Anyone know how many model railroaders there are in the whole world?
Just a neat statistic.
First define “good”.
How accurate? Typically within X%; what do you want for your X ?
Next, are Toy Train (Lioinel, LGB, etc) enthusiasts Model Railroaders by your definition?
There are 5 billion model railroaders on the planet earth ± 100%
guess you got a point there,
yes all scales, 1/2 gauge, O, HO, Z, G, N, anything that is not the real size of a locomotive counts. just wondering if NMRA ever has a number, and by %, probably 80-90 % true.
No. No reliable figure exists, at least to my knowledge and this is an area I have particularly long interest in. Various numbers have been thrown around over the years, even some by organizations representing the manufacturers. However, in many cases these have to have been absurdly optomistic unless every one who ever even looked at a model train are included.
At one time MR estimated that in the U.S. there were probably around 300,000 model railroaders, total. This does seem at least reasonably ballpark if one considers the total circulation of all the MRR magazines combined (although, obviously, most of us get more than one magazine). But even then such a figure must include a lot of folks with no more than a fringe interest in the hobby. So, considering that the hobby seems to be of relatively low interest outside North America, Europe, Australia, Japan and Russia, I suspect the final world total would not likely exceed 750,000.
a lot
tom
Best estimates place the number at 2.3 million.
I’ve always heard it said that Germany alone has millions of railroad hobbyists of one kind or another, the number one country in the world by a considerable margin.
Last week at the plant I work at , an engineer from Germany flew in to help us adjust / repair one of our German machines. On the second day we talked about Model railroading. he went to his brief case and showed me pictures of his layout. It was awesome. He explained to me in broken engli***hat model railrosding is a big thing in Germany. He said the only products he uses is Marklin,Kirbi,Faller and another of which i could not understand because of our language barrier.
Yes, Germany is big when it comes to Model Railroading. But don’t forget Britain. They have a lot of modelrailroaders that use odd scales no-one has ever heard of outside Britain. This is pretty much a Britain-only affair when it comes to manufacturers and customers. Very little is written / spoken about it outside Britain. I think you would be suprissed to see the number of “odd-scale” railroaders in Britain; they’d make a dent in the total number, I’m sure…
But with Germany and Britain included, I wouldn’t be suprissed if the number in Europe alone is somewhere around 2 or 3 million. I read somewhere a few years ago that in Holland alone (pop. 16 million) there are some 50.000 modelers associated with model railroad clubs. Add to that the fact that only a fraction of modelers in Holland are associated to any clubs and you can imagine the total being somewhere around 150.000.
Do the same in Germany and I guess you get a million easy. Granted: of all European countries, Germany, Britain and Holland are probably the countries most into modelrailroading.
If you’ve never done an eBay comparison, the difference there is telling. eBay Germany has about twice the amount of MRR auctions active than eBay USA. While both are naturally likely attract foreign sellers, I’d hazard a guess and say most of those speak better Engli***han German and choose accordingly.
It’s easy to understand why there’s no clear overall picture of the hobby, because there’s a very limited amount of interchange over the Pond, most Europeans go with European stuff and Americans with American stuff. Fleischmann, which is among the more prolific German manufacturers, famous for a long history, quality and durability, doesn’t even have an English Wikipedia article dedicated to it. I doubt they have have an US importer either. Likewise, most U.S. stuff that reaches our European shores is Bachmann, and that only because it used to be vastly cheaper than what the Germans produce.
There really are two different worlds of model railroads out there. You even have completely different couplers there! Back here, we don’t have an unified standard for buffer-to-buffer couplers, which just about sucks. Europeans seldom enter model railroad forums such as this one, so the image one gets by following such is skewed.
Although internet and more specifically sites like eBay and RR Forums are somewhat globalizing (in Europe at least) the hobby. Personally, I started the hobby like any other euro guy: with German stuff (there wasn’t much else). Gradualy, models of more and more countries came into excistence.
Then, when high speed internet really became publicly available some 7/8 years ago, more people discovered US railroading and saw prices that were unheard of, for quality comparible to that of German manufacturers, so they switched to this “new” area of RR. I personally switched from euro stuff to US stuff when I started my new layout, now 5 years ago. And I won’t be going back… eBay and internet really made that possible as the US stuff isn’t exactly over-represented in EU. Internet gave me the possibility of buying abroad.
I think that if you give it some 5-10 years, our hobby will be pretty much global. By then anyone can get anything from anywhere. I don’t see how that would help get things more clear on the total number of railroaders though… I think that will pretty much remain a mistery, since many people practice MR at home and only at home. They don’t join a club and only rarely go to MR shows / exibits… guestimation will be the keyword here I’m affraid.
I’m one of those people with very little regard what I run on my rails, as long as it runs well, looks good and can pull a car or two. This is why there’s a red DB diesel switcher on my desk next to a GP38, a Bachmann hand car parked between German steamers and a 0-4-0 besides a DDA40X.
I’m not keen enough on any one time / location to devote exclusive attention to it, and I doubt I’ll ever be. My future layout will probably remain as naked brass rail and plywood.
Unless of course I decide to realize that “HL2 Combine rail depot” idea I had a while back, but that’d mean scratch-building one of those evil black locos…
Unfortunately, this is where the problem with the numbers gets badly scewed. Remember that European hobbyists typically have little room for personal layouts. Over there one sees lots of folks with trains who use a club layout or those of one or two of the club member’s layouts to run their trains. This results in club membership accounting for the great majority of hobbyists…the lone wolf is rare. Likewise, European trains are very expensive relative to those in the U.S. In much of Europe you need to be upper middle class to have quality trains and especially a modest-sized layout. This cuts back dramatically on participation in the hobby. Also, remember that nearly all the European manufacturers are, or have recently been, failing or at least in serious financial straights because of declining sale (i.e. declining customer base). None of the above are indicators for a huge number of hobbyist relative to the U.S. figures.
It’s very easy to vastly over-estimate how many people are in the hobby across the pond and misleading figures are the norm. We all like to think our hobby is highly popular…usually to a far greater extent than reality might allow. Just ask the average U.S. hobbyist about the numbers here and I’ll bet you get figures of a million or more!
CNJ831
Brits have model Railways so there are very few Railroaders in the UK[:D]
It is all in the wording.
A few years back when I rediscovered my model trains from the UK and decided to get back into the hobby, I wanted to see how active the hobby was in the US where I now live. I Googled “model railways” and was amazed to find that there were virtually no US web sites about trains! I went at least a week thinking that the hobby was non-existent this side of the pond, before I found a copy of Model Railroader mag at the local Borders.
I was at my LHS the other day, and the owner Gerry (who hails from England, incidentally) was test-running a Big Boy on his in-store layout. We got into a discussion of minimum radius for these big bruisers. He threw a few turnouts, and brought this Big Boy into an 18-inch loop, where it ran fine around the tight curves and even through an S-curve crossover.
He pointed out that this was a Trix Big Boy, built largely for the European market. Because European homes tend to be smaller, there is even more a premium on layout space than here in the U.S. Therefore, modellers tend to use smaller radius curves, and the manufacturers must design their equipment to accomodate them.
The in-store layout of Maine Trains in Chelmsford, MA, is featured this month in RMC.
To put it simply, the hobby is dying all over Europe. It’s already claimed a few of our big manufacturers and will claim more before it’s through. So whatever the top numbers were, I’d guess they were reached in the early 90s, globally.
To heck with Europe, does anyone have a good estimate for Japan? Kato mostly ignores the US market in favor of their domestic lines, and there are loads of Japanese manufacturers that nobody in the rest of the northern hemisphere has heard of!
Japan is model crazy, and they’re everywhere. And they’re good too. Look through any Japanese modeling mag, and you’ll find stuff (mostly si-fi) that blows away anything seen here. I’d hazard to guess that there are well over five million railroad modelers over there. And don’t let the Euros complaining about space make you feel sorry for them. In Japan, they have a modular standard where the modules are a standard A4 paper size (slightly smaller than 8.5x11 here in the USA). They pop them into a briefcase, hop on the subway, and attend a meet.
And that brings up a good point: what ARE we calling a model railroader? Do you have to have at least a 4x8 layout stashed somewhere? Are we including armchair modelers, or Lionel, or average folks who never buy a mag or attend a show? If you roll up everyone who has ANY sort of layout, be it a 4x8, module, Unitrak, giant home layout, attends a club, or who’s even just a collector or armchairer, we start to see a HUGE number across the globe, possibly up to 5 million. With 6.5 BILLION people on the planet, that’s still just a drop in the bucket!
Here’s the hot smoking dope!!! (Or the poop from Group if you prefer - anybody have any idea whether they still use that expression in the Air Force - we used it a lot in the sixties but it was a carryover from WWII and most of that crowd has long since departed the scene)
Anyway!! The answer to your question is: two million, eight hundred seventy one thousand, six hundred and twenty-five. Anyone have a more accurate estimate than that???
There are six… the rest of us play with trains…