I decided to post this after a couple of events this weekend. First, my MRM came this weekend and again it was so thin. Second my son had a friend over for the weekend and after a morning of barefoot & slalom waterskiing back at the house they decided to run trains. That’s when I wondered how many of us have passed the hobby onto the next generation, because without the next generation our hobby is in long term shrink mode. I’m not looking for the same old hash, but would like to know who and how have you been successful. Then hopefully we can utilize the best practices approach to encourage the next generation.
I am 14 and got my start from my grandfather, a major lionel collector, when I was 5. I recently got back into it, and discovered a club in my area, which delt in HO, so I sold my lionels, made a new layout, and here I am.
I guess I have failed… We had four boys (all grown and on their own) and none are interested. One is a very serious “Hero Clicks” collector, player and Judge.
One is an avid camper, one is a Buick Regal T-Type collector 1:1 size and a workaholic to boot.
The youngest (33) is still in Grad School down in Missouri. To graduate in spring of 2013.
So… I guess my only hope now is my Grandson, if I live long enough to pass it on as he is only 4 1/2 months old .
Amazingly a lot like me. I’m 15 and have had an interest in trains (from 1:1 to 1:220) since I was about a year old. That’s what I’ve been told, anyway. First thing I can remember was a train ride when I was four. Unfortunately there are no clubs close enough to where I live for me to be active more than 3-4 times a year. [:(] Same with hobby shops.[sigh]
Hopefully we can get more people my age interested. I know I’m the only modeler in town under retirement age [swg]
I guess I qualify as part of the new generation given the overall demographic (haven’t reached 30 quite yet).
No one passeed the hobby onto me as no one in my family was into it. My Grandmother greatly influenced me by bringing me with her cross-country, twice. Since then I’ve been very much into model railroading, attempting to re-create my experiences.
I have a Godson that I am slowly “teasing” with the hobby but I want to be congnissent of making sure that I don’t push it on him and make sure it is something he naturally gravitates to.
There’s also hope for my own offspring whenever that happens. I’ll be sure to exercise the same care.
I don’t really know where I picked up the hobby from. It may have been left-overs from my father’s hand-me-down AHM set, most of which are gone. But my father was never really into it save for having the occasional train set.
I may have passed on the hobby to the next-next generation. I gave a newer bachmann set (ones with a can motor and all wheel drive and pick-up) to some kids of a friend of my father’s. I think they were 4 and 8 when I gave it to them and I was 20 or 21. Maybe they’ll pick it up.
My son and stepson were interested in HO until highschool and you know what happens there! I have a couple of grandsons with an interest in trains, but I don’t think they are serious interests. My only hope so far is my brother-in-law’s son who is a computer genius and went ‘off the chain’ as they say now, about my DCC system and Loconet. I just gave him a Bachmann G scale steam set for his house warming and he waa thrilled. So this looks like my only hope so far.
I got my start by accident I guess, I built a wood Strombecker steam engine for a school project and needed about 10" of track. My dad said he would get something for it. He came home with 1/2" x 1/16" x 48" pcs of stainless steel; a whole 4 x8 foot sheet cut up. He knew someone at the Otis Elevator company, down the street from his shop, and that is what this friend gave him. The rest of the ss became track for our future American Flyer layout, several years later. I never looked back.
My Dad & I built a 4’x4’ N scale Christmas Tree train layout about 25 years ago when I was 10ish.
I got back into the hobby a couple of years ago and my kids (now 10 & 6) are sometimes totally into it and sometimes totally “distracted” by soccer, karate, iPod, Wii, reading, Japanese school, American school, sleepovers, friends, swimming, etc.
They’d help here and there on my layout, but what made the difference was starting a “Summer Shunting Shelf Layout” project with my (then-9-year-old) daughter:
Having a specific and separate layout just for her (as opposed to “Dad’s”) gave a sense of ownship, and it was fun to teach her how to lay track, kitbash structures, and solder hand-built turnouts.
I wrote an article for Model Railroad Hobbyist entitled “The Joys of Kids and Model Railroading” that explores a bunch of practical projects modelers can do with kids of various ages and skill levels, all based on “successful” experiences with my own kids (“Success” being defined by having fun together, with a little learning and sense of accomplishment thrown in).
Hope the article comes in handy and inspires other modelers to involve their kids in more model railroading. Just takes a little prep work but the payoff is pure gold!
I’m 38 years old. Been seriously in the hobby for about five years. Usually when I go to my LTS I am the youngest by far. Today, I noticed three other customers younger than me purchasing items.
Milwaukee’s annual Trainfest train show of operating display layouts, dealers, and manufacturers continues to attract tons of kids, including girls. And it is not all Thomas the tank engine either, although I do not deny that the Radio Disney corner is a non-train attraction in itself. By the way Trainfest is November 10-11, 2012.
A LHS owner reports he now has a number of good regular teenage customers,more than he had just a few years ago. From time to time we see excellent models from young people in the local NMRA divisional contests. And I see kids – including teens but also kids with their parents or grandparents – trackside to see trains, particularly Amtrak where they know for sure a train will appear.
My feeling is that if you can create some level of interest and involvement in the child, that even decades later that offers hope of a renewed interest in trains. It used to be that it was cars and girls that distracted the young men away from trains until their 20s. I guess I would add a challenging jobs market and extraordinary student loans as other reasons why a return to trains might be deferred for a few more years than was the case decades ago.
I totally agree and thanks for posting. My daughter has a switcher into which we put figures, one of me as conductor and one girl painted as she liked to dress as the engineer. During Christmas Holidays my son and daughter build a layout for the tree onto which they put their special Christmas cars. Although now my daughter is older and her interests are waning–I’m hoping for her later years and with her (hopefully) kids they at least give it a try.
I actually went the other way. My older son has been train crazy since he was 2. I liked trains, but never like him. Now we railfan together, and work on his layout. It works out because I like to model, and he likes to operate.
I think that model railroading is such a peculiar (I mean this in the best way) hobby that it is hard to simply pass it on like an inheritance. You can and should expose your kids to it. After all, it’s the World’s Greatest Hobby! But do it on their terms and when the timing is right for them. Love of model railroading isn’t really teachable. It’s a little like a sport. Either you have the moves or you’re just taking up space on the bench because your parents thought it’d build “character.”[^o)]
Beyond the family may be where to concentrate your enthusiasm if your kids aren’t really interested. The Boy Scout Railroad merit badge is one place where a helping hand is welcome in a LOT of places.
Personally, there are railroaders in the family, but I knew nothing about trains up close and personal. No one was a modeller, although I was gifted with a hand-me-down Lionel set. I came across the Silverton branch on a family vacation in 1967 and that may have started it. I was into model planes and then rockets, but I just lost too darn many of those things.[:'(] I came across a Model Railroader somewhere in 1970 and the rest is history.
I tried to pass it on to my sons…bought the electric Thomas stuff, plenty of the wooden Thomas stuff, all as advised by none other than (my former boss and lifelong friend) Lewis K. English, Sr., himself (retired owner of English’s Model RR Supply, Bowser Manufacturing and Toy Train Heaven).
However, that is nearly impossible in this day and age.
You see, here in Central PA (I live about 1 mile from the famous Rockville Bridge) even with all the railroad history here…I guess people have heard and seen it all and mostly don’t care. Electric slot car racing seems to be hotter than trains here.
In the local schools, even the teachers in kindergarden and first grade can be heard saying things like “trains are for babies” (my eldest son has heard this in Susquenita School District).
My son heard that at the nursery in the gym we attend at age 5 (the Train Yard Gym–Train Hard at the Train Yard–which was located directly across the street from Enola Yard at that time). Within 2 weeks of hearing a misguided mother say to her 4 year old “You don’t want to play with (Thomas) trains, those are for babies,” my eldest son stopped playing with ALL his trains. We used to go to Strasburg more than 8 times per year. He would come into our bedroom on a Saturday morning, jump on the bed and say “Daddy can we go Strasburg?” every Saturday morning.
But after that clueless hairbrained … mother (we’ll keep this kind) made that statement, it was game over for trains.
With Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, and the other video games available to kids these days, it is difficult for trains to compete, because the video games, at least to the kids, are much more exciting. You can’t even get them to play basebal
Thanks for your efforts, you never know what seeds will germinate later. Just note the two teenagers that replied earlier here and love trains. If it weren’t for sound and computer involvement, I don’t know how much my son and daughter would like the MRR.
And thanks for your service to scouting. The Boy Scouts have a merit badge for railroading which here we use elements of an operating layout to demonstrate what the prototypes do and why, etc.
The RR bug is firmly planted in my kids. Though they don’t actively participate in running the layout, my daughter does help a lot on the artsy side of things.
At my kids school in grades 3,5,7 they do large projects on the CPR as it played a huge roll in Canada coming in to being. Also every year each grade holds a math fair and at every math fair one of the teams has a time saver. This is always the most popular exhibit at the fair (especially with the dads)
In grade five all the kids learn this song and sing it at assembly and/or the parents depending on the year.
My kids already knew the words as it gets played a lot at our house.[:-^]
Don’t give up too soon. Kids go through lots of phases. Give it a few years and you might be surprised. Something that seems childish once can be transformed by experience so that the next time he gives it serious thought something may click. I think you’ve done all you can on the train front for now.
However, there are subtle ways to build interest that may pay off. Give him hands on experience with whatever you can around the house. Most of these skills transfer well to building a layout later, but it can’t hurt to understand about basic hand tools, painting and some other things that are just good to know in life anyway.
Then there are other models. Yeah, don’t sweat the trains, but after a decent interval, if he’s interested in something else – planes, trucks, cars, whatever – get him a kit for that. Let him do it his way, but of course be there for advice and maybe a helping hand if HE thinks he needs it. He’ll get a chance to try his hand, build confidence without the pressure of living up to dad’s level of work (it’s something we don’t think about for anyone who’s not a model rail, but this can happen even with adults), and generally have a hands on experience.
And it doesn’t have to be a model. If you do woodworking, let him build something (with your aid for the kid-dangerous stuff). If you work on cars, let him help wash or detail it. Garden? Give him his own row of veggies to raise.
The key is working with your hands and creating something yourself. They say the video games improve hand-eye coordination. Maybe. But they sure leave the user as a consumer, able only to choose, not create. In life, it’s those who are creative who succeed over and above the average. To a certain degree, you need to be creative in model railroading, too, at least in touch with whatever creativity you can muster. Feed that urge and you’ll be doing the right thing by him as a dad, even if he never builds a layout.
