What Is The Future of S?

This article contains speculation from your webmaster.

Model railroading, in general, is a hobby that one engages in, both early in life and later in life, typically. It's a hobby that involves many aspects of life, and can be quite time-consuming to participate in. One learns new skills, challenges oneself, and learns to be involved in something that takes quite some time to materialize. So, in general, the hobby doesn't change very rapidly, and is not well-suited for those seeking instant-gratification.

However, the world around us does change, and its rate of change seems to be slightly increasing with each year, at least with each decade. Manufacturing of the items we need to build our model railroads has changed. In the olden days, manufacturers would produce items, sell them wholesale to brick-and-mortar retailers, and the model railroad customer could walk into the store and buy whatever was still on the shelves. Sometimes things sold quickly, sometimes they'd take a while, and sometimes they'd linger on the shelves. This, then, offered marketing feedback to both the retailer as well as the manufacturer to see which items sold well, and which they should consider dropping from their product line. There was no other practical way of dealing with this, and it was a large risk to both the manufacturer and the retailer. If one made a wrong call, it could mean the end of the business.

When magazines became more mainstays, the concept of mail ordering was introduced. Customers could now send in a check or provide their credit card info via postal mail, to order items shown in the retailer's advertisement. This made it possible for those who didn't live near a model railroad or hobby store to still be able to acquire a specific item. Over time, some retailers realized that if they became only a mail-order company, they could cut out the expense of maintaining a physical store. This, then, allowed them to sell items for less than the full market price, as their overhead was lower. Stores with a physical presence started to complain to the various manufacturers, and so some manufacturers started demanding a minimum retail sales price for their product line, or they required the retailer to prove that they had a physical location. While that worked for several decades, it became clear that maintaining a physical store was the less ideal approach. You would get spur-of-the-moment sales, but you would have a good amount of overhead to account for.

When the Internet, and especially the World Wide Web came on the scene in the early 1990s, the concept of mail-order went to a new level. It took a number of years before online shopping could be done securely, but stores were at least able to put their inventory on their web site, and customers could then order, from literally anywhere in the world. While that opened up a whole new market for many stores that went "online", there were many stores with physical locations that could not compete with retailers that only sold online. It wasn't, and still isn't, trivial to create an online shopping cart system for your web site, so many older stores didn't bother with the Web. So, over time, either through retirement of the owners, or due to slumping sales, many physical hobby stores closed their physical locations permanently. Some switched to online only, but most just disappeared.

While buying via the Web has its conveniences (pick what you want, pay with your credit card, and the item shows up at your doorstep a few days later), the big downside is that customers aren't able to visually and physically see what they are buying. It also tends to kill the spur-of-the-moment sales, as one may not see the other items the store has for sale, as not all items may be listed on the site.

While all of that was happening, the cost of producing new products for manufacturers continued to increase. This was somewhat offset by American companies having Japanese manufacturing facilities producing their items, specifically after WWII. Over time, Japan's economy recovered and their employees started demanding higher wages. This led to increases in manufacturing costs, so model railroading companies started having items produced in Korea. Over time, the same thing happened there, and so eventually nearly all large-scale manufacturing of model railroading items was shifted to China. China is now rapidly heading in the same direction, and some companies, such as Lionel, are now having their products manufactured in countries that used to be part of the former Soviet Union, as the cost-of-living and labor is cheap there, and people there are eager to get work. However, an over, or total, dependence on the labor force of only one country is quite a risk to take. Reality hit in 2010 when one of the major manufacturers in China decided that they would no longer take orders from smaller U.S. and European manufacturers. This hit S-scale hard as two of our main manufacturers, S-Helper Service and S Scale America had all of their products manufactured by that Chinese factory.

At the same time, most companies, and not just in model railroading, started switching to a system where they kept less inventory. With the Internet, it was easy for manufacturers to set up pages on their web site (or portals for their retailers) to place pre-orders for an announced product. This gave companies a good idea of which products are of interest to their audience and which ones aren't. They would then make a call as to which ones to actually make tooling investments into. If the customer pre-ordered or pre-paid for an item that wasn't going to be produced, the customer would get a full refund. Otherwise, the company would get some up-front cash to pay for the tooling, or at least have a better risk-assessment made based on pre-order requests. The downside is that when the items finally arrive (which can be many months to even several years), if a person hadn't pre-ordered an item, they would likely not be able to get one, as there was likely little or no inventory stocked by the manufacturer, let alone with the dwindling retailers. This means that modelers have to buy an item when it is announced, or else risk losing out on it. This now applies to all scales in the model railroading hobby.

The news in 2010 didn't really affect the model railroading scale that has the largest marketshare, HO-scale (the Chinese factory is the parent company of Bachmann, for example), it disproportionately hit the small manufacturers the hardest. These are companies that were probably barely eeking out a small profit to begin with. This, therefore, spelled disaster for the scales with smaller marketshare, such as S.

However, as luck would have it, the foreign concept of "3D-printing" was coming into the mainstream. Expensive experimental machines had been around for a while, but both their costs and their end results made them impractical for actual commercial use. However, as the technology improved, and as more and more companies started investing in producing 3D-printers, it became a feedback loop, where small companies and later individuals started to buy those machines, which allowed the machines' manufacturers to further improve the technology and come out with even better machines, and so forth.

Today, we are a point where a basic 3D-printer is only a little bit more expensive then a computer paper printer. Software is needed to massage and prepare a print, but one can download for free, or pay a small fee to purchase, 3D-printer files, to then print the item at home. Additionally, a new market has been created by individuals or small companies that have the CAD drawing experience to design a model of just about anything and then print the item to be sold as-is, to be the basis of a kit, or to completely finish and sell as a ready-to-run model. Some are even able to create items in more than one scale.

As with anything else, technology will continue to improve and become cheaper. So, there will likely be a day where most model railroaders will have a good-quality 3D-printer sitting on their workbench (or in their garage, to avoid the fumes and noise in the house), and use that as another tool to create parts, details, or whole models. For scales such as S, this, then, appears to be the future for our scale. While there will continue to be manufacturers, such as ScaleTrains, American Models, and Lionel, they will be limited by which tooling they already have for S-scale models, and they will be taking a large risk each time they do a run of a model for us. Creating a model based on completely new tooling is now a very, very large and very risky proposition for these companies, so we should not count on that happening in S. Hopefully, we will all continue to support them, and in the meantime, we each can make S be known to other modelers, thereby growing our marketshare, to the point where these companies might want to take the gamble. But, if you want a specific model, whether whimsical or a very specifical prototype, 3D-printing may well be the way to building your model railroad in the future. In 2023 a company designed S-scale track, several engines, and several cars in a CAD program, and made their 3D-printer files available for anyone to download and customize. So, it is now entirely possible to 3D-print your way into your next layout!