a crystal ball gazing thread on another forum got me thinking. rather than a thread on what the future of MRing will bring such as dead rail or a replacement for DCC, I’d like to ask what is missing from MRing or needs better products for?
i post this under General Discussion because i assume it includes things other than tech, for example ground foam improved scenery.
so while you might think in terms of what you’d like to see, i’d like to ask why? is it missing from MR, needs improvement, ???
Model Railroading, as an industry, needs a simple and easy-to-understand way for newcomers to get involved.
Something better than a train set, well made, and affordable.
Walthers is in the best position to do this, and become the “recruiter” for the hobby, but an enticing package of fun that is reasonably priced and provides the gateway to the hobby for adults is missing.
-Kevin
Then again, my LHS owner who might know about these things pointed out to me that the major market of current model railroaders are older, time on their hands guys with mad money to spend. Current highly accurate model railroading is expensive but compared to other, ahem, activities older men with money and time tend to acquire as possible “hobbies” model railroading is cheap. I’ve spent a lot of money in a short time to get going quickly in this hobby. But compared to just adding a supercharger to my sports car it’s been really great value for money. I dare say I spend way more time and effort enjoying model railroading than driving my sportscar. And a I really love driving.
Kudos to manufacturers continuing to cater to the market with not a lot of money or time. Times past model railroaders who were serious made their own accuracy now we can just buy it. Starting out in the hobby you can’t just buy accuracy. It’s expensive.
What would benefit this hobby is a forum where excessive obsession with detail and accuracy was less prominent. Just my opinion but, objectively, this forum is unnecessarily intimidating to any newcomer. Seriously folks, an attitude adjustment is long overdue here,
A wider range of eras. Right now, if you go into a hobby shop and look at the products, you would think railroads were invented sometime after WW1. The first 100 years of railroading is pretty much ignored.
When I first posted in here several years ago I said that HO scale really needs a whole new track system designed for easy installation and lifetime quality.
That need still exists, but it will do me no good now. I have already purchased all the trackage I will ever need.
-Kevin
What we need is a good book. There are no good books that go into model railroad design and building that don’t get caught up in “I think or my way” and even the experts on a method don’t have the answers when things go wrong. I had the later when I was building my last layout with zip texturing, even asked and got responce from the guru at the time, I finally got it figured out myself. In this hobby we seem to get a lot of unscintific recomendations. Take another thing that happened to many, the car storage with bubblewrap makes on cars. Personaly never happened to me but I have seen it, but why?, only theorys exist but we do now no what that black crud is on our engine wheels are. Also things like foam, the tools for both expanded and extruded can be different and they both have differnt propertys and add different enviorments. I use beaded foam but you would not beleive the number of people who try to use a sarrated blade with that stuff wehich leads to beads everywhere etc.
I have thoughts on what the hobby needs, and what it does not need.
Needs:
Better product availablity, with less preorders. I don’t expect preorders to go away, but the more the product can be available when people are ready to buy, the more likely the hobby will grow.
Less product overlap between brands. This ties into my first point. 5 companies fighting over the Big Boy collector market while other modelers can’t get products they would buy makes no sense. I have made this point many times before. Look at the product offerings of Athearn and Roundhouse back in the 50’s thru the early 80’s - almost no overlap. Look at the early days of Spectrum and Proto2000 - no overlap. They all made lots money and the product was readily available.
Only the manufacturers can decide if it makes sense to continue to offer DCC ready (DC) locos. But all DCC/sound locos should be built to be easily backwards compatible by decoder removal or bypass, not by dual mode decoders that sometimes work ok in DC and sometimes not.
Better access to the wealth of information already created about this hobby. A search engine for the MR archive that works, a similar archive for other publications would be really nice.
Some things we don’t need:
We don’t need a “replacement” for DCC. There will always be alternative methods tried and that’s fine. But it is unwise and unlikely that that the NMRA or the industry would or should look to replace DCC.
The HO and N scale hobbies in particular where built on product interchangeablity. DCC has already created a divide in the hobby because even after 25 years it has only reached about 60% useage.
I promise you, if some new system comes along and is pushed hard by the industry, MOST exisiting DCC users will not rush to switch, no matter how much “better” it might be. They have too much invested. New control systems only appeal to new users or those making big changes in their a
Have you checked out the Bachmann forum? It is filled with much more casual modelers, and it is a good forum. I once spent lots of time there, but simply limit my online time now.
Sheldon
I agree, and it is disappointing that Athearn has not done more with the Roundhouse line.
The problem, as I have talked about before, is the ever increasing number of eras modelers have to choose from. Even if the number of modelers is steady or growing, I suspect the growth is not as fast as the march of time and thereby there are few modelers in ANY given era, and the eras before the 50’s are quickly becoming less popular.
If I was to model a different era from my 1954 choice, it would be 1910-1915.
Sheldon
The OP’s question begs the difference between newcomers and veterans to the hobby of model railroading.
After 17 years in the hobby, I consider myself a veteran hobbyist, and my MR needs are stuff like advanced signal systems.
But, newcomers face a more difficult task. When I started out in HO scale modeling in 2004, I had three local hobby shops. One in particular told me, and showed me, everything that I needed to know to kickstart my way into the hobby. The owner and his sidekick introduced me to DCC, decoders, flextrack, turnouts, Tortoises, wiring, electronics, and on and on and on.
Without them, I would not be in the hobby today. They referred me to this forum and others. Once all three LHS closed a few years later, I had the foundation to continue and use this forum as backup.
For those newcomers today who don’t have a LHS, as local hobby shops fade away, they are in for an uphill struggle. I don’t know how you solve that problem.
Rich
Agreed, but I am starting to think that for those younger than us Rich, social media and Youtube will do at least part of the job.
As may know, I stareted young in this hobby with lots of good mentors, and by young adulthood I was working in a hobby shop helping others get started just like you experianced.
I owe a lot to those who got me started, and gave me the opportunity to be in clubs with experianced modelers and to work in the industry.
I belong to two Facebook model train groups, and I have only made about three posts - it is the only thing I have done on facebook.
But I can see how it is connecting modelers like the hobby shop and clubs did years ago.
The other thing I will make a pitch for, which can be connected thru social media, is round robin groups. Clubs without club layouts, dues, LLC’s. A group of guys who meet at each other homes to run trains, work on layouts together and share the
I have, thanks for the reference. I agree with your assessment.
Facebook is where younger modellers go. I can’t be bothered with social media. I’d just p’o more people more efficiently…
Unfortunately fewer and fewer people are reading books. Seems they want everything in “video” format. I am not certain a book would be profitable for one to write.
A better forum.
Maybe model railroading is not in need of anything – or rather I should say, we are already model railroaders and seem to be doing OK so what WE might like to see is not necessarily what the hobby of model railroading needs to grow and thrive. Our side of the hobby is mature.
The current distribution system for the hobby seems entirely oriented to existing hobbyists. We know what websites to go to, we know what firms offer what and what we have to do to order it in time to get it. But what non-model railroad hobbyist wanders into that world of catalogs and website ordering and pre-orders and the like?
That is where the old local hobby shop served both sides of the coin: the experienced model railroader and the person, maybe a kid but maybe not, who just wandered into the store, or saw something interesting in the window, or had another hobby that was catered to by that same shop and found themselves wandering in the train department.
Similarly many hobbyists used to tell of how they came to be introduced to the hobby by looking at a magazine rack and finding a model railroad magazine with an interesting cover and decided to just buy and issue - and got hooked.
So to my mind what the hobby really needs is a way to interest the folks (adults; I would not hold out until kids are interested like they were 60 years ago) who are not already intersted but might be predisposed to becoming interested. But since LHSs and magazine racks are not coming back, I don’t know what it is. Maybe the model train displays at Menards stores can help a little. Viral videos from Miniatur Wunderland help a little. Photos of Rod Stewart’s layout help a little. I do not know if Big Bang Theory helped or hurt.
But more than that stuff is needed.
Dave Nelson
Seems to me there are much fewer real size trains. No visual stimulation results in lesser interest. (Insert joke about girls here). I now live in Northern Michigan where we get one engine with one load of lumber every 3 to 4 weeks and it runs slower then 5mph. Not very exciting to even railfans
Books can be digitized, another publication is basicaly that and a digituzed version can be surchable.
And the trains there are cannot be modelled. In addition to lack of space for track mileage we have insufficient space (and money!) to model current unit or container trains. Most places no longer have passenger trains either. Even 1950’s passenger trains are hard to find enough track space for.
It’s mostly well-fixed men whose kids are ‘paid out’ and on their own, with homes they own and disposable income who can do this hobby ‘seriously.’ Whatever that means, it means bucks and time. And not a little nostalgia.
As someone just said above, trains are like the bowels of ships. Interesting, but only if you find yourself down there. Not likely when the psychology of amazon and your current smart phone are working against you and your spare time. Besides, how much did you spend on your hobby when you were 30? Isn’t that going to a data plan and a new $500 phone 'bout every 24 months?
The hobby is frustrating, and newcomers are soon swamped with the complexities and vagaries of it. They find that their trains don’t turn on and run like their Samsung/Apple phone does. First time your train derails, or it stalls due to issues of one kind or another, it takes the starch out of one’s verve for the hobby. Phones bring cudos, thumbs up, interesting info-bytes, recipes, nudges, and all the motivation and encouragement that a body can stand. Trains don’t do that unless you know what you’re doing, and it takes work besides.
So, while Sheldon has a point that we don’t need a replacement for DCC, we do need a different way to power our locomotives. They mostly run well enough out of the box, but they won’t run long before we have to fix something to get them to run reliably. I have yet to use alcohol-soaked rags, a Bright Boy, 600 girt paper, or fix a solder on my S9. Which, by the way, is marvelous, and I won’t be replacing it until at least 2023.
Oh, and I can’t cast from my BLI UP 9000 hybrid to my Samsung 65" OLED to watch bike races. Not yet, anyway.
Maybe, but there is nothing to compare to the old fashioned LHS hand holding.
Rich