I recently received a few old MR and RMC issues from the late 1940s/early 1950s. Interestingly, of the dozen or so I have, two of the 1951 RMCs have letters to the editor regarding the idea of “screwdriver kits and ready-made track,” both for and against. We often now call “screwdriver kits” as “shake-the-box” kits, such as the Athearn “blue box” kits.
It seems even in 1951 (that’s now 56 years ago!) the debate we have in these forums over hobby trends (whether craftsmanship is dying in the face of RTR and easy kits) was raging then, too. The argument against was that new moel railroaders needed no skill and therefore were bringing down the standard. The argument for was that easier kits made for more new model railroaders. Sound familiar? So, the hobby has survived all these years in spite of the controversy.
One thing that came and almost went (they’re still around though fewer in number) were the “snap-together” kits I remember from AHM and Bachmann. For the sake of appearance, I’d probably take the pre-assembled kits of today over a snap-together kit. That is, of course, except for the AHM–now IHC–HO Rural Station; that’s a great kit in terms of detail and style. I had one in HO I painted up for a my freelanced railroad, to which I added a scratchbuilt wooden platform and Campbell shingles to the roof. I hated selling that one when I switched to N.
Also, the March 1950 MR annual survey estimated 100,000 model railroaders in America. Does anyone have a more recent estimate?
In the past fews years, I read in MR several years ago about 250,000 to 300000 people are involved in the hobby. The numbers probably covered all gauges and collectors, but it was just an estimate. I have not read if it is going up or down, but I would believe that it is beginning to increase since the HO sound was introduced. I know of several persons that now are puchasing HO and diesel steam with sound.
In dealing with 1956 and 2006 discussions, they will never change since human nature does not change all that much.
In 1974, my club members were concerned how several of us were having trouble getting the proper amount of voltage and current to run our Tenshodo Challengers and Big Boys since their Varney 4-4-2’s or whatever ran just fine. The 30" curves were also a problem for most large brass steam, but again the Varney whatever ran just fine. The whole concept was not to change anything since the layout was up to date in 1954.
The more things change, the more they remain the same…
Back about the time plastic kits first came out there was a raging debate on the merits of metal versus plastic. A contemporary cartoon in Model Railroader showed a Fred Flintstone dressalike leaning on the (solid granite) counter of his LHS, looking into a box held by the store owner (also dressed in sloppy skins.) The caption?
You can say what you want about these newfangled metal kits. I still prefer stone.
Apropos of which, how many of us remember the great HO coupler wars? The NMRA tried to end them with the X2F, but got outflanked (at least among serious modelers) by the Edwards brothers. (Believe it or not, in the same time period the major manufacturer of Japanese HO tinplate standardized on the Baker coupler.)
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with Kadee MKD’s)
I think it’s great that so many folks can do quality work with relative ease thanks to the hobby manufacturers. Hobbyists can exercise as much or as little craftsmanship as they want.
That said, however, learning those difficult skills (soldering, working with metals, scratchbuilding, decaling, etc.) gives you far more flexibility in what you can do. Want to run Pennsy steam in N? Well, unless you have the cash for brass or one of the announced-a-very-long-time-ago-but-still-not-out-yet PCM PRR M1 4-8-2s, you’d better learn some skills. I have three PRR steamers. One’s brass (motor burned out–on the “to-do” list), one’s a cast pewter-and-brass boiler and tender kit on a Kato 2-8-2, and one’s an out-and-out kitbash from several locomotives. No, I didn’t hand-smelt my own brass and roll the sheets and stamp the rivets, but the two I built required fine soldering, cutting, drilling, glueing with ACC, bending wire shapes, painting, decaling, and a hard-wired DCC decoder install. If I were just an RTR man, I’d have one non-functioning brass steamer and be running just diesels.
The point is, I think most model railroaders will find themselves rewarded if they actively seek to develop those skills that are the mark of a craftsman. But those skills can be honed at the modeler’s own pace, and are not needed “up front” to enjoy the hobby.
It’s very enlightening that MR should have claimed that figure in 1950, especially so if you appreciate what the numbers really meant. We were just beginning to see the appearance of shake-the-box kits and screwdriver assembly models then. Only six years earlier, MR had estimated hobbyist numbers at only 16,000(!), yet by 1969 it was at some 140,000.
However, the most striking aspect of the 1950 published figures was that 20% of model railroaders were in their teens, while 50% of all hobbyists were under 30 and just a minute 5% were over 50! Compare that with today! Incidentally, the highest figure for the number of hobbyists that MR has ever claimed was 250,000 back in 1989 and it’s claimed less since.
As to the more things change the more they remain the same…not quite. Back in 1950 the claim that screwdriver kits and such were ruining the hobby, as it was then, was quite valid. At that time model railroading was considered a true craftsman’s hobby and it was generally considered that to be a participant you needed all manner of real skills and often a good machineshop in your basement. Many of the models hobbyists built from scratch in that period were of amazing quality and accuracy (and yes, some weren’t!). Such limitations were, undoubtedly, the reason for MR estimating that hobbyists numbered only around 16,000 back in their 1944 figures.
That all changed with the introduction and expansion of shake-the-box plastic kits and screwdriver-assemble locos, which was well along by the mid 1950’s and the hobby became decidedly different from what it had been. The craftsmen aspect remained but to a lesser extent and their ranks have grown ever smaller with the passage of time. Less talent was necessary
Something similar (and there are all kinds of things that could be used here) that Dave can relate to is weather forecasting. In the “old” days, we had to be able to plot the maps, hand analyze them and do all the computations manually. One computers became the norm, we stopped teaching all the “finer” points of forecasting. Many of the old timers, and even not so sold timers declared doom and gloom for our profession. No way that the “kids” nowadays could ever be good forecasters if they didn’t have to do all the work. Hogwash. We are better now than ever (of course I realize I’m offering myself wayyyyyyy up for a target[;)])
There will alsways be a debate between craftsman and shake the box, kit and RTR, prototype versus freelance, strict adherance to reality and whimsy. I’ve seen too many times and been a recipient myself of unwarrented attacks based on how or what I was modelling.
I’ve gone from shake the box, build it if it has the roadname I want to more emphasis on prototype (not a rivet counter…yet!). Plus, the skills I have learned has helped me so I can have items that are not readily available.
Who knows what they will say about the hobby in 2063, but I doubt that I’ll care!
CNJ831,Commercial slot car racing hasn’t gone away…Like most hobbies today its a Adult hobby.
I can remember when they said us young modelers will ruin the hobby because of our radical thinking…
That radical thinking? That it was possible that high detail plastic models could be produce.There was more to the hobby then running train in endless loops…There has to be a better way to model railroads correctly…Surely we shound study the difference in locomotives phases and type of cars…Yup radical thinking.[}:)]
I’m not certain that slot car racing isn’t going to make a big come back once they standardize the digital control that allows more than one car in each slot and lane changing. In my opinion that was always one of the downfalls of slot cars. One had to have a 4 or 6+ lane track before things got really interesting. Tracks that big were hard to build and there always seemed to be one really good lane and one really bad lane, or one lane was way longer than another, etc. Now just like real NASCAR multiple cars can run on the same 2 lane track. All the (dis)advantage of one lane over another is gone. The only reason I haven’t purchased a set is because of the multiple digital systems being used by the various vendors. Choose one and you are stuck with them…
The one constant since I have been in the hobby, going back to the 1960s, is the debate about whether the hobby is dying. If it is dying, it is taking its sweet time in doing so.
The ongoing trend away from scratchbuilding toward easy to build kits and RTR rolling stock and prebuilt structures has been a tremendous positive influence for the hobby. Anything that allows modelers to build quality layouts with less effort is certainly a boost for the health of the hobby. How one achieves results is far less important than the end product. While we can admire a beautifully scratchbuilt structure or piece of rolling stock, whether from an earlier era or contemporary, the fact is the hobby would be in danger of extinction if it were still necessary to do things that way. Today modelers of average skills can produce outstanding layouts. I’ve said this before, I am a great admirer of modelers such as John Allen but I sure wouldn’t want to build my layout he way he had to.
That’s an interesting statement since I’ve been in the hobby a long time too and the only time I’ve heard it widely said it was dying was in the 1960’s when slot cars put a very definite crimp in the model railroading hobby and not again until the late 1990’s when it became clear from numerous indicators that the hobby was in decline.
It’s sort of the same thing as “when I was your age, I had to walk to school 10 miles, both ways, uphill” crap my “elders” tried to pull on me and consequently I am pulling on my kids now. Life was always harder, people were always more honest, things were always more “pure”…way back when. Simple fact is that people have always been people (good and bad), some things were made cheap and some were made well, and you weren’t just born with the knowledge of how to do certain things.
I seriously doubt that everyone who jumped into model railroading in 1950 was an expert craftsman (like Charles Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie), just like not everyone today is an afficiando with DCC, scenery, etc. The fact is, if it interests you, you jump in and LEARN how to do it. Back then people jumped in and learned how to make their models from scratch. Now, we jump in and learn how to do this and how to do that. There is no model railroading school to attend. (That is what this board is about). I will challenge anyone who tells me there is no skill in doing even the basics of scenery of modern railroading (I just spent then entire weekend ballasting track–ugh!).
Yes, there are a few people out there who buy train sets with everything included and assembled, but they are the minority. Those people I wouldn’t consider model railroaders per se. The vast majority of us enjoy putting things together, painting, ballasting, wiring, etc. For me, it gives me a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. But if I had to build a locomotive from scratch or lay all 300 feet of my track by hand, that wouldn’t amount to satisfaction…that would be a cumbersome, tedious job that I would quickly resent. (That is only my opinion, some people might enjoy doing that.) It’s a hobby!!!
While there is satisfaction in knowing that you did a good job and worked hard at it (trains in th
That’s probably because the silverbacks and graybeards spent so much time making youngsters feel so unwelcome that they “ate the seed corn”. I recall reading in a number of MR issues how many people were upset that the mag was “wasting” about five columns per issue with the teenager/youngster-specific “Student Fare”. It was shocking to see how stridently they begrudged kids what amounted to two or less pages per issue. I couldn’t really figure out why because the trouble seems to have started before the first year of the collection I bought. In the 1970’s though it just seemed that the old buggers thought that Student Fare was two pages that should’ve been devoted to THEM, not a bunch of hip-swivelling, long-haired, flag-burning, dope-smoking, communists. I just can’t accept that that was what was behind it because petty, selfish, jelousy couldn’t have - shouldn’t have - produced such venom.
The 1950 MR survey attributed the big rise in hobbyists under 30 to returning WWII veterans.
This stands to reason, especially given how many of us here in the forums today are veterans. In my case, however, I was a model railroader long before I joined the service. Nevertheless, it would be a neat statistic to compare the percentage of veterans in the hobby to the percentage in the general population.
Of course, any factual statistics about hobby demographics (beyond magazine subscriptions) would be very welcome!
Kurt, from what does that impression derive? The rise and fall of teens in our hobby simply reflects the era when interest in Lionel, et al., peaked (which could lead to a participation in the adult hobby) and its subsequent dwindling by the end of the 1970’s. Likewise, Student Fare was dropped from the magazine about a decade ago, followed not long thereafter by Model of the Month, Paint Shop and some other long-running features, most certainly in response to a lack of column readership and the magazine’s declining page-count in the late 1990’s, the teen component in the hobby having by then become almost too small to be measured. That was a logical bus
CNJ831,I agree with your teen figures.Yesterday at the club we had a Boy Scout Troop in so they can get their railroad(hobby?) merit badge…I notice MOST SEEM BORED while others seem interested(polite?) enough to ask questions…Two ask if they could visit again. Of course the answer was yes.Hopefully these two young men will return and become active in the hobby.
When I first got into the hobby in the early 70’s, the argument was over whether or not folks who built plastic models were REAL model railroaders. The wood and metal kits were called CRAFTSMAN kits, the plastic kits were SHAKE-THE-BOX used in derogatory tone. Now it’s the same old argument between plastic kits and RTR. How boring![zzz]
What’s really exciting these days is that you can do it any way you want. Scratchbuild, advanced kits, easy kits, RTR. Horrors! you can even mix these.[:-^]
I have done of all of these and they are all enjoyable. My main interest right now is in having an operating layout, so I’m heavily into RTR where ever it’s available. I have a stash of kits and parts but I’ll build these later. [:D]
If you need to be certified, join the NMRA and earn your MMR. I may do that some day, but for now I am just having fun with trains. Which, come to think of it, was the reason I got into this hobby.[swg]