Always keep in mind that it is YOUR hobby (for whatever reason) to enjoy in the way YOU want to enjoy it. It really matters little what the future holds because that's not something you can control, aside from doing your personal best to share YOUR joy of the hobby with others around you. Beyond that, there's virtually nothing you or even thousands of younger participants like you can do to control or even markedly influence what happens.
This hobby will get smaller. There's no way around that, and the factors that lead me to that conclusion are too numerous in number to expound on them here (although I've gone into that subject in multiple threads here in the past).
You can be quite sure that us oldsters, in our own past histories, went through the very same things you younger folks are dealing with in terms of time and resources. We also went to college, got started in careers, got married, bought homes, raised families, and so on and so forth. I think it's safe to say that a majority of us left the hobby at some point after school and then came back to it later in life after some of life's more significant demands were attended to. I left the train hobby about midway through high school (although I did sell trains at a local department store during the Christmas seasons), and I didn't come back until some 20 years later, give or take, after college, military service, formative years in my career, and so forth. That's pretty much the "normal" course of how things go with this and many other hobbies.
The real difference that you younger folks will have to contend with in the future is product availability. There almost certainly will never again be the bounty of items that has been available over the past 18 years or so and is still available today. Those of us in the War Years and Baby Boom generations are responsible for that treasure trove, and many of us have now pretty much satisfied our wants and needs. Moreover, we are starting to fade from the scene. Our large numbers influenced the production that has been so evident over those past 18 or so years, and those numbers will never again be available in the toy train marketplace. That is simple fact.
My advice is to just enjoy the hobby in any way you can and for as long as your are able, just so long as it continues to bring you pleasure and relaxation. Don't worry about the future, at least as far as toy trains are concerned. We're leaving you plenty of other things to worry about already.
