Google's Ngram Viewer reports the incidence of specific words or phrases throughout history by scanning a lot of books, etc., to determine if, when, and how popular a word was/is in the print media.
Here are the trends for "toy trains" and "Lionel trains" - not sure what they mean but an optimist like me finds something positive here: maybe we're not in the golden postwar age again, but things don't look too bad.
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I'd say things are looking more positive than not......
Today's kids know more about trains than kids when I was young.
It's good to know that you see a positive trend in something that's down about a third since 2000. On the other hand.............
Time for me to clean my wheels and pick-up rollers before they spark. Or i could just continue doing my NJ HiRailers work.
Gerry
Also interesting is putting in the various vendors. The only game in town in terms of the public consciousness in three rail O gauge is Lionel. So anything Lionel does probably helps all the vendors. And if Lionel disappears, probably that spells doom for this segment of the hobby, ultimately, in the long run.
Books mentioning trains and Lionel may down since 2000. But books in general may be down in general. Headlines and web articles may be up. If you do a Google search using Google Trends, one sees a different picture with mention of toy trains and Lionel trains spiking big-time each and every Christmas season. Except for Bachmann trains, the other vendors are not prominently mentioned in articles searched by Google Trends.
It gets sort of addictive, doesn't it?
I'd sure be surprised that kids nowadays know more about trains than I and
contemporary kids did. Thomas has helped, but the child world seems to be full
of electronic games, and spectator sports. I, and I suspect others of my age, who once walked through Sears and Woolworth toy departments, just about upchuck in a walk through Toys-R- Us, at the plastic junk. (and not to single them out..just about any other than a hobby retailer) But..times and tastes change...as have the railroads we model.
The TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/what_...5_million_books.html) by two of the fellows involved in the development of this is both fascinating and hilarious.
Lee, I too tossed in UP, I added Rio Grande but the hits were probably the river / canyon because when I added Western or Southern Or used D&RG the line bottomed out.
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