Good Read

I thought this column did a nice job addressing some of the persistent hobby gripes, and just how unfounded they are.  I've been in the hobby since the 70s, and agree there isn't much reason to idealize the state of modeling back then.  Craftsmanship has been re-focused, not left behind. 

It is only better because you are not still there!

We all like to reminisce about the good ole days. The way it used to be. A simpler time. Too often we don't balance those memories with the negatives that were very real at the time. It is human nature.

In the words of a wise turtle to a panda.... Yesterday is the past, tomorrow is the future. Today is a gift. That is why it is called present.

Agreed Rob

I agree Rob.  For me, the real "model" is the layout as a whole.  All the pieces that make it come alive - locomotives, cars, structures, scenery, etc., are just "detail parts".  While I enjoy kitbashing and custom-painting locomotives when necessary to get what I want, and scratchbuild all my primary structures, I also take advantage of RTR models where their quality allows, and use commercial kits for supporting structures such as grain bins and some bridges.

By the way, for me, scratchbuilding structures isn't about being "macho".  I've just found that it's typically quicker and cheaper than kitbashing in achieving what I want.  Yes, details can get pricey, but we can buy 4'x8' sheets of 0.040" styrene from a plastics supplier for around $25, and one of those will give me all the core material I need for every structure on the layout.

Will detail and decal manufacturers survive?

I think that my biggest fear about the move toward more and more r-t-r models is that for the prototype modeler that wants to kitbash a model into something more accurate for our prototype is that I'm not sure if detail and decal manufacturers are going to still be around in 5 or 10 years.  We have already lost a few decal manufacturers due to the original owners retiring or passing away and not being able to find buyers to keep those companies going, or the products in production.

Detail and decal manufacturers?

The short answer is no, most won't be around in 5-10 years, at least not in the form we know them today.

Will modelers still be able to get detail parts and decals? Yes, in fact it will be a golden age for the niche modeler.

What will happen is technology will come to the rescue, as it often does for modelers. 3D prototyping and new decal/transfer technology will usher in the heyday of custom products at affordable prices. Minority scales, like S scale, stand to benefit big-time from this shift.

Clever folks with an entrepreneurial bent will build new detail and decal businesses on pulling together custom designs and marketing them via this new technology. If the old-school manufacturers want to survive, they will evolve their business to change with the times.

It's like what has happened in the music business. The iPod and the advent of 99 cent instant music downloads through iTunes made the CD recording and sales business irrelevant. Today, musicians wanting to go mainstream get their songs on iTunes, and CDs are a maybe later kind of thing. The big recording companies have faded to a distant secondary status ( see this link for a chart of what has happened) - but for those wanting to get music from their favorite groups, the times have never been better.

Same thing will happen to detail parts and decals. For the modeler, a golden age is about to dawn, and companies who can see that will make it - for those who stay with the tried and true, many won't make it, unfortunately.

My wife, Linda, and I think fondly about . . .

our early cars (my '57 Chevy and her '65 Mustang). Just when we think how neat it would be to have them again, we think of the ease of driving and creature comforts of our current rides and kick back and enjoy the photos.

the ease of driving and creature comforts of our current rides

not to mention the points, plugs, brake linings, etc. that the old iron went thru with a huge appetite. I raced 57 chevys on oval tracks for years and they are a great handling car but I certainly would want to drive one every day now. My Tacoma and my Wife's Accord Sport suit me just fine and I never have to open the hoods...DaveB 

I think we all tend to romanticize the past.....

 I'm guilty of it for sure but on the other hand, I don't think we should ever discount the work  of modelers of past times. They did some amazing work considering what they had to work with compared to what we have to work with today and there are some modelers of old whose work stands up even when compared to the best of todays stuff. I would even argue it surpasses it in some respects.  For one thing, the judging criteria of what makes a good model or a good layout has changed over the years and not  always for the best. At least in my opinion. And it's always fun to speculate what those "old timers" would be doing now with todays materials and  equipment.

Michael

...

No mention of the Tru-Scale system...nor the different spiking tools devised over the years...

I know a guy my uncle's age [70s], he gave me a box of HO, as he said he did all his track handlaide.  Inside there was a tool where you could drop a spike in each hole and then use a two tined ram to ram them home.  I also got a pile of truscale roadbed and rail...

This is not the first time I've run into the stuff, a man I knew in Fort Worth [80s/90s when he passed on]  had a huge collection of the stuff, with ties and rails applied, shelved up in the rafters of his train shed just waiting for a bigger layout.  And I picked up a double slip and a double crossover at the old hobby shop before it closed down, back around 2003...

In other words, this column was written by people who were kids in the 60s, a whole two generations removed from the people who were kids in the 40s and the driving force in the hobby in the 70s.  Find me the people who were kids in the 40's and 50's, and let's talk about the hobbyists who were the serious mainstream hobby [versus the set runners] in the 70s!  Right, they're all dead!!!

I dare say what we have is a memory gap because we simply didn't do it that way for a number of years between the gap when we used to use things like tru-scale [if you wanted a switch that wasn't Atlas] and when you could get a nice Shinohara or ME any time of the week.  The generation we have in the mainstream section of the hobby now has never known a time without a quality commercial switch!

These are the good old days

...as Carly Simon once sang.

I remember cutting my teeth in the hobby as a kid in the 1970's, and then getting serious about it in the 80's. I remember it well, and NEVER want to go back!

The variety of models, tools and materials these days are almost unimaginable when I think back to what the hobby was just 25 years ago. At no time was it easier for a modeller of average talent to be able to complete a beautiful layout that rivals the masters of bygone days.

And I don't think anyone has forgotten the masters, any more than physicists today forget Isaac Newton. If it wasn't for the work of Frank Ellison, John Allen, Jack Work or Allen McClellend  (just to name a few) I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be in the hobby.

...

Nobody's forgotten the masters...

But what about the thousands of physicists who made Newton's work possible, while publishing in that same era?

Nobody forgets the greats, but then nobody remembers the common people who made everything possible - like the last time I took my car to a car show, a man walked up and said "did you know you have the only Straight Six here?"

Everybody loves the V-8 coupe, but in truth, most cars were of the straight six four door sedan variety.  But you won;t think this for a moment if you went to a car show.

It took me a moment to mull that thought over...

Well...

If you like we can get into a deep discussion about whether or not Newton plagiarized calculus from Gottfried Leibniz (he probably did).

Just making the point that we present day rail modellers are standing on the shoulders of giants, just the same as modern day physicists do.

...

That's not the point I was making...

It's more a matter of the shoulders these giants we look at stood on, and those they stood amongst, and how easily we forget what was commonplace if only because we're so fixated on our champions.  The common people have all but disappeared because nobody recorded their layouts, their ideas or their lives, and those who remember them are now also nearing the end as well.  Three generations [kids, parents grandparents] is all the time it takes for an entire life to be all but forgotten.  In a hobby like ours where the major hobbyists are middle aged or advanced in age when they hit the hobby full throttle, that means the mainstream modelers of the 50's and 60's are barely even a memory in my dad's eye.

In turn, we make all sorts of assertions based on information that has been magnified due to ready reference repetition of the crownstones while missing true trends due to information we have ignored if for no other reason than because it was never published.

Everybody loves the V-8 coupe ?

 When I first started racing I drove a 47 Chevy coupe with a Hudson Hornet 308 flathead six motor and it could beat any of the V8's around the 1/4 mile oval. One of my favorite sounding cars when it rev'd up to the redline. I'd like to hear it again..DaveB

Slot cars?

Does anyone really see any slot cars anymore? Most of that hobby went down before the proliferation of Hot Wheels.

As for the good old days, I did handlay some switches on my first layout. I remember the arguments at the club I belonged to as to whether curved switches were prototype as well as reversing loops. I did establish that both types of track work can be found on our mainlines.

Currently my main focus has been on G scale layout that allows for a lot more freedom in my modeling. Did you know that finding and shaping live plants into trees for the layout is an art in itself.

I would say that the good old days always start with yesterday but the best days lay straight ahead.

The life of a mayfly

I've spent the last two months researching the history of Northeast Scale Models in hopes of putting together an article about Jim Doyle who founded the company and has indirectly touched so may modelers over six decades now. Doyle was the invisible hand behind Ambroid in the 50s and 60's  but he also touched many other kit manufacturers right into present day with an incredibly accurate product-mind blowingly scale lumber. Even so, he started with a misstep in my mind in the late 40's selling only "S" scale products, quickly adding "O" gauge when he saw the writing on the wall and then into production on HO in late 1949.

The reason I bring him up in this discussion is because most of the kits and engine bodies are really only on the market for a very short period of time. If you want it, you have to get it. The scratch builder doesn't operate with the same pressure.  I started out buying kits and have gravitated to scratch building because I enjoy the process as much as the final result. Some don't and that to me is absolutely fine.  What is important here is that we have been blessed with time to pursue trains instead of pursuing a wild boar to keep from starving. Time is our treasure. 

For me in the basement, I'm free to spend time, not necessarily money. I have lots of pricey things down there but my time is priceless, can't be bought, can't be brought back, it's here and now. It's winding down too.

In reading the Model Railroaders from '34 up to '50 where I am now, I have seen this dance around what scale is right and what lunkheads the guys who don't build their own stuff are. I think the most amazing article I ran across was a guy switching with pneumatics using bellows under the table. That I really loved for persistence if nothing else.

In my own field, the argument is constant. Are you really a genuine artist or just a common craftsman. Do you make your basic materials from minerals or do you buy mixed stuff by someone else?  It has gone on for years. Time grinds away. I know now that if you do what you love it should be  enough. When I see those old guys and younger men and moms taking their kids in the gates in West Springfield, I know that the spark is just love, the fuel is the time that's been given to you. Embrace it.

The Fifties Were the Good Old Days

Back in the Fifties:
1. My Dad bought all my trains for me.
2. The control systems were so simple you did not need training.
3. The track work was never a problem.
4. I was a whole lot younger back then, and had a lot more energy.
5. The Ice cream truck came by every day but Sunday.
6. The little neighbor girl pretty much stayed in her yard, and left me alone.
7. The government was a lot smaller back then
Yea! Those were really the good old days!! It has never been that good since!

A individuals perceptions are what made the good old days so good.

Technology is better, and the times are good but these are not my good old days.

Regards, John  ********************

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around.
But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished by how much he'd learned in seven years.<> Mark Twain

The best thing about the good

The best thing about the good old day's, ...a duck under was actually a walk under...

Randy

Detail its all in the detail!

So there we were building box cars using cardstock for the sides and hunk of wood for the ends and floor.  Bending our own grab irons and the like.  All this time we were looking for more DETAIL. So along come these 'shake the box' plastic things and we cried MORE DETAIL!  A few years pass and the KITS now have so much DETAIL WE can't put them together let alone even get the parts off of the sprue!  So thank goodness the manufacturers found some folks that actually assemble them s then we have READY TO RUN!  So there you have it the Craftsman are still around they are just READY TO RUN!  Russ

Ah yes but

Next thing is we are going to hire somebody to run our trains for us and then ask, "Did I have FUN yet?"

From the sounds of the generation to come they are going to pick there child from a test tube instead of making one.

Bernd

god old days

while i do agree with most that the current state of the hobby is better because of new technology  and advances in materials and techniques, i also believe that without studying the past those who weren't there and living it can not really appreciate it. of course there have been advances in he old techniques too. do i really need to mention fast tracks and clever models. designing your own card and paper models with model builder. easier ways to hand lay track. todays economy and budgetary constraints have brought back the desire to learn these styles and methods, at least for me. that being said let me also say i have been in the hobby since the early 80's and have seen the changes come and go. ( who remembers ole factory aires? I do.) i can recognize and appreciate each individuals talent and skills. i just happen to like those who can build great looking models using old style and new tech. the streamline theater in a past issue of MRH was great. today is nice but without looking back you dont where you came from.

Community, "good old days" and modeling

Your reflection on modeling touched a nerve with me. I've long noticed the "glory of God" statement and read the longer link about using creativity as a mode of expressing honor. So it was especially nice to see you honor the idea that we are all parts of a larger body or community with different functions. I'm all thumbs as a modeler, due to a disability, and have rejoiced at being able to purchase models ready to run. I have the greatest respect for those who can build from scratch (let alone assemble a kit and have it come out square), but I am not one of those, and all I ask is for similar respect when I consider my hobby to be putting the RTR trains on a track and running them around.

And, as a history professor, you are also right on about the "good old days." Our memory is highly selective. They weren't all so "good."

Said this before....

..but I'll say it again and then even again if need be.  Most of the techniques and so called new methods  are just rehashed stuff that was being done by the old guard masters year and years ago. Some of the materials may have changed for the better  and the techniques slightly updated to better take advantage of those materials but the basic way we build and scenic a model railroad hasn't changed that drastically in years. I can go back to old books and articles from MR and show you examples of "furnace filter trees" and "static grass machines"  from the 1960's and before. That's just a couple of examples off the top of my head too. There's much more. It really irks me sometimes when I see modern day modelers and authors try to take credit for stuff that I saw John Allen and Bill McClanahan writing about 40 years ago when I was a kid. It happens a lot more often than you think too.

Michael

To be fair...

...I don't think there are many people who set out to plagiarize the Giants or the Common Folk when they write about their discoveries. More often than not, they are genuinely unaware of the writings in a fifty-year-old, dog-eared magazine and have inadvertently "rediscovered the wheel." Good on 'em for publishing their findings for the current generations of modelers! In the end, does it matter who "discovered" the technique for building "X"? What matters most is the sharing of what we know with like-minded folk who are interested in what we have to say.

Knowingly plagiarizing is a different issue, but in this type of situation, I really don't think it happens that often. Give credit where it's due, if you can. But more importantly, share with your fellows for the greater knowledge and enjoyment of all who hear. Above all, remember that this is a hobby. Hobbies are supposed to be fun!

As an aside, If I knew who discovered fire, I'd acknowledge him (or her!) every time I roasted marshmallows. But not knowing who to credit never kept me from teaching my kids how to build a good, safe campfire.

-= Craig =-