I think what drew people to model trains was the ability to create and automate your tracks. It's an interesting and fun thing to do, basically designing a system and going trough all the small things needed to make it work. I can see how today this itch can be scratched by many different videogames (Factorio, just to give one example), while decades ago it was either model train or nothing much else.
I think younger generations are drawn to cheaper and easier to access forms of entertainment that provide similar intellectual experience. It's a shame for the hobby, but I find it a very reasonable thing to happen.
Seems to gloss over the physical space required to have a model train. A video game can come in many sizes from phones to consoles and is much more accessible and even portable.
Growing up, we had a 4'x8' sheet of plywood covered in the fake grass and then decked out with structures, trees, people, cars, and all sorts of stuff. It was a lot of fun setting it up, building the models, and deciding on a track layout. Took weeks building it. It took days to get bored with it. For some reason, we thought it a good idea to tack down the tracks for better stability, but it made it a nightmare to rearrange the tracks. However, it stayed like that for years and from time to time as I got older would fire it up and quickly bore of it again.
> Took weeks building it. It took days to get bored with it.
That's my experience as well. A guy I met in a store had inherited an absolutely massive Rokal set, a lesser known brand so there wasn't a lot of documentation about how it all worked. He asked me to get it all working. The whole installation on 8 full sized sheets of plywood had been cut up to move it into his basement, they'd cut a temporary hole in the floor to move the sheets in but all the wiring had been cut and there was zero documentation. It took many months to figure it all out and to get it connected to the point where it would all work reliably. But once that was done I think I looked at it for 30 minutes before moving on to something more interesting. I loved working on the set itself though, especially because I kept finding new details that had previously eluded me (such as working traffic lights!).
This is where sectional track is a godsend. Easy to rearrange before worrying about tacking it down. For example, Märklin C-track. Ballasted roadbed. Clicky connectors that stay connected. Metal bits for attaching power+control leads.
And for tacking it all down, Homasote makes it easy to detach+reattach and deadens sound.
As told in Steven Levy's Hackers book, there were two groups in the TMRC. There was the group that went on train rides and did meticulous models on top of the track... and there was the systems and powers group that worked with wires and automation (from the telephone company) under the track.
From the Wikipedia article...
> The club was composed of several groups, including those who were interested in building and painting replicas of certain trains with historical and emotional values, those that wanted to do scenery and buildings, those that wanted to run trains on schedules, and those composing the "Signals and Power Subcommittee" who created the circuits that made the trains run. This last group would be among the ones who popularized the term "hacker" among many other slang terms, and who eventually moved on to computers and programming.
> ...
> At the club itself, a semi-automatic control system based on telephone relays was installed by the mid-1950s. It was called the ARRC (Automatic Railroad Running Computer). It could run a train over the entire set of track, in both directions, without manual intervention, throwing switches and powering tracks ahead of the train. A mainframe program was used to compute the path, and all modifications to the layout had to be compatible with this ability.
When I was little my brothers and I played a lot together with Lego.
Now we’re all over 40 and occasionally play on a heavily modded Minecraft server to scratch that itch.
In many ways it’s so much more practical, essentially unlimited building materials with no real cost, no issue with physical space in the house, we can do it casually in the evenings while doing voice calls on Discord, no unpacking or packing up needed before or after.
There are even great rail cart mods for those interested in track switching type activities.
We make a point of doing in person LANs about every quarter, also for old times sake.
I think this is the best explanation. I myself spent enormous time on Factorio "model trains" and it was even better because my train decisions were always motivated by an external requirement in the game. Model trains by themselves feel a little more sterile in comparison because they're disconnected from the rest of the world.
Though after billions of billions made in TT/OpenTTD and whatever imaginable railroad systems it lost most of it's magic for me. Every once in a while I install it, browse and add some mods (FISH of course) and... after I'm on +300% profit each year it starts to get boring.
Funny to see this now. A couple days ago I was on vacation in San Diego and visited the San Diego Model Railroad Museum in Balboa Park and a lot of the traffic flowing through my head about it are all points addressed in the above article:
"Almost everyone working here is quite old"
"The amount of space this takes up is incredible, I wonder how people get into this hobby, I've never lived anywhere where I'd have enough space to set up a model railway long term"
It's kind of a shame too, it was the first time I think I've ever really appreciated the large scale model train installations. When I was younger I'd see them at random historical museums and mostly just think "yeah choo-choo sure does go in a circle haha". I think the San Diego museum did a good job of conveying that it isn't really just about the trains as much as it's about modeling the landscapes and towns the trains actually go through. Viewing it from the perspective of a massive scale diorama of some region really raised my overall appreciation for the whole endeavour.
My father was an enthusiast. When we moved into their current house (1988), the builder had the option of a three-car garage or enclosing the third-car section, and that was intended as a railway room. He favoured the large German "LGB" trains, in part bought because they were among the more durable products on the market, so it would be child-resistant for the kids to use. He built the framework and a track plan but never really had the time he wanted to work on it.
I, in turn, moved on to smaller American (HO scale) and British (OO) trains, using the same room, but now find that the tables designed for big 1:22.5 trains have irregularities enough to make 1:87 trackwork unreliable. Will probably need to rework them.
The hobby itself has definitely changed though: Yes, today's modern models are higher quality than a lot of the old "Blue Box" Athearn kits, but they're also $50 instead of $7, and come ready-to-run, so the hobby aspect of building and customizing it is gone. Many models don't even come as an undecorated version anymore, if you wanted the classic "paint it for your own custom railway" narrative. You don't get the same "hours of fun per dollar" out of that side of the hobby anymore.
What's interesting is that there's definitely an opportunity for synergy with the rise of hobby electronics-- the trains have moved from "variable DC on the rails" to "AC with a command bus" and sometimes even Bluetooth, so there's a lot of interesting stuff you could do with computer or microcontroller interfacing. I bought a project for an automatic traffic-signal design using some 555 timers and capacitors, and thought "this is 10 lines of code on a $3 Arduino, for this generation of hobbyists."
Shops are closing-- I make it a point to try to find a model-railway shop and pick up something exotic when I go on holiday, but even pretty big cities don't have one, or it's a billion miles from anywhere. I was sort of saddened to get a note from Hattons (an excellent UK retailer-- surprisingly cheap shipping to the US) that they have started to wind down operations in the last month.
> Shops are closing-- I make it a point to try to find a model-railway shop and pick up something exotic when I go on holiday, but even pretty big cities don't have one, or it's a billion miles from anywhere.
Berlin has two or three big shops and some smaller ones.
>Shops are closing-- I make it a point to try to find a model-railway shop and pick up something exotic when I go on holiday, but even pretty big cities don't have one
Tokyo has tons of them. They're even in the big, new shopping malls, along with huge dioramas.
> "The amount of space this takes up is incredible, I wonder how people get into this hobby, I've never lived anywhere where I'd have enough space to set up a model railway long term"
So much "millenials killing X" discourse is just "property prices killing X" in disguise.
My maternal grandfather was a pipe fitter on the railroad, before becoming a defense contractor, and also before contracting mesothelioma and dying when I was 6.
He owned a sizable property in California which included a large home and some attached apartments. They ran a boarding-house for immigrants, and later, my widowed grandmother became a landlady.
I was raised with a fervent love for railroads of all types. I had little engineer togs as a toddler and a professional photoshoot to prove it. We rode around on a scale railroad in the park. But most of all, my grandfather's labor of love was building a model train set for me in an upstairs bedroom.
It was essentially a simple affair; grandpa had built a large plywood table topped with Astroturf. The rails themselves were in a large figure-eight, with not much landscaping or scenery around. We concentrated on the technical bits: a good AC/DC transformer with variable knob, some nice rolling stock with the traditional freight-train assortment of cars, and a locomotive that had that smokestack where you could insert a little tablet and it'd puff out "steam" while it ran.
My sister and I loved that whole setup, and it was like catnip to us in our youth, at least until the Atari 2600 took over. The railroad remained the centerpiece of that room and a focal point of our entertainment for years and years, even after grandpa passed away. It was really a cool thing for an authentic railroad guy to pass that on to his grandchildren.
I'm not sure how much of it is space, as I remember even 20-30 years ago the model railroad magazines always had a "how to fit a layout in the space you have" - up to and including elaborate folding layouts that would fit in something not much bigger than a briefcase.
If people really want to do something, they make space/time available for it, even if it involves clubs, etc.
The number of people who want to build models in general is down, I suspect, given that we have so many other things to do with "free time".
The only time that museum was filled with kids was the yearly "LEGO Train" exhibit, which I partook of once or twice.
And the people I was with (setting up the exhibit) were mostly younger (at the time) ranging from the 10 or so year old kids of the people leading it to mid 20s - not counting the leaders who were middle aged.
Everyone loved it and the number of visitors in that two week period or whatever it was would rival the total number of visitors the rest of the year.
But LEGO trains are not model trains (my goodness), they're toy trains - a completely and unrespectable thing.
“ But LEGO trains are not model trains (my goodness), they're toy trains - a completely and unrespectable thing.”
I love this condescending sounding distinction, it’s actually very accurate! When I was 12 or 13 I had an uncle that was into model railroading and I thought it looked so fun and cool! Then I started looking into it more and it’s not really (at least to me at that age) because it’s not a toy you take out of the box and play with a 100 different ways. You build a very static and detailed landscape, put your rails down, start the train up, and just sit back and look at it. Where’s the fun in that?
I just got a Lego train set for me and my kids and we’ve already built several different ways, crashed the train and rebuilt parts of multiple tiles, discovered you can program it with the new PoweredUp system, put mini figures on the roof of the cars, etc.
I also suspect that many of the young people who can afford and are interested in many of these sorts of hobbies have, at least incrementally, tended to shift more urban which makes them impractical absent some shared club/store space. When I first got an apartment after school--and pre-digital photography--I tried doing home processing in a half-bathroom and rapidly concluded that was for the birds. (Even after I got a house, there really wasn't a suitable space and then digital photography came in.)
Also I know a few people who are into model train and I would not call them old. Also they use quite modern tech (resin 3D priters and fully automated train control).
As for the space issue, they even sorta sved that as well via modular layouts - you build a certain part of a layout that conforms to an interface spec (rail placement at edges, electrical connections) and then you can join other enthusiasts at events where they build massive layouts from these modules in a rented hall somewhere for a couple days.
It's not just the space although you either have to belong to a club of some sort or have a house with a fair bit of extra room. But stamp and coin collecting is pretty much out of fashion as well.
So we have a family friend who owns a model train shop, a very popular and notable one. He took it over from the original owner, and this fellow also has a private museum attached, where he exhibits vintage vehicles, typewriters, and other stuff: https://www.jacooleymuseum.com/
So one of his daughters was my friend and classmate, and when we were growing up, of course, her father was already collecting model trains, and he had so many that every shelf of their home was occupied with model trains of various types.
My friend didn't visit many other homes when she was young, but once she finally went over to a friend's house, and she looked around, bewildered, and asked, "Where are all the trains?"
Model trains require a large amount of dedicated indoor space. With millennials and zoomers frozen out of the housing market I expect a large proportion of them simply don't have the room.
I’d be curious how mobility plays into that as well. The YouTubers I see often seem to be well settled in their large-enough-for-the-hobby houses. If you end up moving often, or just _feel_ like you might have to, it’s more difficult to invest time and money into it.
I've just been thinking about this in terms of metalworking. I've long wanted to have a home lathe, welder, possibly milling machine or at least a drill press. I recently moved into a house with a sizable basement workshop space and am enjoying setting it up and doing some simple projects (none of those high-dollar tools yet, but I have a selection of files, rasps, a nice vice and workbench, etc.).
The thing is, I don't expect I'll necessarily have this kind of space forever (and almost certainly not this particular one), so it's hard to justify things like cutting a hole in the side of the house to crane in an industrial lathe. I'm planning on getting more hobbyist-scale stuff (though still space-consuming) with a goal of using it to build my own, smaller, portable workshop (a small lathe, provisions for using it for milling, a selection of cutting tools and the necessary meta-tools to maintain them, a pack-up forge/foundry).
The ultimate dream is something the size of approximately a (possibly large) suitcase or footlocker that can be used to recreate itself (think RepRap but a whole, miniature machine shop), so that I can 1) continue in my hobby even if I have to move into an apartment, and 2) share this with other people by helping them bootstrap something similar. The David A. Gingery book series ("Build Your Own Machine Shop From Scrap") is my inspiration here, though so much of the series would be a lot easier if you could start with some existing machine tools instead of having to do literally all of it from scratch).
I don’t have a tabletop to spare in my apartment. We use a folding table for board games so that we can put it away afterwards. Space is at a premium and simulator games take up even less space.
I don't think it needs to be dedicated indoor space - at least in my bubble, it's not uncommon to do temporary layouts on floors.
It's obviously very focused on the railroad part, but turning your apartment into a model railroad for a few days every once in a while means you can use a lot more space. Outdoor spaces can be used as well.
Plus storage for elements you aren't using, plus work area. A coworker was shocked I could dedicate a ~1.5x4 L desk to my miniature painting. Most 25-30yo people I know here in Berlin would have to choose between this or a partner, purely based on space; or a 1h trip into the city centers.
Even 40 years ago many opted for N scale because of space constraints. Clubs were almost always HO scale focused, since they had cheap or free accomodation often in semi abandoned rail hangars etc.
As for age, it is not just the cost, but also the alienation of the young from messy analog physical dexterity, long low stimulus attention and slow progress in favor of high stimulus instant digital gratification.
I know a lot of people who are into model building in the younger-millennial older gen-z age range. I am not convinced that this shift is particularly pronounced.
I think the real problem is that y'all got houses to put a train set in for like $3.50 and the only people I know with houses are the ones who's parents put the money down and cosigned the loan. The models fit on a shelf in a tiny apartment with a roommate.
Maybe vote to approve some apartment blocks and public transit next time around?
Since I moved out of my moms place I could not bring my 3d printers, cnc machine or electronics equipment. I simply cant fit it in this tiny apartment with my wife.
I have lost these hobbies over the past two years to software entirely. Not necessarily a bad thing.
I guess my point is, you can lose your slower hobbies without even realizing, just due to circumstance. It's not necessarily the younger generation's "fault". It is often just the emergent consequence of the situation.
> the alienation of the young from messy analog physical dexterity, long low stimulus attention and slow progress
I suggest any boomers with this attitude check out what the kids are doing with Gunpla and Warhammer. It's a space issue, not a "stimulus" or "physical dexterity" one.
At the same time modeling of "real things", except maybe RC airplanes, seems to be in a decline. For instance there don't seem to be many people into building models of ships/etc. The fantasy stuff goes a lot stronger. Kind of makes me wonder if declining social conditions have young people running to escapist fantasy stuff. Or maybe it's because the fantasy stuff is more profitable for corps thanks to trademark/copyright, so consumers follow the advertising?
As an outsider, I'm pretty sure almost everyone has always considered model trains boring. That's always been the joke. This isn't anything new. You can't blame social media for this.
Housing costs have been growing at 2x wages for 50 years. If space was a constraint then, imagine how it is now.
How many times did boomers look at the two buttons before them, "make housing affordable" and "make housing a good investment," and which button did they press every singe time?
The claim in your first sentence seems intuitive. Yet, I have found conflicting data about it in the past. Do you have specific sources you're referring to by chance?
As a younger person who in theory is interested in model railways, the sad truth is that the drawbacks simply outweigh the benefits.
Model trains are physically large, so building a layout in my apartment is pretty much impossible. They are extremely expensive, and if you want to get something which can do more than literally run around in a circle you're looking at a $X000 setup cost. The "sexy" part (digitally controlling the trains) seems to be pretty much stuck with poorly-designed protocols from the 80s.
I like trains. I like DIY electronics. I like 3D printing. But given the barrier to entry, I'll just stick with OpenTTD or some kind of Euro Train Simulator game.
My friends are into Warhammer and DIY racing drones. If those hobbies have no trouble attracting younger people, the problem here really isn't young people's interest.
I've recently been designing a custom implementation of a DCC controller for a new model railroad I'm setting up - what don't you like about the protocol?
I find the protocol fascinating in that the data signal is combined with the power, so you just run everything over the two tracks.
Further, a transmitter is just a simple H-bridge that costs pennies...
It gets hacky when you want to read out CVs, since the DCC protocol is one way only. You need a good current sensor since most decoders encode the values into the current flow using the motor. It's a cute hack and somehow akin to morseing out with power LEDs.
Now we've got plenty of battery to make that viable; and the radio technology to control the engines remotely cheap. once the industry works that change out and grovelling over you contact path is eliminated; they'll have a boom.
People will want to buy bare chassis units and 3d print their own model shells to put on them. A couple of industry standards about sizes and battery connectors and they could get somewhere, kick off a hobbyist reseller market, like people painting figurines for tabletop games.
More likely "private equity" will buy up the existing market it; milk it til it dies; then sell the shell to some litigious patent shark vulture outfit. "The community" will have to invent new standards on its own; which i believe may be underway.
I'm 41, just recently got back into the hobby. Have rejoined the local club I was a member of as a teen.
Membership average age is like 50-60ish. We do have about 10-15% of members like me under 50. Some even in their 20s. Doesn't seem quite like its in too much trouble around here. The pool is shirking with apartment living becoming more normal though in the area. But maybe because this is a club with its own layouts that members can use is one way for the hobby to survive & thrive.
There are 5 layouts, 2 in N scale. 3 in HO. 3 of the layouts are able to be broken down and put on a trailer and taken to an exhibition.
I do think that home built & run layouts are probably on the decline with cost of living & housing so high compared to years past. But I think club layouts that members can use is a way to help keep the hobby relevant.
There are cool projects like https://dcc-ex.com/index.html and arduino based control for layout automation bits. That historically cost a lot.
My observations of the US is that mostly ready to run models are sold now, haven't seen too many kit makers around for US stuff. Still kit makers for Australian & NZ stuff. With some decent ready to run Australian prototype available now.
The next house will have a train room or area of the garage available. This is definetly a middle class hobby. Its not cheap.
I have wanted to work with my hands again. Sitting at a computer all day or parts of the evening playing video games is only so fun. Would rather build something physical.
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I think younger generations are drawn to cheaper and easier to access forms of entertainment that provide similar intellectual experience. It's a shame for the hobby, but I find it a very reasonable thing to happen.
Growing up, we had a 4'x8' sheet of plywood covered in the fake grass and then decked out with structures, trees, people, cars, and all sorts of stuff. It was a lot of fun setting it up, building the models, and deciding on a track layout. Took weeks building it. It took days to get bored with it. For some reason, we thought it a good idea to tack down the tracks for better stability, but it made it a nightmare to rearrange the tracks. However, it stayed like that for years and from time to time as I got older would fire it up and quickly bore of it again.
That's my experience as well. A guy I met in a store had inherited an absolutely massive Rokal set, a lesser known brand so there wasn't a lot of documentation about how it all worked. He asked me to get it all working. The whole installation on 8 full sized sheets of plywood had been cut up to move it into his basement, they'd cut a temporary hole in the floor to move the sheets in but all the wiring had been cut and there was zero documentation. It took many months to figure it all out and to get it connected to the point where it would all work reliably. But once that was done I think I looked at it for 30 minutes before moving on to something more interesting. I loved working on the set itself though, especially because I kept finding new details that had previously eluded me (such as working traffic lights!).
This is where sectional track is a godsend. Easy to rearrange before worrying about tacking it down. For example, Märklin C-track. Ballasted roadbed. Clicky connectors that stay connected. Metal bits for attaching power+control leads.
And for tacking it all down, Homasote makes it easy to detach+reattach and deadens sound.
The original home of many people who became hackers (old use of the word) was the TMRC at MIT. Tech Model Railroad Club - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_Model_Railroad_Club
As told in Steven Levy's Hackers book, there were two groups in the TMRC. There was the group that went on train rides and did meticulous models on top of the track... and there was the systems and powers group that worked with wires and automation (from the telephone company) under the track.
From the Wikipedia article...
> The club was composed of several groups, including those who were interested in building and painting replicas of certain trains with historical and emotional values, those that wanted to do scenery and buildings, those that wanted to run trains on schedules, and those composing the "Signals and Power Subcommittee" who created the circuits that made the trains run. This last group would be among the ones who popularized the term "hacker" among many other slang terms, and who eventually moved on to computers and programming.
> ...
> At the club itself, a semi-automatic control system based on telephone relays was installed by the mid-1950s. It was called the ARRC (Automatic Railroad Running Computer). It could run a train over the entire set of track, in both directions, without manual intervention, throwing switches and powering tracks ahead of the train. A mainframe program was used to compute the path, and all modifications to the layout had to be compatible with this ability.
When I was little my brothers and I played a lot together with Lego.
Now we’re all over 40 and occasionally play on a heavily modded Minecraft server to scratch that itch.
In many ways it’s so much more practical, essentially unlimited building materials with no real cost, no issue with physical space in the house, we can do it casually in the evenings while doing voice calls on Discord, no unpacking or packing up needed before or after.
There are even great rail cart mods for those interested in track switching type activities.
We make a point of doing in person LANs about every quarter, also for old times sake.
The sensors and engine can be controlled via Bluetooth Low Energy: https://github.com/topics/poweredup
Though after billions of billions made in TT/OpenTTD and whatever imaginable railroad systems it lost most of it's magic for me. Every once in a while I install it, browse and add some mods (FISH of course) and... after I'm on +300% profit each year it starts to get boring.
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"Almost everyone working here is quite old"
"The amount of space this takes up is incredible, I wonder how people get into this hobby, I've never lived anywhere where I'd have enough space to set up a model railway long term"
It's kind of a shame too, it was the first time I think I've ever really appreciated the large scale model train installations. When I was younger I'd see them at random historical museums and mostly just think "yeah choo-choo sure does go in a circle haha". I think the San Diego museum did a good job of conveying that it isn't really just about the trains as much as it's about modeling the landscapes and towns the trains actually go through. Viewing it from the perspective of a massive scale diorama of some region really raised my overall appreciation for the whole endeavour.
I, in turn, moved on to smaller American (HO scale) and British (OO) trains, using the same room, but now find that the tables designed for big 1:22.5 trains have irregularities enough to make 1:87 trackwork unreliable. Will probably need to rework them.
The hobby itself has definitely changed though: Yes, today's modern models are higher quality than a lot of the old "Blue Box" Athearn kits, but they're also $50 instead of $7, and come ready-to-run, so the hobby aspect of building and customizing it is gone. Many models don't even come as an undecorated version anymore, if you wanted the classic "paint it for your own custom railway" narrative. You don't get the same "hours of fun per dollar" out of that side of the hobby anymore.
What's interesting is that there's definitely an opportunity for synergy with the rise of hobby electronics-- the trains have moved from "variable DC on the rails" to "AC with a command bus" and sometimes even Bluetooth, so there's a lot of interesting stuff you could do with computer or microcontroller interfacing. I bought a project for an automatic traffic-signal design using some 555 timers and capacitors, and thought "this is 10 lines of code on a $3 Arduino, for this generation of hobbyists."
Shops are closing-- I make it a point to try to find a model-railway shop and pick up something exotic when I go on holiday, but even pretty big cities don't have one, or it's a billion miles from anywhere. I was sort of saddened to get a note from Hattons (an excellent UK retailer-- surprisingly cheap shipping to the US) that they have started to wind down operations in the last month.
Berlin has two or three big shops and some smaller ones.
Tokyo has tons of them. They're even in the big, new shopping malls, along with huge dioramas.
So much "millenials killing X" discourse is just "property prices killing X" in disguise.
He owned a sizable property in California which included a large home and some attached apartments. They ran a boarding-house for immigrants, and later, my widowed grandmother became a landlady.
I was raised with a fervent love for railroads of all types. I had little engineer togs as a toddler and a professional photoshoot to prove it. We rode around on a scale railroad in the park. But most of all, my grandfather's labor of love was building a model train set for me in an upstairs bedroom.
It was essentially a simple affair; grandpa had built a large plywood table topped with Astroturf. The rails themselves were in a large figure-eight, with not much landscaping or scenery around. We concentrated on the technical bits: a good AC/DC transformer with variable knob, some nice rolling stock with the traditional freight-train assortment of cars, and a locomotive that had that smokestack where you could insert a little tablet and it'd puff out "steam" while it ran.
My sister and I loved that whole setup, and it was like catnip to us in our youth, at least until the Atari 2600 took over. The railroad remained the centerpiece of that room and a focal point of our entertainment for years and years, even after grandpa passed away. It was really a cool thing for an authentic railroad guy to pass that on to his grandchildren.
If people really want to do something, they make space/time available for it, even if it involves clubs, etc.
The number of people who want to build models in general is down, I suspect, given that we have so many other things to do with "free time".
And the people I was with (setting up the exhibit) were mostly younger (at the time) ranging from the 10 or so year old kids of the people leading it to mid 20s - not counting the leaders who were middle aged.
Everyone loved it and the number of visitors in that two week period or whatever it was would rival the total number of visitors the rest of the year.
But LEGO trains are not model trains (my goodness), they're toy trains - a completely and unrespectable thing.
But today I see LEGO themselves referring to the track as "L-gauge": https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/the-orient-express-train-... - which started out as almost a joke and is now getting some pretty serious attention.
If model railroading as a whole wants to survive and thrive, they will need to embrace the "toy" train.
(Lots of these museums are really just "fronts" for the member's hobby, after all, and it gets them out of the house.)
I love this condescending sounding distinction, it’s actually very accurate! When I was 12 or 13 I had an uncle that was into model railroading and I thought it looked so fun and cool! Then I started looking into it more and it’s not really (at least to me at that age) because it’s not a toy you take out of the box and play with a 100 different ways. You build a very static and detailed landscape, put your rails down, start the train up, and just sit back and look at it. Where’s the fun in that?
I just got a Lego train set for me and my kids and we’ve already built several different ways, crashed the train and rebuilt parts of multiple tiles, discovered you can program it with the new PoweredUp system, put mini figures on the roof of the cars, etc.
There's a lot you can do at shared spaces, but cost/availability/inconvenience of those is just such a big barrier to entry for many younger people.
And its just a branch of another big layout in Prague: https://www.kralovstvi-zeleznic.cz/en/
Also I know a few people who are into model train and I would not call them old. Also they use quite modern tech (resin 3D priters and fully automated train control).
As for the space issue, they even sorta sved that as well via modular layouts - you build a certain part of a layout that conforms to an interface spec (rail placement at edges, electrical connections) and then you can join other enthusiasts at events where they build massive layouts from these modules in a rented hall somewhere for a couple days.
So one of his daughters was my friend and classmate, and when we were growing up, of course, her father was already collecting model trains, and he had so many that every shelf of their home was occupied with model trains of various types.
My friend didn't visit many other homes when she was young, but once she finally went over to a friend's house, and she looked around, bewildered, and asked, "Where are all the trains?"
The thing is, I don't expect I'll necessarily have this kind of space forever (and almost certainly not this particular one), so it's hard to justify things like cutting a hole in the side of the house to crane in an industrial lathe. I'm planning on getting more hobbyist-scale stuff (though still space-consuming) with a goal of using it to build my own, smaller, portable workshop (a small lathe, provisions for using it for milling, a selection of cutting tools and the necessary meta-tools to maintain them, a pack-up forge/foundry).
The ultimate dream is something the size of approximately a (possibly large) suitcase or footlocker that can be used to recreate itself (think RepRap but a whole, miniature machine shop), so that I can 1) continue in my hobby even if I have to move into an apartment, and 2) share this with other people by helping them bootstrap something similar. The David A. Gingery book series ("Build Your Own Machine Shop From Scrap") is my inspiration here, though so much of the series would be a lot easier if you could start with some existing machine tools instead of having to do literally all of it from scratch).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNje4KTLZT4
It is 1:450 scale and half the size of the Z scale.
https://www.tgauge.us
When describing starter sets, the track area is dimensioned in mm. https://www.tgauge.us/product/452/20/lner-125-hst-train-set
> The 120mm loop included in this starter set will cover an area of 253mm x 372mm (10" x 14 3/4").
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1690894492688437248
Young people own homes at higher rates than they did in the 90s:
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1690951544240484352
As for age, it is not just the cost, but also the alienation of the young from messy analog physical dexterity, long low stimulus attention and slow progress in favor of high stimulus instant digital gratification.
I think the real problem is that y'all got houses to put a train set in for like $3.50 and the only people I know with houses are the ones who's parents put the money down and cosigned the loan. The models fit on a shelf in a tiny apartment with a roommate.
Maybe vote to approve some apartment blocks and public transit next time around?
Since I moved out of my moms place I could not bring my 3d printers, cnc machine or electronics equipment. I simply cant fit it in this tiny apartment with my wife.
I have lost these hobbies over the past two years to software entirely. Not necessarily a bad thing.
I guess my point is, you can lose your slower hobbies without even realizing, just due to circumstance. It's not necessarily the younger generation's "fault". It is often just the emergent consequence of the situation.
I suggest any boomers with this attitude check out what the kids are doing with Gunpla and Warhammer. It's a space issue, not a "stimulus" or "physical dexterity" one.
How many times did boomers look at the two buttons before them, "make housing affordable" and "make housing a good investment," and which button did they press every singe time?
Model trains are physically large, so building a layout in my apartment is pretty much impossible. They are extremely expensive, and if you want to get something which can do more than literally run around in a circle you're looking at a $X000 setup cost. The "sexy" part (digitally controlling the trains) seems to be pretty much stuck with poorly-designed protocols from the 80s.
I like trains. I like DIY electronics. I like 3D printing. But given the barrier to entry, I'll just stick with OpenTTD or some kind of Euro Train Simulator game.
My friends are into Warhammer and DIY racing drones. If those hobbies have no trouble attracting younger people, the problem here really isn't young people's interest.
I find the protocol fascinating in that the data signal is combined with the power, so you just run everything over the two tracks.
Further, a transmitter is just a simple H-bridge that costs pennies...
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/21/3d-print-yourself-a-tiny-ste...
Now we've got plenty of battery to make that viable; and the radio technology to control the engines remotely cheap. once the industry works that change out and grovelling over you contact path is eliminated; they'll have a boom.
People will want to buy bare chassis units and 3d print their own model shells to put on them. A couple of industry standards about sizes and battery connectors and they could get somewhere, kick off a hobbyist reseller market, like people painting figurines for tabletop games.
More likely "private equity" will buy up the existing market it; milk it til it dies; then sell the shell to some litigious patent shark vulture outfit. "The community" will have to invent new standards on its own; which i believe may be underway.
Membership average age is like 50-60ish. We do have about 10-15% of members like me under 50. Some even in their 20s. Doesn't seem quite like its in too much trouble around here. The pool is shirking with apartment living becoming more normal though in the area. But maybe because this is a club with its own layouts that members can use is one way for the hobby to survive & thrive.
There are 5 layouts, 2 in N scale. 3 in HO. 3 of the layouts are able to be broken down and put on a trailer and taken to an exhibition.
I do think that home built & run layouts are probably on the decline with cost of living & housing so high compared to years past. But I think club layouts that members can use is a way to help keep the hobby relevant.
There are cool projects like https://dcc-ex.com/index.html and arduino based control for layout automation bits. That historically cost a lot.
My observations of the US is that mostly ready to run models are sold now, haven't seen too many kit makers around for US stuff. Still kit makers for Australian & NZ stuff. With some decent ready to run Australian prototype available now.
The next house will have a train room or area of the garage available. This is definetly a middle class hobby. Its not cheap.
I have wanted to work with my hands again. Sitting at a computer all day or parts of the evening playing video games is only so fun. Would rather build something physical.