sets just outside San Diego, and he routinely got questions about didn't he worry that thanks (no kidding) to 'poor quality US workers', that the TV sets wouldn't be as good as those made in Japan by 'quality workers'. He had a great answer, he said he fully expected the tv sets to be as good or better than the ones made in Japan, and that if the set had the company's name on it, that would guarantee that. He went on to say that the quality came from the committment to the product on the part of the management, and that the workers would reflect that.
The reason so much junk comes out of China is simple enough, with so much manufacturing being done there there isn't any competition based on quality. The quality of screws coming out of China is aweful, for example, but walk into the local hardware store/big box store and that is what you see, the same crappy stuff (Home Depot actually has some decent screws, if you know where to look for it, the Spax screws they carry are made either in Germany, in the US or Taiwan and they are well made ime). The move to China was predicated on low cost, and it was not predicated on quality at all, no reason to. If it breaks after the warranty is over, get a new one, if it breaks under warranty, we will fix it; if it works marginally well, well, tough, you got it so cheap.
