Are Lionel and MTH ever going to have some new locomotive model produced?

How many copies of a new issue would have to sell to make it profitable?

What would a new issue cost to produce the first copy? 100-200 grand? I dunno.

The hobby is shrinking at an alarming rate. I doubt we will see any new (not warmed over) issues. There will be some mods made to existing molds, but that's about it for new stuff.

Except for the newer passenger power from Siemens and EMD, seems most of the major diesels have been done, except the SDP40F.

I just think there is too much product out there right now, most of it to me overpriced.

It seems to me that the most famous and important steam, diesel and electric locomotives have already been made by one or another of the O gauge manufacturers. These would be the prototypes of interest to the vast majority of model railroaders. The types that have not yet been made may not have a large enough number of potential buyers to justify the cost of tooling. Yes, I can point to many locomotive models that I would like to have. But is it cost-effective for a manufacturer to make them? I'm not sure. Having said that, I'm still surprised that the Amtrak ACS-64 has not yet been offered in O gauge.

MELGAR

A few models come to mind that should be good sellers The Timken 4 Aces 4-8-4. I have asked those at MTH to use the die from the newest European Electric that they have done to produce an Amtrak ACS-64. Some to the newest NYC Transit subway models such are the R38s, R40s, R42s R46s, R86s, R143s, R144s. Lionel will not be producing any NYC Transit models. The newer Siemens Amtrak diesels that are operating out of Chicago and soon in California. The Baldwin Shark Passenger Diesels from the 1940s & 1950s. If no new locomotive model are produced this fine hobby of ours will just fade away just as it almost did in the 1960s and has already begin to. I am here to support the companies that produce new locomotive models as I have been doing since the 1950s.

Edward G.

ed new haven line posted:

... If no new locomotive model are produced this fine hobby of ours will just fade away just as it almost did in the 1960s and has already begin to. I am here to support the companies that produce new locomotive models as I have been doing since the 1950s.

Edward G.

I do agree with this part of your comment. If new prototypes are not made, long-time modelers may not support the hobby. I personally will not buy a type of model locomotive that I already have just because the newest version has whistle steam or a moving bell...

MELGAR

Dominic Mazoch posted:

I just think there is too much product out there right now, most of it to me overpriced.

That there is the actual truth. That prohibits the purchase of the products and thus prohibits the money to make new models. They have about put themselves out of business because of the over price of things. Why do you think they do BTO because they can't afford to make 1000's of them not knowing if they have enough buyers because they have the selling cost so high. And is there a to high suggested retail price ?  I say yes. Why else can train world, Charles roe, etc able to sell them for about 10% +/- less than suggested retail price. They need to make a profit. Another thing that raises the price is very few sellers except your real big ones can buy direct from Lionel, They have to go thru a distributor, So there's another company that has to line there pockets with your money. I would bet that each person/company has anywhere from 30% to 60% mark up from there cost to pay overhead and other expenses. This includes Lionel/MTH. Do you really think a $2000 engine cost cost anywhere near that. I would bet that they pay between $300 - $400 to have it delivered to the united states. 

Perfect example about a year and a quarter ago Lionel had the pet shop train sets on sale if I remember right for about $39 as they where not selling ( do you think they where taking a lost on them. ( retail about $120 if I remember correctly ) Probably not. Probably right at cost or a couple dollars over. These where not you lionchief sets. 

The other locomotives that have been overlooked have been some of the 1960's and 1960's General Electric models. 

There are the U18B and the B23-7/B30-7 variations for somebody to mass produce. 

Exact models of the EMD GP18 have not been made.

The 1960's era SD40 has only been made with TMCC from Atlas O and Legacy from Lionel, but there are not any of the 1960's SD40's being produced by MTH with DCS ProtoSounds. 

The USA GP40-2 and Canadian GP40-2W have not been made in O scale. 

The GP49/GP50 has not been mass produced in O scale. 

Andrew

If MTH or Lionel made an accurate Boston and Maine GP18 or a Maine Central U18B, I'm in.  I would also like MTH to make a Maine Central F3 and passenger cars to go with it.  

Other than that, I think I'm pretty much done buying the trains themselves.  I've got way more than I have room to display and run on my layout.  

What would a new issue cost to produce the first copy? 100-200 grand? I dunno.

One of the HO companies said it cost $100,000 to produce new tooling for a locomotive. That was also back in the 1990's! Today, it's more like a quarter of a million plus. The cost is much higher for O scale as the physical molds are much bigger, so the machines have to be larger. Dave Olsen commented here about the latest Legacy engine, that Lionel had put $80,000 into tooling revisions. Not new tooling... just revisions.

In the recent Facebook presentation from Dave and Ryan at Lionel, Ryan said the problem with doing new locomotive tooling is producing a model that will sell enough units to pay for the "six-figure" tooling.

If no new locomotive model are produced this fine hobby of ours will just fade away just as it almost did in the 1960s and has already begin to.

New locomotives has nothing to do with the O gauge/scale hobby fading. The entire customer base is aging. Which is more important for costly high end locomotives, since it is usually older, more-established or retired hobbyists that can afford to purchase them.

And the scale part of the 3-rail market is even a smaller audience. Now factor in large scale locomotives cost more to produce, therefore are more costly at retail thus limiting sales potential. Now factor in larger engines that need larger minimum radius curves: A further loss in sales potential.

HO and N scale both have new products coming out - because they're both larger markets that can bring a timely return on tooling costs. But when you bring that up here, amongst the comments you will read are that HO doesn't have the heft of O gauge, that the sounds in O are so much better, or that their eyesight will no longer handle the smaller scales.

Heck, the fact that Microscale is always introducing new sets of N scale decals every month blows my mind. Too small for me too. But obviously not for everyone, otherwise they wouldn't continuously be produced.

So if you want new locomotives, you either scratch build them yourselves, or send your favorite train company a non-returnable gift of $500,000.00 with the guarantee of more if needed. Aw, c'mon Brianel, you're being way too hard... this is the entitlement generation. Lionel owes it to us. You know, have it your way and right away!

Or to put it another way, if an acquaintance asked you to do a job for him that was going to cost you $500.00, and he was going to pay you no more than $50.00, would you still do it? Obviously the train companies are consumer product businesses. So making new products would seem to make sense. But not if the companies are guaranteed to lose money on them.

Originally posted by Domonic Mazoch:

Except for the newer passenger power from Siemens and EMD, seems most of the major diesels have been done,
except the SDP40F.

Originally posted by Melgar:

It seems to me that the most famous and important steam, diesel and electric locomotives have already been made by
one or another of the O gauge manufacturers.

NO they have not! You have the GE B23-7, GE C36-7, EMD GP40-2, ALCo C636, ALCo T6, BLW DT6-6-2000, BLW S12, FM H-20-44 

Originally posted by Edward G:

A few models come to mind that should be good sellers The Timken 4 Aces 4-8-4.

Um Ed, Third Rail made that loco several years ago and they still have some stock left to sell.

Weaver also made the Baldwin Passenger Sharks.  I wish I could have afforded a set when they came out.  They often go for more than list on resale now.

Tooling costs vs. number of units needed to sell a run is the main issue and has been for several years in O scale.  I don't blame manufacturers for not coming out with new product considering how many times I read on this forum that it is too expensive and will be cheaper on the resale side.  That's not exactly encouraging to a manufacturer.  They are a business and need to make money to operate and keep good people around. 

The reason for the brass hybrid from Lionel is that brass doesn't have the tooling cost investment.  The drive has already more than paid for itself in past projects.  As a brass shell, the numbers of units needed to be sold is greatly reduced to turn a profit.  This was a wise business decision. 

3rd Rail does some of the more unusual locomotives, because that is their market; finding the niche that will only sell 750 units in plastic or 100 units in brass.  Reruns are rare, but there have been a few.   

Overall, I don't see as much of an issue with this hobby as some.  Many people are still getting into trains, they are just not getting into them for the same reasons.

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to E6s and the E5s as they are the next projects I will be assisting with.  Serious research is starting now. 

I think now more than ever, we're seeing the "business side" of the hobby taking a huge precedence over the "consumer wants side" of the hobby.  Perhaps it's always been like that -- behind the scenes for sure -- but we're probably sensing it now more than ever.  Just look at the discussion over on the MTH/LCT Tinplate thread.  Same issues brewing -- even more so since 2017 came and went with no new catalog. 

A lot of stuff is going down in China these days that's likely making the manufacturing landscape very foggy at best.  So can you blame the importers for sticking with tried-and-true tooling, which isn't really THAT dated when you look at things?  And then just adding an incremental feature or two in an attempt to snag new buyers?  After all, that's essentially what we're getting with Lionel's next Vision Line locomotive, the Niagara.  So if they're taking that approach with a Vision Line product, what hope is there for "regular" products?  I guess working everything through overseas manufacturing today ain't what it was 10-15 years ago.

Then again, we HAVE seen some new tooling from Lionel that didn't necessarily break our piggy banks... namely, the recent Brass Hybrid locomotive.  I couldn't justify the price-point last year, because a Santa Fe steamer wasn't really calling my name.  But if they do a similar style brass hybrid loco in an Eastern or Pacific Northwest roadname, I could be in serious trouble.   

The marriage of "brass detail" with Legacy Railsounds and electronics has some serious potential.  Perhaps that's our pathway to the new tooling many folks are clamoring for.  Is that enough for those looking for something really different?  Only time will tell.

David

MTH's latest effort was the G.E. 70 Tonner. The first "new " release I remember in the past few years, so it may be awhile...........

Just one question on BTO. If a manufacturer needs a certain amount to sell to recover tooling, etc. and the quota is met, why not manufacture more to reap a bigger return on the molds already made, say maybe in another year and sell to those that are on the sideline, and also to have more spare parts available. Parts, is also my hesitation to purchase any BTOs.

Keeping inventory is a cost against the project.  It is square footage and lease rate for that space that ultimately cuts into the profitability of any project.  The days of being able to rent a warehouse to store parts and inventory are largely gone in general.  What is this years hot new product is next years blow out.  BTO makes sense because it is a true gauge of interest in a model.  It allows for the models that people truly want to move forward and the ones that don't draw the interest never get built.

Model trains is a high overhead, low profit business in general.  That is today's reality. 

PAUL ROMANO posted:

MTH's latest effort was the G.E. 70 Tonner. The first "new " release I remember in the past few years, so it may be awhile...........

Actually, it was a 44 tonner.

Rusty

PAUL ROMANO posted:

MTH's latest effort was the G.E. 70 Tonner. The first "new " release I remember in the past few years, so it may be awhile...........

G.E. 44-ton phase 1c diesel was the latest MTH new model. I get what the original poster is saying. I know I was excited for the release of the one I preordered (and pictured below), but you have to be realistic, too.

New tooling has to be a financially sound business decision. Just because you personally want something (and, yes, I have my own want list) doesn’t make it practical.

The problem is as others have pointed out the cost of tooling. Unless for example something like 3D printing makes the cost of new designs a lot cheaper (I am talking flexible production, not prototyping), the number of new products is going to be limited. One of the problems with modern engines is that while some tooling may be shared (for example, might be possible to share components like the frame between different F unit models hypothetically), when you are trying to build relatively scale fidelity equipment you don't really have the ability to share much. Back in the 'golden age' of Lionel things like drive mechanisms, chasis, frames and sub frames, would be reused with relatively little modification to allow making several different engines. Not very scale like, obviously, but allowed them to build things while sinking the cost into a lot more output...which isn't true with something like for example a scale Vision engine. HO gets away with this because the cost of tooling is less, as is the material cost (physically smaller trains), but also because of the number of units they can sell. Brass in general was and is a lot more expensive in HO because they produce a lot less (and brass tends to be more hand built than standard plastic and die cast engines) for much the same reason I would bet. If they ever perfect 3D printing to the point where it can produce any number of things quickly and relatively cheaply, then even BTO would allow a lot of different things being produced (a rough analogy to this was in the auto industry, one of the reasons Toyota and the other Japanese car makers were able to produce more products with more variation than the US auto industry of the time was the lean production they used was built around flexibility, whereas US production was specialized to the Nth degree), it allowed them to build more cars, more variations, more cheaply, than the US could do). 

And even in the 'golden age' of lionel, they really didn't introduce all that many new things at any given time, from reading articles in the CTT and other places, much of what Lionel produced was produced over a relatively long production run, and the tooling used for one thing might be used for something else when the first item was no longer made....so the amount of new offerings were relatively limited, each new catalog brought relatively limited totally new things. Given the nature of this market, I am not surprised, it is just too small to support a lot of new product offerings or even variations of offerings, the cost factor and the lack of size kind of prevents that.