I am an Assistant Scoutmaster in my local Boy Scout troop. I am an Eagle Scout so I have some experience about this. Someone came in the other night and gave the troop a large box full of BSA equipment and various publications. I looked through and discovered roughly eight years of Boys Life magazine in the bottom. I remeber these same issues but don’t remember the projects in them. These were published in the '90s and early 2000s. I had forgotten that some of them contained model railroading projects in them. Most of these projects were easy to follow and the materials were rather cheap to do.
I recall boys life when I was a cub/boy scout. Don’t recall MR stuff but there was them gravity race track derby stuff. Think my troup made one of them tracks. Now you bonged my brain I made car…heh.
Guess I wasn’t so hip doing that now tho…hint hint…tooo much railroad stuff…
We have a bunch of Boy’s Life mags from the 1920’s that have all kinds of stuff about steam locomotives and how things got made----sheeesh—now that you remind me—[:-^]
I am relying on my memory now – not the greatest idea anymore – but I seem to recall that when I got Boy’s Life from the late 1950s into the mid 1960s that every issue, or very nearly every issue, had something on model railroading. I think it was a regular column. The merit badge book on railroading back then had a fair amount of model railroad content, some of it taken from Lionel publications.
A friend of mine who is active in scouting (his son made Eagle Scout) reports that the railroading merit badge is still pretty popular amoung the boys.
My hunch is that a lot more boys had trains back in my day than had Daisy BB guns that were a big part of the advertising in Boy’s Life. I know my mom would never allow me to have a BB gun – I mean, you’ll shoot your eye out!
We’ve had local Scout troops in to visit the Operations Road Show layout in support of the Railroading merit badge. One of our ideas for the coming year is to make it better known to councils throughout the rest of SE Michigan that we’re available for visits.
In my Boys Life era – read: the early 1950s – I was more interested in alternate modes of transportation but I do recall there being features on model railroading which, I am now ashamed to admit, didn’t really draw my attention; there were, however, a lot of articles on building them thar flying machines which did. I developed more down-to-earth interests when I realized that the world under 10/10 overcast was considerably more interesting than the world over 10/10 undercast.
I received Boys Life from 1952 until 1956 and I accumulated 45 to 50 issues which I donated to the Boy Scout troop sponsored by the Mormon Church in Roberts, Idaho in 1959. Don’t know how those mags have fared over 50 years but it was a good magazine for Boys in their early- and mid-teens.
I live not too far frome Notre Dame, they have an incredible library, makes me wonder if its there, I wandered in there finding things dated pre-1900’s.
Some books on railroads/interurbans dating around 1900.
Makes me wonder if Boys Life was the pre-hobby mag before all the Trains/MR mags. Model railroading certainly was around before then. So much of it was about “you building it” now see what :omy:
I suspect Boys Life’s model train coverage did largely take the place of Lionel’s own magazine which was I am pretty sure discontinued by the 1950s.
Actually back in the 1950s Kalmbach published Model Trains magazine which was specifically aimed at beginners, both in scale and tinplate. It had some “you can build it” type articles some of which were surprisingly sophisticated, some of which were quite elementary. Sectional track track plans were a mainstay. It also had some very interesting – even for an advanced modeler – “railroad you can model” prototype features. But as Linn Westcott explained, the problem was that beginners can’t wait for a monthly magazine to get around to the topic they need to know about right now. That is what books are for.