Reply to "Will we ever see a SD70ACe or ES44AC produced in plastic that is similar in quality to the Overland Models brass engines?"

Ask any dealer and they will tell you transition period is the most popular.  I cannot argue with that even though I have no interest in it.  I like contemporary stuff.  Ask why Lionel is making their 50th version of the Big Boy (and it will sell out)?  Ask why the biggest success for 3rd Rail this year is the Jawn Henry.  People complain about how big things these things are and how silly they look on short radius curves and yet that is what sells.

The steam folks say they want more small steam, 0-4-0s through 2-8-2s.  Guess what never gets lots of reservations and usually barely enough or not enough to make it happen?  So what people say they want and what they are willing to put their money where there mouth is are two totally different things.

Tower 55 was a disaster for Overland.  Ask Brian Marsh and he will have nothing nice to say about it.  It was mostly DCC related.  He was so happy to offload it.  He was the first with off the shelf high end DCC plastic offerings.  People complained about how expensive everything was and how this nit or the other was wrong...   Wrong horn, wrong bell, wrong lights.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  Sound familiar?

And they were not reliable because DCC of the time was not reliable.  The biggest reason why he backed out of DCC for the O Scale SD70Aces was because there is still not a standard large scale DCC interface and he wasn't going to go through that again.  That is all our fault for not participating the in the NMRA committees that make those standards.

IF there was a market for this stuff then maybe it would be done.  Truth is there is not a market for it: get over it.

Why maybe.  I asked Scott about making articulated 53' well cars and containers.  Gave him all the research to propose to manufacturers.  Turns out the design folks that did the Kato HO cars are the same folks who designed the Lionel Husky stack cars so getting really good designs was easy.  The project ended up being a no go.  Why?

Because all of 3rd Rails manufacturers are brass centric sub businesses.  And they said

We don't do die casting

We don't do pad printing

We don't do repeated runs of things.

All of the 3rd Rail and GGD locomotives and cars are individually hand decorated and the manufacturers have no desire to change that.

In short, they all agreed they would be too popular.   So here we have a situation where there definitely is a market and yet...  Why?

Because,  Lionel, MTH and Atlas make what they want to make, not what there is a demand for.

And if you talk to any of the plastic "mass" marketers, in any scale, off the record, they will ALL tell you they dislike dealing with uberscale folks like me, quite intensely actually.  Years ago the Intermountains and the Red Cabooses filled that void.  But then everyone wanted the accuracy and finish of brass RTR for the price of Railking.

Now even the brass folks are slimming down their American O Scale offerings to more hard core folks like me and one of the Asian Manufacturers said why the best.  "Don't like dealing with Americans, they all want everything for cheap."