Doug, I beg to differ. Lower prices were a big part of K-Line’s marketing strategy. Had their list prices been equal to Lionel’s they probably wouldn’t have had the sales they did have.
The problem was too much new expensive tooling all aimed at the high end buyer, and all issued too fast to allow those products to generate the revenue needed to pay for the tooling. With all the overall indsutry wide emphasis on these high end products, there are simply not enoguh buyers for all of them, without some of them having to become blowouts. Read those wish lists on the OGR forum… the vast majority of them are selfish, impractical, not worth bringing to market and will NEVER generate the necessary sales to pay for their development. Unless they are priced accordingly to those investment costs - and they means no one will buy them.
For example, there’s a lot of moaning wishing there was a scale sized centercab switcher available. There IS! But it’s brass and it’s NOT cheap. But it’s made and availalble. You can’t have it both ways… the train companies cannot make everything that buyers say they want, and sell those items at prices that reflect a mass market interest. The Lionel Dockside Switcher is probably priced lower than Lionel would wish. But the lower price along with the compromises in scale detail gives it appeal to both high and low end buyers. Meaning it has the potential to make money!
K-Line also more or less abandoned the non-scale, traditionally sized product buyers who had been the back-bone of their sales, until the very end. (And the Hsky line was a wasted effort that was only done because the tooling was previously made by the Chinese). The brew-ha-ha with K-Line’s theft of Lionel engineering material was just another nail in the coffin that speeded the process up. That and the utterly poor handling of the original agreement between Lionel and MDK, which sealed their fate.
Another huge mistake was the later KCC offerings. Original