Subject:
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Re: 9V Train Motor Being Discontinued?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.trains
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Date:
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Tue, 4 Apr 2006 19:02:17 GMT
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Viewed:
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4593 times
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Rafe Donahue wrote:
> The way I see it, there's not much that really needs to be kept: train
> motors, track with metal rails, the controller, the wires, and
> the wheels. If we never get new sets, I'd be fine with that; please,
> please, please don't make regret playing with my trains because I'll
> risk wearing out the motors. And please let me still buy more track
> (in a color that will match what I have!).
Here's a reality check. The way LEGO makes train track is realy just wrong.
It's way more expensive than it needs to be. Result - LEGO really can't
afford to keep producing the existing 9v track and hope to remain
profitable.
The way I see it, the current 9v track is DEAD. And there's nothing we can
do about it. Unless we're each willing to pony up 1000s of dollars every few
years to get them to make a run of it - but even that wouldn't work because
the tooling is more than just molds, the plant that manufactures the track
has specific machines to do it, those machines may do other things also, and
probably LEGO could come back to them in 2 years and get track made, but I
bet in 10 years, LEGO would not be able to get track made.
The only viable solution I see to hobby 9v track is for one of the existing
model railroad companies to decide they could make flex track tie strips in
L-guage, to fit one of their existing rail sizes. That would get us all the
track, of any radius, we need for the cost of ONE mold, which would probably
be useable for decades (until it wears out, but if they wear out the mold,
they would have an idea of how much demand there is and would make a new
mold if demand was sufficient). Of course that doesn't get us turnouts and
crossings.
The LEGO train motor is probably also more complex than it needs to be. That
would be a pricier thing for a 3rd party to produce, but perhaps if a
company is making the track, they would make a generic motor (and also a
generic wheel set). Some scale modeler will come up with the perfect
scale/guage convention and a scale model hobby would develop using the same
guage (yea, right, fat chance of that - the guage is too close to O, unless
somehow it turns out it's a better narrow guage for one of the many G scales
[1:20.3, 1:22.5, 1:24, 1:29, 1:32] than O).
So that's the reality. LEGO can not afford to keep manufacturing the current
9v line given the sales they get. There's nothing we can do about that
(other than somehow increasing our hobby 10x or 100x in the next few
months). It's simple economics (oh, I guess we could convince some socialist
government that LEGO trains are vital to the well being of their people...).
Frank
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: 9V Train Motor Being Discontinued?
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| (...) Without actually having seen the numbers in regards to the company's sales and manufacturering costs, I'm not sure any of us can say definately that that's the reality. We can speculate a lot, but without some hard numbers, I don't think we (...) (19 years ago, 4-Apr-06, to lugnet.trains)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: 9V Train Motor Being Discontinued?
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| (...) Ok, I'll add my $0.02 to the pile. Summary: Lego trains are the reason there are now 100,000 Lego bricks in my Lego room upstairs. Details: When I was a little kid in Wisconsin in the 1970s, we had HO trains in the basement (didn't (...) (19 years ago, 4-Apr-06, to lugnet.trains)
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