BTW, MR staff, I’d gladly pay for an all-time MR index. The search functions inside the DVD collection need improvement and, of course, they don’t cover the last 8 years.
Yes agree. I suggested this years ago before the Archive, MRVP and digital MRR but was told there were no plans to do this. A good, easy to use data search on all MRR magazines would be SO helpful.
the Trains Magazine Index indexes more than just Model Railroader
AND you can limit your search to just Model Railroader on that index if you prefer. Years back a private outfit (Stephenson) published a good index but it stops at 1985; they also did Trains and RMC and R&R. What is interesting is that they seem to have gone back to the issues themselves rather rely on the MR indexes, which underwent a number of changes in index philosophy over the years. I think the ones compiled by the late George Drury were the best but that is just my view.
I do agree that a super duper “Google-type” search index would be wonderful since many times I am certain I saw an article or a photo or a name only to fail to find it in the index, and then casual browsing shows it was actually a letter to the editor which is not indexed.
I have all the annual indexes from 1960 to date clipped together but it is starting to look like a mess because I have so many post-it notes sticking out for articles or drawings that I simply have to be able to find again! Fortunately I have a fairly decent notion of what five year span a given article or drawing appeared in but with age (and a few more dozen years of MRs) I am starting to lose that.
Dave Nelson
not exactly sure why this works with this site, but you can restrict a google search to a particular web site using the “site:” keyword. This will only return matches on that site. For example
site:trc.trains.com koester turnout
returns a list of matches on the Trains Magazine Index website. Not sure this better than their search engine.