I am looking for things we can all use to grow the hobby that might be a bit out of the ordinary. Please post what you have done or want to do.
I regularly give away decent train sets to youngsters interested in trains, maybe one every two or three years. My gift of choice has been a tuned Athearn blue box locomotive, matching caboose, and several freight cars. I provide a loop of either Kato unitrack or Atlas tru track and a simple MRC powerpack.
I have given the son of one of my employees a Brio type wooden train set when he was 2. He absolutely loves trains; he now has a big backpack full of trains and track that goes everywhere with him (he is now 3.5). His dad bought a Kato N scale starter set at auction (that i donated) for his future use.
I may have another convert of an adult child of another of my employees; he wants to build a layout at home, and has expressed an interest in helping me build my layout.
The wooden train sets are always the go to as gifts for young children for us. The play value they get out of them is tremendous and it often plants the seed.
Wooden trains were my first exposure when I was very little. My parents still have them in the attic! I look forward to my children (assuming me and the missus are blessed with them) getting mileage out of them!
We have a wooden train set from Ikea that my kiddos enjoy…it was also a bit more affordable than Brio and has a few expansion sets. It also helps that I have a layout in the basement and we regularly go to the Colorado Railroad Museum. Railway museums, especially those that let kids climb into cabs and interact with the equipment, are great ways to spike interest.
I know there are various youth divisions of clubs across the country. I was involved in Youth in Model Railroading out of Denver as a kid, a club specifically for kids. The club taught me most of the building blocks of the hobby (scenery, basic wiring, weathering) and gave out donated items. They are still going strong. Though it is pretty clear talking to parents and volunteers with the club, that the main barrier is the cost of getting into the hobby. While I may think dcc and sound equipped locomotives are great and dandy, a basic dc engine with rugged details that runs well at a decent price point (e.g. reworked blue box engines as noted above) would be a great addition to the hobby product line up.
As the local railroad club’s Head of Public Relations, I set up little display railroads at all sorts of events (this one was at a West-themed art show) and then try to get everyone who walks by to run the FP7. I also hand out as many pamphlets and “railroad passes” as I can–in this case, I ran out!
Our local museum has a real depot as one of the buildings and I get to run the activities in that depot. For the past 4 years, we added the depot as part of the 1/2 day the 2nd graders spend at the museum every April. They have a real conductor give them an Operation Lifesaver presentation and a coloring book, they learn how to send their first name on a telegraph key and they learn about the tools that were used to build railroads and maintain steam locomotives. This year, every kid was given their choice of an HO car and a piece of track. A model railroad club donated Tyco cars they can’t use which were donated to them. The thank you letters from the kids had several drawings of train cars and others mentioned them in their letters.
I will be setting up a temporary Christmas display with a Lionel on a 4x8 sheet of plywood to entertain the kids on our Holiday Stroll. We get more kids in 2 hours than we do the rest of the year. Parents tell me about how much their kids love trains.
We recently had a HVAC repair at home and the repairman was telling me how much his 1st grader would always run down grandpa’s basement to look at his uncle’s homemade wooden caboose. I sent a HO caboose and a few pieces of track home with the repairman for his son.
I was just like those kids once. My first piece of model railroad equipment was a Marx water tower that was 98¢ at the local Western Auto. That was a lot of money in those days.
Our museum recently acquired another building. I offered to build a Lionel/Marx/Flyer layout upstairs in the new building. It will stay there when I am gone. There will be at least a loop where the kids get to run a train and plenty of push buttons to make accessories come to life. Little girls love the trains just as much as little boys. Treat them as equals.
Most of our “new” members are actually adults in their 50s. Many of them did not even play with trains in their youth. The best way to reach out to them is to set up demos in shopping malls. Our club is also open to the public every Tuesday evening. That makes it easy for them to just drop by a few times and explore the hobby.
Something else I do with adults that have an interest in trains is to invite them to our NMRA division meetings. We have an active division with great programs and activities. So far, I have brought in two new members and am working on others.
There is one thing that would really work. Convince Caitlin Clark to take up model railroading.
Exactly, it just seems like young adults are the most overlooked portion of the hobby. It seems like it’s either get the little kids with the Brio or the old men with the Lionels. The reality is pretty much all the boomers who were gonna join the hobby have already joined by now and eventually those kids with the Brio sets are gonna get older and want more out of the hobby. They’re not gonna be content playing with little wooden choo choos when they’re in their 20s. The vast majority of them are also not going to be interested in Thomas The Tank Engine. They’re going to want to see serious trains and to build actual models not toys. But marketing to them requires work and the model railroad industry does next to nothing to market itself to anyone who isn’t already in the fold.
Shoot! That reminds me of this old railroad “museum” in Guthrie! It was about a 30 minute drive from where we lived. It was less a museum and more a clubhouse in an old station, but it had a couple of layouts. One of them was I think an HO scale layout that ran some German steam locomotives? Can’t remember, but I loved watching them rush around the layout.
They’re already trying to sell their collections and have found that the market isn’t what they expected it to be. Hoping I don’t offend anyone, but, in the days before the great “boomer boon” of the 1990s when O Gauge had a great resurgence, that particular generation seemed bent on buying the best Lionels as an investment strategy. They were genuinely PO’d when reissues and reproductions started hitting the market.
Pretty sure a lot of them are trying the same thing with Tycos in HO scale. Reminds me of back in the 90s when we late Gen Xers thought we were gonna make a fortune holding onto them comic books with the holographic covers, anniversary issues, and new “issue number ones.” Nowadays you got people using them covers for wallpaper and the comic book shops have all those old issues in the bargain bin because they ain’t even worth the paper they were printed on.
