I've rebuilt a 40s-era Lionel train track system (mostly replaced the power plug to the control box), and ordered an AFX track from ebay just yesterday. The sizes don't mesh, but both are going on a plywood layout in the garage.
Enthusiasts struggle to keep model railway industry on track
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Re: Enthusiasts struggle to keep model railway industry on track
#42All of you complaining about space, you just need to move to the country. I hear real estate in Missouri, Alabama, etc. is pretty reasonable.
Re: Enthusiasts struggle to keep model railway industry on track
#43Funny to see this now. A couple days ago I was on vacation in San Diego and visited the San Diego Model Railroad Museum in Balboa Park and a lot of the traffic flowing through my head about it are all points addressed in the above article: "Almost everyone working here is quite old" "The amount of space this takes up is incredible, I wonder how people get into this hobby, I've never lived anywhere where I'd have enou…
I've wondered this about a lot of hobbies, e.g. drumming, pottery, woodworking, anything that needs space or sound insulation. There's a lot you can do at shared spaces, but cost/availability/inconvenience of those is just such a big barrier to entry for many younger people.
I also suspect that many of the young people who can afford and are interested in many of these sorts of hobbies have, at least incrementally, tended to shift more urban which makes them impractical absent some shared club/store space. When I first got an apartment after school--and pre-digital photography--I tried doing home processing in a half-bathroom and rapidly concluded that was for the birds. (Even after I got a house, there really wasn't a suitable space and then digital photography came in.)
Re: Enthusiasts struggle to keep model railway industry on track
#44I dabble, but much like RC cars, video games have choked out another physical hobby.
Re: Enthusiasts struggle to keep model railway industry on track
#45Meanwhile in Hamburg, Germany: https://www.miniatur-wunderland.com
Re: Enthusiasts struggle to keep model railway industry on track
#46How long until we have model networking?
tiny racks filled with tiny Cisco routers. with tiny cables management and tiny blinking LEDs everywhere.
You can even add buttons to simulate solar storms on your tiny microwave antena model which would change how the blinking lights work on the tiny routers.
And if you want to splurge like some train modelers do with fake grass and such you can maybe even go for the middle manager model as if it's walking around the server room as he tries to avoid the CEO that day.
Re: Enthusiasts struggle to keep model railway industry on track
#47Sad to see but my overlapping hobby (miniature wargaming) has some cross over and model train stuff is so expensive even compared to miniature wargaming which isn’t very cheap itself.
Over COVID I couldn't wargame with friends in person, so I started an N scale railroad to fill the hobby void as they share a lot. Also it was fun doing all the automation etc as mentioned in other comments there. I've sold the railroad off since as I started wargaming again though.
Re: Enthusiasts struggle to keep model railway industry on track
#48Even 40 years ago many opted for N scale because of space constraints. Clubs were almost always HO scale focused, since they had cheap or free accomodation often in semi abandoned rail hangars etc. As for age, it is not just the cost, but also the alienation of the young from messy analog physical dexterity, long low stimulus attention and slow progress in favor of high stimulus instant digital gratification.
Housing costs have been growing at 2x wages for 50 years. If space was a constraint then, imagine how it is now.
How many times did boomers look at the two buttons before them, "make housing affordable" and "make housing a good investment," and which button did they press every singe time?
Re: Enthusiasts struggle to keep model railway industry on track
#49I think what drew people to model trains was the ability to create and automate your tracks. It's an interesting and fun thing to do, basically designing a system and going trough all the small things needed to make it work. I can see how today this itch can be scratched by many different videogames (Factorio, just to give one example), while decades ago it was either model train or nothing much else. I think younger…
Honorable mention for OpenTTD
Re: Enthusiasts struggle to keep model railway industry on track
#50How long until we have model networking? tiny racks filled with tiny Cisco routers. with tiny cables management and tiny blinking LEDs everywhere. You can even add buttons to simulate solar storms on your tiny microwave antena model which would change how the blinking lights work on the tiny routers. And if you want to splurge like some train modelers do with fake grass and such you can maybe even go for the middle m…
Have you looked at /r/homelab?