I would think that 1 1/2% would be awfully high.
Good statements from Rooster and Joe,
Guys, with all due respect…some of you are indeed “Doom and Gloom”. I heard similar comments waaaayyyyyyyyyyy back in the early 80s…“The hobby is dying! Young people want to play Pac-man and run RC cars and planes…”
With DCC, Sound, ultra realistic signaling systemes, beautiful trackwork from Shinohara and Peco, gorgeous highly detailed locomotives out of the box, more scenery options than ever, DPM and Cornerstone kits…
Sorry. I’m not going to pay attention to the doom and gloom “statistics”. Ten years from now we’ll be hearing them. I hope to have a huge layout in the attic section of my house where I’ll be able to run 15 car versions of SCL varnish and New Haven commuter sprinters.
PEACE!
The world doesn’t end at the shining sea, guys. Maybe they meant there are a million MRs on the planet, in which case it sounds VERY plausible to me, if you count anyone with a working trainset or an armchair interest. A third of them parochial North Americans, a third Europeans (including Brits) and a third the rest of us.
Good point. Us Americans tend to be a bit narcissistic when evaluating such things. We often forget that our population percentage of the entire world is actually quite small.
Although I doubt the NJ Business article’s numbers included worldwide data, I think it’s certainly plausible that there are a million worldwide.
Be interesting to know how many copies of MR go outside the US.
Or how many online subscribers they have that are non-US.
I remember the 60’s when some pundits (even on the network news, IIRC) were claiming that the slot car hobby was going to doom model railroading. Because of costs, space, and the differences in people, our hobby is always going to be more of a niche than a mainstream passtime. Get used to it.
One of the big changes that I have noticed is that kit building seems to be less prominent in the hobby than in the past. The built-up structures offered today were much less common than in the 60’s. Of course, today we have some much better kits than back then. We still can find Athern Blue Box kits (good for beginners and younger modelers) but now we also have plastic kits with much better detail. Back in the 60’s, if you wanted the level of detail on some modern kits, you had to buy a wood-and-metal kit and do a ton of super-detailing. On the whole, we have a better selection of product than in the past.
Quite a few MR mags go overseas, I saw the number once but I forget. Also a fair percentage of sales by the US manufacturers are overseas, though I’m sure way more than half is still domestic.
But in addition, the Brit and European manufacturers sell to huge domestic markets, the Japanese seem to have a healthy domestic industry, and some other countries seem to have busy cottage industries going - certainly we do in NZ, and so does Australia.
So yeah the talk of a million was probably hype but if the focus is shifted to the world it was probably close to true anyway.
It’s such a great hobby it always beats me how there could be ONLY a million.
I am pleased to see that there has been some skepticism about how there could be a million model railroaders, and I agree that the estimate was extrapolated from figures that can be called into question. While I don’t know how many model railroaders there are, I think the number is surprisingly large. Of course this includes people we would think of as “dabblers”, who perhaps have a train set in a box that they intend to set up someday or a 4x8 oval of snap track. Probably does include Lionel and G scale, for that matter. Not everybody buys a new kit or part every week. Let’s think broadly about who is in the hobby, so that we can enlarge the number of active model railroaders. And if there really are about a million model railroaders, the NMRA and Model Railroader are really only scratching the surface of the hobby.
Somebody come up with a better set of figures, I’d love to see them!
Regards
Peter
conford