Who Can Afford This Hobby Today?

I don't want to drag this thread off course, as I am enjoying it immensely. However...as the "holder in due course" for the Archive slides, I now have LOTS of unpublished slides, but there are a couple of drawbacks that I need to sort out before taking on a Volume 3. One is that a lot of the slides are store-bought, meaning that someone else holds the copyright (see previous threads on this topic). The other is that what I mostly have are roster shots of O&W locomotives, which may or may not appeal to a wide enough audience to interest the publisher. I need to take a closer look at what is here to determine if there is enough to work with, but thanks for asking.

GS

 

The hobby may or may not be dying (although I agree with Jim: I think it is, too), but it is certainly not growing. Reading back through this thread, many of the posts are from guys who have been in the hobby for quite a while and have already accumulated enough of the basic stuff (track, rolling stock, structures, etc.) that they do not need to make a large up-front investment to get started. As it, having moved from Chicago to Cape, I have to buy a lot of plywood which, if nobody has shopped it lately, has also gone through the roof.

GS

 

Thank you for this thought-provoking post, Rick - great to hear from you!

It has been fun reading everyone's take on the topic. I would fully agree with Rick, and what most everyone has said - this has become a very expensive hobby - if you want the "top of the line" stuff.

In my younger days, my dream was to buy a house with a basement and fill it with a model railroad layout. About a year after my first son was born, we moved into our first house - without a basement, or room for a layout. Ten years later, with two sons, we moved to a bigger house - still here in Lenexa - with a basement! As the boys quickly grew older, and the years flew by, I became involved in their activities, and the timing never worked out for a layout.

Fast-forward to the youngest son exiting the house - while I was unemployed for about three years, working modest jobs to keep busy and making a buck or two - still looking for career work. Shortly after finding another solid job, I became the grandfather of a wonderful little girl. She's three now, and her cute little sister was born in July of last year. To alleviate childcare expenses for my son and his wife, we watch both grandchildren every other weekend - his wife's folks watch them opposite weekends.

What do grandchildren and an empty basement have to do with this thread?

Well, my son and his wife moved out of their apartment two years ago, moved in with her folks, thinking they would save money for a house. Where did their household possessions go? That's right - in our basement - occupying just about every square foot. It looks like they will be looking at houses soon, so maybe we'll have the basement back.

Based on my available time, and costs of the hobby, the best I can hope for is to display my railroad memorabilia and have a modest little switching layout with, perhaps a layout design element, based on the Clinton Sub - we'll see. My budget would definitely preclude the "top of the line".

One last thought: when I was in junior high and high school, it seemed, at the time, that most of the modelers were older and worked in some type of well-paying profession - at least those who had the "cool-big" layouts. I did have a handful of friends - the same age group - who were "arm-chair" modelers with big dreams. Like me, most of them have yet to fulfill them - in the model railroad sense.

My sincere thanks and appreciation for several of you, like Rick, who not only have pushed further on than the rest of us, and built those dream layouts, but share pictures and updates on this site, as well as opening the doors of your basements to share the spectacle and enjoyment of your creation!

Bob McKeighan
Lenexa, KS

 

Hi Guys,
Just to put things into perspective I read an article in the old Linn Westcott mgazine "Small Railroads You Can Build" written by Jim Page and Larry Kumferman. It was about the "Pine Tree Central RR" which was originally published in the December1952 issue of Model Railroader. The article describes building a small railroad from scratch for the Christmas holiday and later making it a full time layout. In the beginning of the article it gives a list of all the materials, including the lumber, track, locomotive and cars. It is referred to as "the works" and the total in 1952 dollars was $69.46. Converting that to today's worthless currency makes the start up costs $694.60, or 10 times the cost it was in 1952. With the ever increasing cost of lumber, copper wire, paint, nickel track, and rolling stock, it's easy to see that the average model railroader today has to invest a large amount up front to get started, but when you consider that today we have eBay and online auctions, good deals can be had. As for me, I got started in model railroading in 1971 with an old "postage stamp" Aurora N scale layout. I got back into model railroading in 2002 when I bought my first HO scale locomotive kit. All of my stuff is DC, and most is the cheap stuff like Athearn and Round House. I have all the buildings and rolling stock I need for a layout, so all I would need to build a decent 4 x 8 ft. railroad is track and the space to put it. So in retrospect, while start up costs are high, with the quality and diversity of products on the market today you can get quite a good deal for your investment. And yes, most of us in this hobby are "old foogies" that have been around since Noah was a sailor....hi hi.
George

 

The answer really depends on how one pursues the hobby of model railroading. The way many model railroaders have pursued the hobby or want to pursue the hobby is rapidly becoming unobtainable. Several factors seem to be leading the hobby of model railroading to a tipping point in which it will begin to move in a new direction. Among them:

• Wage stagnation and inflation. We can argue all we want about whether in inflation adjusted dollars Athearn's current freight cars are no more expensive than the Blue Box kits of past decades. That won't change the fact that most middle class Americans have less purchasing power now than they did in decades past. Wages and salaries rise, but slower than inflation. That means there is simply less money to devote to leisure time pursuits like building a railroad.
• Added expenses of modern life. I'll boil this down to two things, cell phones and cable/satellite tv. There are others, but those are obvious and nearly ubiquitous. Many Americans spend upwards of $300 per month for things they now consider necessities. Regardless that twenty years ago they had neither and managed to survive such dark and beleaguered times (some were even happy, not knowing what they were missing).
• Loss of unclaimed real estate. It's rare for a man to be able to claim sole use of a vast basement space. Now we're supposed to include space for media rooms or game rooms and sometimes the wife wants space for her hobbies too! Also remember that significant parts of country don't even build basements. Every person who gives up their job search, sells their home, and drives a UHaul to Texas, moves to a land of no basements.

Nevertheless I don't think the hobby is dying. But that doesn't mean that the hobby will change and meet new realities easily. Here's where I see pressure intensifying within the hobby. Eventually something will have to give.

• The glorification of big layouts. The hobby press is quite certain that bigger is always better. More layout, more trains, more people operating, more everything. I know that in many ways the mags want to show us what we can aspire to, but they miss the reality that the vast majority of their readers can't aspire to a massive empire. Check the short bios of the people whose layouts are featured. Notice a common thread? They're often a doctor, lawyer, or business owner. They make enough to keep the wife in pearls and not protesting while he spends tens of thousands of dollars on a big layout. For a whole lot of people who like trains and want to have a model railroad, our sights will have to be set a good deal lower. If we want to have a big layout, we'll need to join a club.
• Model what you know. For a lot of model railroaders, our layouts are memory vehicles. We are recreating aspects of bygone days that we remember (often our childhood). That means the golden era for model railroaders is constantly changing. It was once the late steam era, then the transition era, and now it appears to be the sixties and seventies (which helps account for all the good Frisco models). How is that relevant? Quite simply, the railroads became more intensive and heavy duty in that time period. Branch lines were abandoned or sold off to shortlines, downtown switching districts disappeared, passenger service practically ceased. Many of the things railroads once did that lended themselves to being modeled in small spaces, have disappeared. A young railfan going trackside saw long trains pounding by in a glorious parade. It was a thrill. Forty years later that young railfan has raised a family and wants to rejoin a long lost hobby. He looks at the two ten foot long walls that he wants to use for a layout and he knows he won't be able to relive that thrill in that space. Nor can he afford the twenty to thirty locomotives he would need, much less enough cars to pull behind them.
• The increase in detail. We get some fantastic models straight out of the box. Ten years ago would anyone have dreamed that you could buy a Frisco SD45 and it have an L-shaped windshield or a GP40-2 and it have a Gyralight? These things are amazing! But the obsession over super-detailing means things costs more. Somebody has to be paid to make and apply all those details, even if it isn't American minimum wage. The trap is that now everything is expected to be super-detailed. I'm fairly confident that Allen McClelland couldn't get an article published today if he was just starting out. "Good enough" just isn't good enough anymore. Molded-on grab irons are just unacceptable, even though it's kind of hard to notice them when a train is rolling along at a scale speed. Everything must be perfect.

So what are the answers? I don't know, but I have some ideas of how the hobby will change.

• Smaller layouts are normalized. Big layouts are the exception, not the expectation.
• Smaller layouts means smaller rosters. So all the rolling stock can be super-detailed, there just won't be fleets of it.
• Exhibition layouts. British and Australian modelers have something to teach us here. We could share our layouts in ways we don't today.
• Switching layouts. Want to model modern railroading in a small space? It's possible, if you're willing to be a footboard conducter rather than a dispatcher. In this I've definitely been influenced by Lance Mindheim, Byron Henderson, and others.
• Still want the thrill of running a long train over a subdivision? That's what V-scale excels at. You can enjoy big-time railroading on the computer while still getting the tactile enjoyment of modeling on a smaller layout.
• N-scale. It's small enough to fit into tight quarters and the scale has largely avoided the super-detailing craze. Besides, you can barely tell the difference at that size without a magnifying glass! N-scale isn't cheap, but it's cheaper than HO and pennies on the dollar compared to O scale. It's not for everyone, but for guys with tight budgets and small spaces (that's me), it sure beats hoping and dreaming.

I feel confident that this hobby will survive. It may not always thrive like it is today, but it will continue. So long as young boys love trains (which seems near universal), enough of them will grow up and enter the hobby once they have money and time.

David Erickson

 

Dave,
That's exactly why I keep my layouts small.....and my wife HAPPY....LOL!

 

Hi Tom!

I should have thought of Ramen noodles. Maybe I could get one more car . . .

Hey I really enjoyed the video of your layout. Very nice.

 

...or you could combine the noodles with the peanut butter and add a little garlic, green onion and chile to taste. It is bound to be way more interesting than either one by itself.

(I have not tried this, but the local Chinese Restaurant makes a similar dish that is fantastic.)