I ended up, after becoming more interested in the work of John Allen and his famous “Gorre & Daphetid,” model railroad and after listening to a model railroading podcast epsiode, I learned not must more about his early start in the hobby, but the state of what the hobby was when he started out in the early 1940s.
I learned that he started during his time as a professional photographer, taking photos & portraits of American servicemen, he became more interested in the hobby. I learned that during this time, factories where instead turning out materials & goods for wartime instead of model trains that where in production at the end of the depression, and became less of a priority due to wartime demand.
I also learned that despite to wartime fears the hobby was alive and strong, something for people to turn too, as anything could happen, such as fears of invasion or the tide war turning against the allies. However something confused me. Due to strong encouragment to buy war bonds, and to contriubute as much scrap and material to the war effort, was the hobby discouraged?
I mean if you wanted to buy wood to start the benchwork for a simple starter 4’x8’ layout would you have gotten stares and be told you where not helping the war effort by contributing enough materials or being greedy?
In the 1930s (pre-war), Model Railroading was nearly an all-scratchbuilding hobby. There were nearly no kits or even very many parts.
So, as a consequence, war rationing and limited supplies did not effect much as far as hobbiests would have noticed in the early 1940s. Model Railroaders were already building their models from scraps and bits as could be found.
Electric toy trains were probably effected directly by war production needs.
If you go back to the 1940s issues of MR, there are plenty of ads referring to shortages and delayed releases for components and kits. Numerous ads refer to selling what stock is available from pre-war production. Several speak about being occupied with war production and are like “we’re already planning for victory and new products!” Lots of mentions of poor postal service due to war restrictions.
For instance, page 322 of the July 1944 issue has three ads. All three mentioned the war. The first mentions their plans for post war locomotive releases. The second is ad ad basically saying not to place orders with them because they can’t fill their existing orders due to labor shortages. The third says they can still supply orders from their full line as depicted on a previous price list.
I do not think model railroading was discouraged during wartime. I think modelers found a way round things to proceed. Just like now with this Covid stuff (with shortages of track etc.)
The interesting thing (I found) in wartime is, it is the wartime modelers we admire and followed after the war, are names we know now.
“During the war, model manufacturers were ordered to stop production in order to conserve critical metal supplies. Walthers produced what it could from nonessential materials. Walthers was well-known for his humorous ads run during World War II and his sense of humor in general. A series of these ads in 1943 saw Bill literally scraping the bottom of a barrel for materials. A line of ‘Tongue-in-cheek’ products was issued. This included the #933-5419 ‘O’ gauge Beer Can Tanker Tank Car Kit, which was a set of metal castings including a chassis, sprung trucks, couplers, wheels, ladders, a spigot and a platform that could be assembled onto any type of aluminum can (beer or soda pop that you provided) to make a custom tank car. The Walthers motto used on packaging was “fun to build”. Some feel Bill Walthers personally kept model railroading alive despite the wartime restrictions on materials used in model railroading. Walthers boasted that every freight and passenger car model offered in their line was patterned after its prototype. All parts and patterns were built from the original railroad drawings with dimensions accurately scaled down.”
It is very interesting to read Model Railroader from the war years – the ads, the articles, the editorials, and the letters from readers – because of the shortages and what they caused modelers to have to live with. Most articles about building stuff used wood and paper/cardstock anyway so in a sense construction articles continued to be helpful. But the shortages did mean that not many newcomers could enter the hobby (assuming they were not in the armed forces - the average age of a model railroader back then was surprisingly young). And there were some interesting work-arounds, since necessity is the mother of invention. For example, eventually brass rail was not to be had, but one enterprising firm created rail made of wood and suggested that since a locomotive would be unlikely to run to the end of your sidings, only freight cars, remove that much of your brass rail, replace it with wood, and use the newly recovered brass rail to make a turnout or crossing, or create a new siding. How many guys actually did that I have no way of knowing.
Many firms, especially those unable to convert to war work (Varney and Mantua were able to and did), withered and died as a result of the war.
Another consequence of the War, and here MR’s editors and the NMRA and some other influential people in the hobby put their heads together and kind of forced a major change in a way that seems almost unthinkable today: it was becoming agreed that the 6 volt motors used for pre-War HO were inadequate and it was more or less decided by a fairly small group of folks, that as soon as things got back to normal, the 12 volt motor would be the new standard. I may be getting my facts confused here but I think the old 6 volt motor standard was an outgrowth of automobile batteries being 6 volts originally. I do know that auto batteries were a common power supply in the hobby in its early days. I am sure there were hobbyists pretty outraged by this "conspiracy&quo
I recall an ad for a war scrap metal drive with a little kid volunteering his electric train (which were all metal back then) to the drive. Most manufacturers changed to war production, not just train companies like Lionel but auto builders - there were no new cars for several years. But you could still buy something if you found it, hobby interests weren’t discouraged. I recall several MR covers with men in uniform working on models.
With war production in full gear, people often worked many hours of overtime only to find there wasn’t much for them to spend their money on. With all the money people had saved up by the time the war ended, that they splurged buying new things like cars, radios, TVs - and hobby items like model trains.
Bear in mind that the wartime materials shortages issues were largely civilian morale building propaganda, not real at all. In Britain civilians were encouraged to turn in their aluminum cookware (which nobody uses nowadays anyway due to the theory of an Alhziemers connection). The amount of aluminium required for just one fighter would consume a seriously huge number of pots and pans. As for iron and steel, really? Domestic consumption of those materials wouldn’t build a battleship. Leaving aside the fact that battleships were obsolete before the end of WWI.
And so on, the same “we’re all in this together” nonsense is being spread around right now for similar civilian morale purposes unrelated to reality.
Not to contradict the reality of bans on “trivial” use of “scarce” materials. But it was just propaganda, not real.
Having lived thru rashioning, food shortages and the like to 1955 I could contradict your statement in its entirety, but I would be departing from the OPs original question.
Me too, although I have no direct recollections of course. Rationing after the war resulted from the UK “balance of payments” problems, not lack of availability of food. Even during the war civilians in the UK under rationing ate better than before the war. Occasionally centralized planning produces better results than the free market.
Material and food “shortages” were real enough during WWII but encouraging civilians to give up their stock of materials “for the war effort” was pure propaganda. No doubt when you create economic demand by blowing up a bunch of stuff and reduce official unemployment by diverting huge numbers of workers to shooting each other prices rise (without rationing) then supply fails to keep up with demand… and so on.
The amount of metal material that could have been diverted from model railroading to the war effort would have been ridiculously small, just for example. There are others.
I’ve thought sometimes that it’s a shame that, once people got used to recycling during World War 2, that it wasn’t kept up after. Recycling didn’t become ‘a thing’ again until the 1970s. It would be interesting to know how much glass, paper, metal etc. during those 30 years were lost that could have been recycled.
BTW, wood wasn’t rationed or in short supply. Quite the contrary, things that had been metal before the war were built with wood instead. For example, all-steel boxcars had become the norm during the 1920s, but many new boxcars were built during WW2 with wood sides to save steel.
When they started picking up the recyclable materials in our neighbourhood in the 1980’s, my mom was on board 100% from day 1. I think folks from her generation (Depression and WW2 era) were very well used to it. I look at my kids today and while they are pretty quick at making a green statement, the behavior is not always there when it comes to actually putting things in the recycling bin or the compost… Oh well.
What most people don’t relize is the scrap drives and some other things were not needed for accuall product duning the war (at least in our country), very little as a percentage of scrap was used in war production, but was instead it was a way to make the average person feel like they were contributing, same with a lot of the rationing.
I think we need to put things into its context, which was risk management in a real wartime threat situation. In 1940, there was a real scare in Britain that the island would suffer from a lack of aluminium to build their 300 or so spitfires per month, among other things. The Atlantic supply route was, let’s say, far from being reliable at the time.
80 years later, I think it’s easy to label these drives as propaganda. At the time, they probably were scrambling for anything they could get as they did not know how long the Battle of Britain would last…In the end, the household items that were donated did not make a big difference, from what I read on the Internet. But that’s an after-the-fact statement…
I think something that may be overlooked, is that by encouraging citizens to donate, you create a sense of comeododery and purpose. A big part of winning wars is keeping the people “back home” feeling like the war is “worth it”. Contrast this time period with another, say around the war in Vietnam. “People back home” got fed up with the seeming lack of purpose and wanted an end, even if that meant not winning. Please don’t rage at this comment. Just my observation.
Exactly what they tried to do and it worked. Still working in many ways.
The model railroader who had to wait for his turnouts to be manufactured was made to feel that he contributed to the collective effort.
The change came about when journalists were given unprecedented access to the actual battlefield. The reality of the situation countered the illusions prior governments had tried to promote. There’s an irony there in that it was initially thought that truth in reporting would lead to higher social commitment to the effort but it had the opposite effect. That same mistake was not repeated.
It’s all about sacrifice. I give you the last ice cream bar and I feel like a better person, even if I don’t enjoy any ice cream. I wait for my brass train track, I feel like a better person, even if it’s totally pointless.
