State of the hobby?

1688torpedo · September 17, 2006, 8:55pm

Hello All! I bet this is what the Older Collectors in 1966 worried about. i.e "Will there be a market in 40 years? Will Lionel still be in Business? Will Lionel have competition then? This is not worth worrying about. When all of us have passed on it will be up to the younger generation to keep things going. All we can do now is enjoy our trains & help out others who are interested in joining our hobby. Otherwise, it is out of our hands when our time is over on this Earth. Take Care.

Poppa_Zit · September 17, 2006, 9:36pm

It’s my fault I tried to make sense out of your original premise that somehow what Lionel sold in 1953 could somehow be equated to today. I figured there surely must be a deeper meaning, because what you said was nothing more than overstating the obvious.

Well it shouldn’t have required too much effort. Quite obviously in '53 (or 54 or so as you prefer) 160M people in the US spent about $33ish million on Lionel (in '53 dollars). Present population growth AND dollar value being what it is today I thought the conclusion somewhat self evident.

That’s why I looked for a deeper meaning. What you originally stated was so EXTREMELY self-evident it really didn’t need to be said.

But then I wasn’t sure when you went out on a limb to write:

“I’ll hazard a hunch that compared to the 1953 population penetration Lionel is waaaaaay off that mark.”

So if that’s ‘going out on a limb’ are you saying that today Lionel HAS a comparable or greater penetration into the US market than it did 50 some odd years ago?

Absolutely NOT. I was being sarcastic because of so many changes (progress?) in the marketplace, and in the way people lead their lives with a multitude of new options to spend their free time, what Lionel did 50 years ago cannot be productively compared to anything today. It would be like comparing the sales numbers of Henry Ford’s Model Ts to the automobile market 50 years later, in the mid-1960s. Can’t be done to prove any point.