The Underserved in the Hobby

As the centralized structure of the hobby has been taken apart little by little and the new structure has yet to be built we are at a loss many times to know how the hobby is going.  Lance Mindheim who builds layouts and has written several books about the hobby has hit upon a point where a missing group of the hobby sits which can be easily overlooked today.  Those of us who enjoy the social aspects of the hobby in sharing what we work on, operating a layout, or just a meal talking about our favorite subject need to find ways to reach these advanced beginners.  In this group are the future of the hobby, our future operators and hopefully future friends.  Please take a look at his blog post

Innovation by Rapido

Rapido is a Canadian model train supplier who is innovating for the hobby by solving long standing annoying problems.  The two problems are the remote uncoupling by magnets and switch machines with targets.  The Kadee design for electro-magnetic uncoupling is 30+ years old and requires major surgery to your roadbed and sub roadbed.  The new Rapido solution takes less space and uses a blue LED to mark the spot for uncoupling.  An obvious solution that results in a "why didn't I think of that" moments.  The second solution is the new switch machine with an integrated switch stand.  This item will solve the issue of knowing which way the turnout is thrown in a yard ladder.  The other operational help is when you are coming down the mainline and you need to make sure the last operator returned the points to normal when they finished using the siding.  Take the link below and review the products.

Rapido Railcrew

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.

It's TIme

The analysis paralysis which has griped my railroading of the last few years has convinced me that it is time to move on and end this blog.  I will be deleting this blog after Sept 30 and hope that someone else will find the name useful.

Change can be good to re-invigorate the hobby.  I will be going forward to a project that was on the back burner for a while and which always has had strong pull for me and I knew that I would build eventually.  The next project will be the Ma & Pa in the 1920s with a focus on the first half of the decade.  I have a new blog for this project maandrr.blogspot.com  Please note the double a with 'and' being spelled out.

Thanks for all those who have followed my ramblings and particularly Bernie, Al and Thom.

Forward Ho!

Simplicity and Layout Planning

One of the emerging themes in the model railroad world is the call to simplicity.  A recent blog post by Lance Mindheim on September 17, 2012 on the one switch layout.  The pressure to build the empire is hard to resist.  When you read the magazines there is a natural reaction among many that 'I can do that!!' or 'I can do that better'.  While the reaction is natural the tendency to overlook the costs of those empires and the delayed fun is big.  What is the cost of a large layout.  A double deck layout replicating the operations of a division of a railroad in a 1000 plus square foot basement would require tremendous resources.  You may think that I overstate the issue, but a typical mid size division could easily require 30 locos minimum to run just 3 through passenger and 3 through freights each way not including switchers, local passenger trains and way freight trains.  If you are running in the steam era then you may need to triple that number to allow for changing the engine upon the trains arrival and departure from each end of the layout. 

Over the last twenty years I have never finished anything but modules.  Usually my layouts consist of modules set up to either run in circles or back and forth.  In O Scale I have seen set up track temporarily with a switch or two and a lead.  Running an Atlas O Scale 0-6-0 USRA switcher and switching cars is fun even with a short track for O Scale and a few cars.  The very full bass sound adds a dimension not available in smaller scales due to speaker size.  

Perhaps my constant yearning and hoarding of materials and items for a large layout is just wrong headed thinking when I have had in front of me an answer all the time.  A smaller layout with less maintenance and easy expansion would give satisfaction now and in the future. Build it using LED (Layout Element Dominoes) which I will go into in a future post will allow things to keep moving.

Time to go play

Discussions with Retired Railroaders

Retired Railroaders are  one of the best resources to understand any line and how it operated.  There are several retired Southern men in the local area.  They share their knowledge willingly and worked on the B line during their careers. They maintain that in their time there was plenty of traffic on the line. This encompassed periodic times from 60's to the early 21st Century.  Traffic in the modern time ended short of Harrisonburg with interchange.  Prior to the merger there was interchange with the C&W, N&W, B&O and the Southern (Manassas).  To include these locations except Manassas as stub end tracks would generate traffic in modern times while they become freight points in earlier times.  The various grain storage customers and co-ops generated much of the modern traffic as they would have in an earlier era.

More to come.