Why did Lionel win?

[Billwiz]

arkady

Lionel trains appeared at the very beginning of the last century, so by the time Flyer S gauge was introduced in the postwar period, two entire generations had been raised to think that "toy train" was just an alternate spelling of "Lionel."  Lionel trains were very much a part of American culture at that time, and, to a certain extent, they still are.

I think this is an excellent overview of the O gauge market.  Plus, the OP may not be familiar with Amerian Flyer, who produced 3 rail O equipment prewar.  It was not until AC Gilbert bought the company and introduced their S line.

[Snip]

Captaincog

[...]

2. S gauge is more to scale and has a unique charm with the steam engines that smore and chuff along with running a long time with no worries.

Your layout makes 'Smores???

As the song says:

"Tell me more, tell more!"

[Postwar Paul]

This is fascinating! So much history. The original question being" why 3 rails.", and this answer is that it was grandfathered in from the early days, and became the de facto standard for 0. New products needed to be useable on the existing track system, and so it perpetuates to this day. It works extremely well, but takes an " eye adjustment ".

Flyer made a fantastic product, but Marx and everything else operates on the 3 rail. Not to take anything away from Flyer, but an incompatible track system. That's hard to overcome.

Paul

[stuartmit]

May have missed the reference to 63 and 73, but working from home at 76 yrs old during pandemic has allowed me to use what would be idle time between bid requests at the office to work on my new layout. I use a laptop with a VPN connection to my office which I carry down stairs to my train room. My outlook email tells me when a new request arrives, and I go back upstairs. The major point I wish to make is that I know although I am quite healthy, I am getting toward the end! Will I finish? (Also, how many more years will I be able to fly from New Jersey to Michigan for football weekends, enjoying the season tickets I just bought 5 years ago?) The clock tick--get To It!
Not a Downer--just being realistic.

[dlagrua]

The way I see it Lionel O gauge won over American Flyer S gauge because they invested in and did a much better job of marketing (advertising)  and selling. Let's not forget that back in the day, trains were mostly childrens toys. Lionel printed thousands of catalogs every year and saturated the market with them. The less afluent American Flyer just couldn't keep up and their line of Erector sets was losing popularity at the same time. IMO, Flyer was more realistic but that wasn't the selling point during that period