Being very mind-full of the moderators recent reminder, I think if one compared the number of new HO car tooling sets produced by Kadee and Intermountain in the last 12-13 years, Intermountain has produced a lot more. Tooling is very expensive, and to recover the investment, you need to sell a lot of models. I would suspect that Kadee has selected prototypes that have a very large (RR's that bought the prototype) and wide (modelers who model the era) market (all post-war, so of no interest to me.)

I am curious if the B&O wagon tops and Milwaukee rib side cars have been financially successful - one would expect those models to be a much smaller market. In their presentations at Cocoa, Intermountain will tell you that they did have at least one product that was a bust - I suspect it was one of the stock cars.

And I think that is the crux of the problem - expecting manufacturers to produce product that may not have a significant customer base could be the core problem here (there are lots of those IM stock cars still on e-bay - just like the LL Proto Mather stock cars - which, as I understand it, were almost given away by distributors 3-4 years ago).

I think the core problem is that the hobby is rapidly moving away from the era of this group - lets face it - this group is modeling Railroads from OVER 50 years ago (and the hobby's non-resin manufacturers seem to have just about left the ever-shrinking pool of WWII modelers out in the cold).

As far as I know we only have two high-volume HO freight car kit manufacturers left in the US - Accurail and Bowser? I am curious to see if Dennis comments on this thread - he may have the best insight.

Dave Evans