engines and ladders from small towns

No. Enough of the small towns we've never heard of. Big cities sell to people that are not hard-core collectors. Big cities bring name recognition, and with cities like Chicago, LA, Phoenix, there are hundreds of possibilities for replicas.

No-name departments tend to collect dust on wharehouse shelves.

   "No-name departments tend to collect dust on wharehouse shelves."

.... And that would be why I used to find the FDNY trucks at K-B Toys Outlets...???   Or why Code-3 had that raffle to clear out those 1:64th and Diamond Plate FDNY 10-Trucks..???

That was also when the edition sizes were much larger, 5,000, 10K. I still say that FDNY doesn't sell as well as a lot of people think. Code 3 bails a large number to the Fire Zone, where they sit on the shelf. I was there earlier this year, lots of Code 3 to be had.

But FDNY is always going to be the anomaly. Even now the edition sizes are larger, usually 3,000 units instead of the 1,500 that we normally see. 

But the small departments are not selling. Look on the Code 3 site, all of those Dashes are still sitting in the wharehouse. Obviously we don't know if there are 5 left or 500, but the simple fact is they did not sell out. I've said this before on the other board. If it doesn't sell out in the first couple of weeks, it's not going to sell out. Most of us who are collectors log on the morning they're released, decide to buy them or not then and there, and move on. 

I'll go out on not so much of a limb and say that short of Iona, the rigs that C3 has recently announced will not sell out and end up sitting in the wharehouse gathering dust before they end up at a liquidator site or the subject of a fire sale at one of the dealers.