As to the "when they return to work". Engineer Joe makes a valid retort to my terse response about keeping up with customer's needs. Corona has caused the entire United States to have to completely rethink how it lives daily life. I feel for any and all citizens who are forced by edict to stay at home, especially if that means forgoing a paycheck. It only makes sense that MTH, Lionel, Bachmann, the list goes on, would not be considered essential personnel. No one wants to be considered unessential, but maintaining and repairing a vehicle is a bit different from maintaining and repairing a model train. Be that as it may, their employees count on that job to keep the bills paid.
I humbly apologize for any irritation my last reply caused, and with that I will say this.
All we ask is that the companies who sell this stuff, keep in mind that people who are willing to spend high amounts of money to buy their stuff expect a little appreciation in return. It's not our fault if we buy a product that is defective or doesn't work the way it was designed to work on the engineering table. Maybe China screwed up when they actually built it. A wire got crossed, or didn't get attached right. I have only been in the train business going on three years. In that time I have great success with everything I have bought. When I see a thread that begins with "I am having an issue with" and notice it was started in January, has not one reply, nor has the initiator written a follow up saying, "Talked to MTH, found out what it was", which would have been possible in January, and February, I take it on faith there is a fellow forum member out the hanging in the lurch who has received no help from any direction. So I respond in April, not 15 minutes go by and another member responds that he had the same issue in March, it leads me to believe that MTH is either aware but not working on it, aware but can't work on it. I see it is the latter. In any case, knowing this forum exists, they are a sponsor, maybe someone who wants to work from home could spend his or day browsing the forum looking for MTH related issues, and responding to them. Lionel could be doing the same thing. Paid employees continuing to work their hours by answering questions or at the least, responding to problems found by their employees. Boring? Yes. Productive? Possibly. Gonna happen? No. Worth a try? Anything is worth a try.
