The "Future" of our hobby

We built a new kitchen about a month ago and now I need to replace the new tap that I did not notice was made in China when we bought it. What an exciting post. One thing is for certain, what ever you think the future might be, - it will be different. There is a difference though, I was born a couple of months before the end of the WW2, and always considered myself a baby boomer, but apparently I'm not. However in those days everybody worked and thought they were working for a better society.

A working man was appreciated and blessed with high wages like my father who was a baker and got almost forty cents an hour. Buying a train back then was something. However today the young people who seem to want to be paid for even going out to look for work do not have the luxury of being part of a group who are surviving, but rather being part of a group whose sole conquest is getting things for their selves. People think things will work out without their input as there is no reason to worry about anyone else but yourself, or so it seems. Model trains are something you can hold and play with, and modify  and they give you some feeling of security. That is where they play an important  role. However, the more you try to model trains and learn how they work and what they do you automatically become a historian, and gain a better view of what is going on. The other end of the story though is that you become aware of the limitation of time you have to do things, and the ability to do things because of other new discovery of aches and pains you never imagined existed.

 

Too few people are taking stock of their lives and leaving it up to leaders, not questioning where they are taking us. Because of where I began freedom was the most important thing, but we will lose it if we do not keep up skills to dream things up and make them on our own.

Well looking at Lionels pricing a Legacy Diesel costs about $500 and scale freight cars run $65 to $90 each. So without track or a transformer let alone benchwork and scenery, you are already there so I fail to see the arguement with those terms.


       

Not steam punk but here model of the future. http://www.andyestep.com/future%20city.html

Why does that remind me of "Things to Come?"(1936)

 

Rusty

Got to know your source material.

Definitely NOT the styling I would choose, but if anyone wants to attempt to build an O gauge locomotive as big as your living room:

 

 

As a late baby boomer who collects postwar and the father of a ten year old daughter who just received her third American Girl doll, I see a lot of similarities between Lionel's. original post war marketing and American Girl. (An American Girl doll can be considered to be the F3 of it's brand.) American Girl sells a relationship, be it mother/father to daughter or doll to daughter. The dolls have accessories just like the trains and the stores are our version of train clubs. Both JL Cowen and American Girl knew/know how to market to he American psyche. By the way, the day my daughter received her doll in the mail, I received a real clean set of Texas Special F3s and my wife said we both had the same expressions on our our faces.

All the best,

Miketg

Did your expression look a little like this?

 

 

Pfft, not me! I own one O-gauge diesel, it's the K-Line Alco FA set I got for Christmas as a kid.  I keep it for sentimental value.  It's in a box in the closet.  I might some day build some weird early diesels, like this bugger:

 

 

But overall, diesels have no external moving parts, and thats BORING!  

Oh, I don't know.  When I was a young'un back in the early 50's, I saw darn few, make that almost no steam locomotives.  Only an occasional glimpse from blocks away of what I now know were the Burlington's 4960, 5632 and something big lurking one evening in the Western Electric wire plant yard.

 

Yet, my main interest today is still with the steam locomotive.  You can probably blame my Lionel 2036 (which came out only for about two weeks around Christmas) for that more than anything else. 

 

Rusty

 

 

A diesel locomotive can sure be pretty (I have mostly diesels by default because of the roads I model), but a steam locomotive is a living, breathing thing.  I've yet to meet someone--young or old--who isn't fascinated and captivated by the sights and sounds of a passing steam locomotive.  A diesel, on the other hand, is essentially a box on wheels--some more attractive and nicely styled than others, but still pretty much a box.

 

No matter how many years may pass, and no matter how diminished their presence may be in the real world, steam power will likely endure on model railroads for many decades to come.

Interesting. My experience as a boy, from the mid-40's to the late 50's was entirely different; perhaps because I grew up in the Pittsburgh area. In fact, a track ran right through downtown McKeesport and bisected main thoroughfares, causing vehicular and pedestrian traffic to wait for the passage of trains into National Tube Works, of U.S. Steel Corp. We could stand at and lean on a railing along a sidewalk, which stood parallel to the RR tracks, in front of a popular candy store, and reach out and touch the locomotives as they lumbered into the mills. 

 

Most were steam locomotives, which I enjoyed the best because I could get my hands greasy and dirty from touching them as they crawled slowly forward. It seemed as though their sides breathed and moved accordingly. If I were lucky, they would stop for some moments and whoosh out steam from their sides, which would make everybody dance away, including the adults standing w/us kids. It didn't matter to me, however, whether it was a steam or diesel engine, so long as it shook the pavement we stood upon, which they always did.

 

In my memory, I can still see the track get pushed further into the ground as the long trains loaded with pipe from the mill passed us by, one wheeltruck at a time.

FrankM

My primary interest is also steam.  When it comes to diesels and electrics, I generally prefer anything introduced before 1955 in the US, or 1965 in Europe.  But what I really like is the blend of the different types of power working alongside each other... with steam as the dominant type, of course .

 

Now when it comes to Japanese railways, it's a totally different story.  I also really like Japanese trains; anything that was in operation from 1960 to the present catches my attention.  Even though it's mostly EMU's, the stunning variety of designs and paint schemes more than compensates for the scarcity of steam locomotives--which, by the way, continued to operate until 1975, so they do fit within my window of interest.  Once I am more fully established in O and HO, one day I would like to build a futuristic Japanese-themed layout in N scale.

Mike Wolf made some interesting comments published in CTT this month.  His point was that the hobby is passed down from fathers to sons.  Thus, so as long as that continues to happen the hobby will continue.  Given that Mike is the most self-made (and significant, IMO) man in the train hobby since Joshua Cowen, I'll take his statement as accurate and observe that it then falls on parents to pass it along (or not) to their kids.  I know this is what my dad did, and what I am doing with my boys.

Thomas the Tank Engine isn't new any longer. Shining Time Station (1989), the first US vehicle for the Thomas videos, has been around for over twenty years, along with Diecast Ertl Thomas items, and TC Timber Thomas items. My kids played with this stuff when they were little.

I think they are great toys, still kids move onto other toys as they get older.

 

A few years back, I learned that the child of the fellow who normally services my furnance was building a Lionel train layout. Over the next few years, I gave him something for his son at the end of each visit. Then one year he told my his son had switched to HO due to the cost and space requirements for "O" gauge.