(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
The end of model railroading? Trump's tariffs may kill the industry, and won't bring back jobs [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-28
The locomotive shown above is an example of what many people think of when they think of toy trains. It’s the product of Lionel’s postwar glory days (late 1940s into the early 1960s), manufactured in America by skilled craftspeople. It’s also a far cry from the kind of toy trains now being manufactured and sold today.
The manufacturing base, the skills and expertise that produce toy trains today in all scales, not just 1:48 O scale Lionel uses, has largely moved to Asia. Bringing it all back to America is simply not in the cards.
Exploring why that is, is one way to understand why bringing manufacturing jobs back to America isn’t going to happen, neither easily or quickly in any case.
FREIGHTWAVES magazine had an article by Craig Fuller explaining why back on April 25, 2025
The industry could be facing a looming extinction event
The beloved hobby of model railroading, a cornerstone of American culture for generations, faces an existential threat. As the toy and hobby industry grapples with potential new tariffs, small and mid-sized businesses find themselves on the brink of collapse. The proposed up to 145% tariff increase could spell doom for an entire sector, reducing it from a vibrant niche to a relic of the past. At the heart of this crisis lies the unique economic structure of the model train industry. Unlike mass-market products, model trains operate on razor-thin margins, typically 15-20%. The industry relies heavily on pre-selling, with 95% of products sold months before arrival. This leaves no room for sudden price adjustments when shipments arrive, making the proposed tariff increase catastrophic. The nature of model train production further compounds the problem. These are not mass-produced items but highly specialized, low-volume products. The costs of tooling and engineering are spread across small production runs, meaning there’s no economy of scale to offset the tariff’s impact. Whether a company produces 2,000 or 10,000 units, the fixed costs remain high, making any significant tariff increase devastating to the pricing structure. Some might suggest moving production domestically, but this solution is neither economically viable nor logistically feasible. Labor and compliance costs in the U.S. are 5-10 times higher than in Asia. More critically, the specialized infrastructure required for model train production—including tooling, mold-making, and specialty die-casting—no longer exists in the United States. Decades of outsourcing have left the country without the plants, parts, or trained labor to match the precision and efficiency of Asian manufacturers.
emphasis added
There’s more at the link, but signing up for an account (free) is required.
It’s enough to give an idea of just what the real challenge is with bringing ‘good manufacturing jobs back to America’. It would take trillions of dollars of investment in plants, specialized machinery, developing a work force with the necessary skills, and doing the same with all of the related industries needed to support them.
What the people promising to bring back ‘good’ jobs don’t want to tell you is that they were good because they were union jobs where workers had the power to get that good pay and benefits in exchange for their labor and skills. Those jobs disappeared because they were deliberately outsourced and offshored in pursuit of lower labor costs and higher profit margins. If those jobs did come back to America, there’s no promise people working in them would make anything like the kind of money they used to back in the 1950s.
(Paul Krugman has a lot more on this at Substack, which I’ll try to get to one of these days...)
The locomotive shown above is all analog — not a computer chip in it. It has a whistle in the tender, can go forward, neutral, reverse, and it has a smoke unit. It’s overbuilt — given proper care it can keep running for decades.
A roughly comparable locomotive from Lionel today is loaded with electronics and all kinds of features. It is highly detailed. It can be controlled with an app on your phone via bluetooth. Allowing for inflation, the cost is roughly equivalent — but those same features make it far more delicate and harder to repair. Compare a car from the 1950s with one from 2025, and you see the same phenomenon at work.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/5/28/2318868/-The-end-of-model-railroading-Trump-s-tariffs-may-kill-the-industry-and-won-t-bring-back-jobs?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
