At this time, we have already received the hostile responses but no positive ones. So at this time it appears that GATS will be conducting BuildAKit at that show without the participation of a local hobby shop. Advertising only has to jump out at you if you are really trying to grab new customers. I do not believe that is the case in the model railroad industry at the present time. None of these engines have burnished American railroad tracks in decades and are totally unfamiliar to anyone under 40 years old.
Modelers tend to begin by modeling what they see or once saw.
All today's manufacturer needs to do is place an ad with a picture in Model Railroader and the current aging and shrinking crowd goes to either the hobby shop, mail order house or the Internet and gobbles them all up. In the last 20 years, light rail has returned to Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, San Jose, Saint Louis, Newark, Calgary and many more cities, where it had become extinct. Philadelphia, Boston, Toronto, San Francisco and Shaker Heights have modernized older systems with new light rail vehicles. Yet in most of these cities, almost every public school student has been treated to a free ride on these systems and they leave impressed. Where these systems are augmented with historic cars, as in San Francisco, San Jose and, occasionally Philadelphia, the response from the younger residents is phenomenal.