What happened? Williams and K Line.

Its a shame that the Williams line was discontinued but when Menards jumped into the lower end of the market,they took charge. IMO, Bachman noticing the sharply lower prices, decided to pull out. The budget conventional market is now dominated by Menards but Williams manufactured far more than Menards does. MY guess is that Williams is now finished with O gauge products.

K-line did do it to themselves because Maury Kline could not keep his big mouth shut.
After the court case was settled and Lionel not wanting to put K-line out of business Maury decided to put out memo declaring that K-line was not at fault for anything. Well this outraged Lionel who went back to court and the court agreed with Lionel and basically K-line was put out of business.
Maury Kline was his own worst enemy. If you ever dealt with him at a train show or any place else you would know how volatile he was.

Dave

Whatever one may think or say, it was K Line, Williams, and Weaver that got me into O. It was the best of times, at least for me.
K Line made some outstanding scale models that to this day still outshine many others. Their Berkshire and Hudsons not only stand out in details, etc, but can run on smaller radius then Lionel.

Boy do I miss Weaver and K Line, those were the days

I thought you wrote earlier it ws infringement and bragging that killed K Line? It was retirement and selling to Bachman that killed Williams.  
Can't have it both ways, was it low selling prices, or Lionels lawsuit that killed K Line??

If you read my post: I clearly say ONE of the reasons K-Line failed was because of K-Lines ridiculous low prices. They sacrificed profitability in an effort to build market share. The other reason is they pissed off Lionel in the lawsuit resolution.

K-Line was in terrible financial shape when Lionel took them back to court and K-Line was no shape to recover from that. I don’t know where you got the idea that K-Line could have only one cause for failure.

And yes, I am making a point by example of how some people have unrealistic expectations of prices in the toy train market. Do you want high tech scale trains and viable train manufacturers, well there is a price to be paid for that. If you want inexpensive trains and don’t care that they are not scale and are willing to accept that they run just okay and look okay, well you can by Menards by the box. An. O, I am not putting down Menards, they have their place in the market as well.

Do you think that K-Line made money on your $359 Berkshire and $389 Hudson?