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I've followed this thread with much interest. My only direct experience outside of HO scale is a Bachmann G scale that I put around the Christmas tree once a year. Nonetheless, I go to a variety of shows (my son likes the Greenberg shows, for example), read the model press, and hang around my LHS (although I wish it were more local). My impression from these inputs is that we in North American HO are fortunate to have mostly been spared the intense sparring and almost politicization that appears to be an ongoing part of the O Scale world. MTH wants to enter the HO market in order to expand their revenues. Gentlemen at MTH (and like other posters, I applaud your responses whether I agree with them or not), I think you will need to modify your behavior in order to even have a fair chance of succeeding in the HO North American market. Rightly or wrongly, fairly or unfairly, we have come to expect different standards of behavior from our mainstream suppliers. O scalers: the "flavor" of your marketplace is very off-putting for the typical experienced HO scaler who might be considering switching scales or adding an O scale. Note my references to "North American". In Europe, things are different. The big boys in the European hobby - Marklin, Fleischmann, Roco, perhaps Hornby (I say "perhaps" given Hornby's much smaller size, and the whole thing about OO versus HO) - have always eschewed standardization and opted to the best of their ability for proprietary featurs and systems that they hope would cause a given modeler to lock onto one company versus the others. Finally, I think some posters are in error in assuming that MTH is some big company - even by model railroad standards. According to Hoover's Business Research Services, to which I have a professional subscription, MTH has 12 full-time employees. They reported $800K in revenues (2003) to Hoovers. For small privately held companies, Hoover's does not verify the revenues, but in my experience the employee numbers are nearly always accurate. The data on other modeling companies that were listed showed average revenues per full-time employee ranging from $75,000 to $83,125. With 12 employees, this would suggest that MTH's annual revenues would indeed be between $800,000 and $997,500. If there is any basis for this data (and I believe there is), and if MTH actually invested $4 million in their DCS system, one has to wonder if a key goal was to try to remove Lionel from their O scale market via crippling lawsuits. Be that as it may, here are some context numbers: Atlas: 80 employees, $5.9M annual revenues Life-Like Products: 400 employees, $32.7M annual revenues Wm. K. Walthers Inc.: 160 employees, $13.3M annual revenues If someone can tell me the name of Lionel's actual corporate owner, I'll see if I can provide data on their size. While we don't think much about them on this side of the pond, I am told that both Marklin and Fleischmann are much larger than any individual U.S. model railroading firm (total industry likely a different story because the Continental model scene does not have the huge number of small suppliers characterized by the U.S. and UK markets). Bachmann Industries would dispute this, maybe correctly, but in terms of reporting to the usual business-data sources, they choose to hide their light under a bushel basket. In any event, no company in the model railroading market is publicly held.
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