Historical Societies and the Cost of Modeling Part 1

The Historical Society is a stated feature of the model railroading hobby.  These societies exist for every major and many minor railroads of the pre-1970 era.  There are even societies for roads such as Penn Central, Conrail and CSX along with at least one for a model railroad.  The desire to save and preserve the past is part of the human spirit with many of these societies started by those who saw that past slipping away.  Railfans, employees and amateur historians were the initial founders along with some modelers.  Each of these historical societies has sort to bring up the standard of their publications and work which costs money.  The raising of the standard has raised the cost of membership for those who want to learn the history and apply it to their modeling.  In my area of Virginia there are several key roads and others within a two hour radius.  Once you add others that one remembers seeing or hearing about growing up the list becomes quite long.  The cost of keeping membership up in all these societies is now past the tipping point and cutting back becomes a necessity.  It is not that any of these societies are unworthy there is just too much of a good thing.   The need to rationalize the cost of the hobby to a lower level means re-examing these memberships and the cost of the additional research material beyond the society magazine.

Part 2 will be a discussion of the interplay between these two cost areas and the choice of modeling subjects.

Railroads Societies belonged to over the last 20 years:

Active Membership

NKP
Southern Railway
N&W
ETWNC
RF&P
Hawaiian Railway Society

Inactive or not planning to renew

Milwaukee Road
Denver & Rio Grande Western
ATSF
Chesapeake & Ohio
Western Maryland
New York Central
NRHS
PRR
EBT

Simplification and Post DCC?

The need to simplify is a strong trend in the hobby noted by David Barrow, Lance Mindheim, Mike Cougill and Trevor Marshall among others.  They speak along this line for size of layout and simplifying the complexity of the physical layout while increasing the purity of the operation.  They are looking for better couplers, better rules, better paperwork and operations to improving fun and faithfulness to the prototype.  What areas are left to apply this perspective?

What they have not seen and we have not seen is a simplification to the operations control system.  DCC is a 20+ year old standard that came into being before Windows 95.  When you see this from a perspective of the computer industry it is apparent that while the decoders are significantly better and more full featured the backbone of the systems is still ancient technology.  The wireless system used by these systems and the control interfaces are still from a generation ago.  There are exceptions.

Lenz does allow you to use a single box to interface with a wireless router and use of small devices like an iPhone.  There are a number of wireless vendors who are making units usually for use with a battery powered system.  NCE recently released its own plug in receiver for use with those wireless vendors.  The question is whether any of these represent the next generation of control systems.

Bachmann has announced what an alternative path of using bluetooth to control the locomotive and this will be coming to their HO locomotives in 2015.  This may represent a new approach to the whole question depending on how well implemented is the system design.  The system is not Bachmann's design but they deserve credit having the vision for trying a new path.  The standard, software and equipment is made by a company named BlueRail.  The links to the announcements and websites are as follows:

Bachmann

BlueRail

Take a look at the video on the BlueRail site and see the possibility.