"With all the doom and gloom about the future the hobby and industry, one forgets that this doom and gloom has been offered for more than half a century. It's still wrong. This is a small but reasonably stable hobby from the standpoint of starter sets, even if the high end is getting smaller. There is a constant supply of 8 year olds and 80 year olds who weren't available the year before 
. It isn't all about the needs of the average 50-70 year old."
This is one of the best posts on this thread and I think it offers a lot of perspective on why people are running around saying the sky is falling. I have been reading about the death of trains since I can remember, I remember in the histories of Lionel how by the 1960's, TV was going to destroy three rail, then I started hearing the same thing about even scale model railroading, that tv, slot cars, rc planes, then computers, video games, etc were going to kill these off as kids suddenly became these alien creatures who didn't have what we did (doesn't matter what age we are, whether 40's, 50's,60's, etc, same thing). It is much the same thing that drives some of the stuff we see in the broader society, nostalgia for a time that probably never really existed. Back in the golden age of Lionel or whatever you want to call it, we have this impression that these things were the video games of their generation, but in reality they weren't. Yes, a lot of kids wanted trains when they were small, but a lot of them never got them, because they were expensive, comparatively video games, even with the cost of the consoles and the games, is a lot cheaper than trains ever were. Most kids back then didn't have empires, they had a relatively modest collection of track in some sort of small layout, with a limited amount of rolling stock and engines, and it was because they were expensive, even used. And they had the same problem back then we do today, kids as they grow up find other interests, back then kids switched to HO and N because it was less expensive and in the same small space, could have a more expansive layout. You read the articles of the people now building the layouts and what do you read? They hit their teen years, they discovered cars and romantic relationships and sports, and the trains were put in an attic or were sold or given away. If you graphed this, put age on the X axis, and interest in trains on the Y, you would see a giant shape like --|_____|--, where it is steady at the younger ages at a high level, it goes down, bottoms for a number of years, then comes back later on (and I make no claim to scale fidelity for this drawing).
Why is this important? It is because probably a large percent of those train sets represent a very limited duration market and always has, the memories of some on here are focused through their own love for the trains and kind of assumed everyone had it, when they didn't. So if the LC or LC+ units ever break down, it is likely that by the time they are read to do so they likely will be abandoned by most who got them. They put these units in the context of the post war trains they so love (as I do), and think that in 20 or 30 years someone would want to run these LC starter set trains and won't be able to....when it is a totally different beast. For one thing, conventional had such a long run, up until the invention of command control in the 90's, the trains had changed very little, so there were generations of us who all we knew was the transformer controlled/block control/forward-neutral-reverse/whistle trains, and it was a run of let's say 50 years (for postwar).
But it is going to be different going down the road, as people come back in in 20 years, 30 years, they would not have experienced post war or transformer the way we did, if I had grown up and trains had remote controls on them, I would expect if I got back into it that is what would be the norm. More importantly, the mentality is going to be different for younger generations, they grow up in an era when they aren't really expecting to go back to the things they had when they were kids (with some exceptions), with things changing so rapidly, you go with what is out there, it is a very different mentality. So a kid who gets a LC set and actually likes trains, is likely to move on to DCS/Legacy if he/she stays in it. Even if the kid gets a transformer set when they become aware that there is command control out there, they likely will want to move on to that anyway. And they are used to a world where things break, you don't necessarily fix them, like I said, in 20 years, if they get into trains again, they likely will be starting from scratch, they won't be looking back to the trains they had a ad kid, the same way if they get back into video games as an adult they won't be looking to use their old Xbox or PS unit, it will be whatever is out there. Yes, conventional trains are still relatively easy to fix, if a reverser board goes bad, there are alternatives to replace it with,and if the motor goes a can motor is relatively easy to find..but fewer and fewer will be doing that.
I think some of the reaction to this is those who loved conventionally controlled trains from their youth and see trains as being that, and hate to think it is going, and in some part I suspect it is because right now, through conventional control/Post war, we can remember times past, a father or grandfather who had those kind of trains, ran them, and the idea that someday post war might be only the realm of a few nostalgia buffs or collectors for the rare items, bothers them. The world where you changed the brushes or cleaned the gaps between the commutator sections on a motor is going away, and Lionel committing to LC seems to be the death knell for that. Then we have those who see conventional as the only 'authentic' way to have trains (much the same way we sadly have those who see conventional operation as 'playing with trains' because they use command, those who pooh pooh those who like 'non scale trains' because only scale will do) and this is a threat to that idea, since it seems to indicate conventional eventually will be as obsolete as the hand crank on a car. We are in a bubble, thanks to the baby boom that drove the Lionel post war boom and kept it going during the decline after the early 60's, where conventional was it, but that is figuratively and literally dying off as we age (I am part of that period, obviously).
To me, if LC can get parents to buy trains for their kids, and kids get exposed to this, and it means in 20 years or 30 years or whatever some of those kids are arguing about things, how simple radio control was better than the holographic trains of the modern era, I'll be happy that there are still people into the trains. There will always be people into conventional, and if in the future let's say no more conventional controlled engines are produced, I would bet you would see a small niche market of kits to allow RC only engines to work conventionally, and there will still be transformers out there, either original ones that have been reworked, or new ones that have been made to fit the needs of those who want to do it.
It is funny, I see much of the same thing in the car world, when I hear people (who are generally the same age as those complaining about the 'end' of conventional train control) complaining about the complexity of modern cars, that you can't fix them with a pair of pliers and screwdriver the way you could in the old days, how the new cars are too complex and 'break too much' and are too expensive to repair. What they leave out is the cars today are infinitely superior to what we had back then, and that the cost of keeping and maintaining them is a lot less then they were back then (anyone remember when mechanics had to pull the heads on cars at 20k, 30k miles to 'de-carbonize' the pistons?). Cars today in many ways are so superior to what was on the roads back then, yet people mythologize them (part of the reason is back then, when a car got to 25,30k miles, people were getting rid of them to buy a new car). I am not saying that the modern command control engines are more reliable than conventional engines of the post war period were, just saying that we often mythologize what we knew well.
I honestly thing Lionel is smart to drop the transformer for these starter sets, it makes sense, conventional might seem simpler (it is), but it also fits what will intrigue kids and adults today. The other thing is the starter set engines are more akin to the cheap engines Lionel came up with in past years for their base starter sets, the scout engines, the cheap steam engine that was my son's first train set engine 20 years ago or so, so LC if it makes it cheaper than LC+ makes sense (personally, I doubt supporting conventional control with lC+ is all that much more expensive than LC, reversing logic and maybe being able to sound the whistle plus the slide switch to set mode can't be all that much, at most a couple of bucks, I think they are doing that because they want people to move up to the more expensive engines, that will support both). I haven't seen any sign that conventional only engines are going away in the near future, or that they are removing conventional from the command engines, given that it doesn't cost them much if anything to support it, given how simple conventional operation is, so I don't know why the conventional operators care, likewise with the amount of transformers out there, old and new, I doubt if they need one it won't be available, now or in the future.
