I think we'll be hearing about MTH special runs for a while to come. For whatever set of reasons, Mike Wolf has decided to continue some of the business without a real company or any catalogs. Their overhead is quite low I'd guess and this enables his employees to continue to earn a living of some sort, and keep some of their dealers in business. It's been grossly mishandled, but given the lack of interest in anyone buying the company, perhaps this was unavoidable. He always did have an inflated sense of his own importance and entitlement, from high school onward. I've heard tales. This is one way of keeping his persona in the public eye and perhaps do some generous things for his long time employees. Or there may be other reasons, such as a needed commitment to keep his factory busy until Atlas ramps up production. Getting the factory to agree to serve Atlas may have depended on MTH contracting some level of production during the transition, I wouldn't be surprised.
I have maintained my subscription to CTT, and most of the modeling shown is, pleasingly, to me, Lionel, K-Line, American Flyer, etc.
The late Neil Beosougloff as editor in chief really did turn off Lionel fans with his ill-informed and strident editorial about the lawsuit, and guaranteed that Lionel would not advertise in CTT while Neil was in charge. To my knowledge, Lionel never has advertised in CTT since that editorial, give or take, and Besougloff hasn't been editor now for many years. He really shot Kalmbach in the foot on that one.
God knows what Besougloff was thinking. I would assume he had no scientific or technical training or experience, since the MTH lawsuit was utter BS to anyone who understands anything about technology. Besougloff bought into a line of scientific and technical crap that Lionel had stolen MTH's designs, a dog which never should have hunted in the first trial. I can only also assume the jury had absolutely no one on it who understood any aspect of product design and manufacturer. No wonder the appeals court threw out the initial verdict, apparently because MTH's expert witness was totally off base and gave testimony that wouldn't have stood up in a first year engineering course
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My guess is that despite getting money from Lionel in the bankruptcy court proceedings, MTH lost a lot of sales, momentum and money on this fool's errand. An endeavor that likely represented Mike Wolf's ego and sense of entitlement more than any legitimate search for justice.
