Our O Scale hobby has survived depressions, world wars, material shortages and the ups and downs of economic conditions over more than 100 years. Model railroading and O Scale are here to stay, and will only get stronger as we move forward and hand off to the next generation of modelers. There are two factors that favor the life blood of model railroading.
Number one, model railroading comes from a tradition of craftsmanship in model building whether that stems from scratch building or from kits. Most of us die-in-the-wool model builders highly value a piece that is custom built over a plastic ready-to-run object of which there might have been hundreds of thousands of identical plastic models pumped out into the market. Scratch built are simply worth more not only intrinsically, but they hold their value over the long run. Many have known the works of Jerry White, Bill Clouser or William Lenoir to name a few.
Secondly, there are enough available model trains, parts, kits and equipment of various scales in the economy available to last a lifetime. Much of your cherished trains are in collections, hand me downs, train shows and available in secondary markets online. There is no shortage.
So the question is how does All Nation Line manage not to have worries over the implementation and sustainability to continually obtain parts for our beloved hobby? To the benefit of our customers, relationships with our partners and suppliers in the US has been the key factor that makes it possible to help us make models, parts and kits available to model builders. A key supplier that everyone knows is Kadee, made in the USA.
Although hard to imagine, prior to the expansion of products from the global market, All Nation Line (since 1923) has sourced all aspects of the business from businesses across this country. In fact, to this very day we work with family businesses that were creating things for us for over 60-70 years. Most of the people that help us bring products to market are small jobber shops, family owned and handed down businesses right here in the US. Working with excellent local machinists is essential for All Nation Line to continue to bring you these products. In essence, these small firms became very lean to remain competitive but also handed down their shop skills from one generation to the next. Consequently, the quality of their work kept improving over the years especially with the use of new technologies. A couple of our helper partners, to name a few, include Gower Machine Shop, Automatic Turning, Craft Die Casting and Durite Screw Company all manufacturing proudly in the USA.
And last, model railroaders happily will be realizing in the not too distant future a new paradigm shift in the way they can obtain model trains. In short, the tool of choice will be AI CAD whereby for example a plugin to a ChatGPT or DeepSeek takes your vision of a model and generates the Python script or macro that executes in say FreeCAD. It immediately renders the model on the screen and exports the file (stl) to your 3D printer all in the space of a few minutes of effort with perfect fidelity. For example, say you need some 55 gallon drums to detail your diorama scene in quarter inch scale. I have done this exactly for my own layout with great satisfaction. Thus, there may not be the need to worry about what country a model train comes from, nor the many hours it takes to manually draw up models in the CAD software if you can describe it to an AI engine. There may not even be a need to purchase off the shelf CAD work from the many repositories that host stl files for download.
So in conclusion, let us reassure you that the model railroading hobby is not coming to an end or minimally be only a niche industry in America. Some in the modeling industry may need to modify their paradigm of how they work with partners in other countries due to economic pressure; however, remember the roots from where we have come, and what we can do with the talent in our home country as we continue find ways to continually partner across the globe.
Model railroading is a hobby enjoyed by everyone around the world. With the advent of excellent ways to communicate through the internet, we will continue to see, learn and share ideas to advance the hobby in ways we are yet to discover.
