Back issues of Model Railroading, RMJ & PRN now online

TrainLife, LLC

formatting link
of Orem, Utah, has acquired the rights to put back issues of Model Railroading, RailModel Journal and Pacific Rail News online.

TrainLife offers this service for FREE!

They have been adding a year of each magazine each week, so it will take a while for them to get all of them online. So far, almost all of the 1988-1992, 1995-1997. 2001 and 2003-2006 issues of Model Railroading are online, as are the 1989-1993, and 1995-2008 issues of RailModel Journal.

__________ Mark Mathu Whitefish Bay, Wis. The Green Bay Route:

formatting link

Reply to
Mark Mathu
Loading thread data ...

Unfortunately each issue is being put up as a bunch of individual page scans, which makes for a LOT of downloading and saving to get the full issues. While I applaud them for all of their extensive work in doing this, it would be nice if the scans were combined as a PDF for each issue.

Reply to
Rick Jones

Which is real easy to do with decent scan software. My combo machine came with software that will do this automatically.

Reply to
Lobby Dosser

And I could load all of the pages of an issue one by one into Open Office Writer and then do a PDF export, but it's still a lot of work to download all of the scans and do that. Again, not trying to denigrate the wonderful service they are providing for us.

Reply to
Rick Jones

Noted - but - each scan is on the order of 256k bytes. An 88 page issue would be over 23mB - do you really want to have to do a 23mB download if you're only interested in a page or two?

Reply to
ray

The scans are *.jpgs, and pretty small ones at that. I would prefer PDFs, but still, as a reference source, the collection is pretty good.

Wolf K.

Reply to
Wolf K

They are indeed jpg images. I downloaded some, and they vary in size from

17k to over 240k - really all over the map so it's difficult to say what an 'average' size might be. Mostly, I'd prefer the individual page scans

- I guess the best of both worlds would be to make it available either way.

Reply to
ray

I lean towards wanting the entire mag and not just the articles or plans that interest me at any given moment. Especially since my interests could change and what doesn't interest me now may interest me later but the resource here might be gone by that time. And like old Walthers catalogs, even the pages of just ads might be of interest for historical reference.

Reply to
Rick Jones

You can always download everything that's there. wget -r will do the job if you're running Linux - for others I can't say, but there should be a similar utility.

Reply to
ray

Easier:

Copy them all into one directory and make sure, the file names allow listing them in the correct order (e.g. pg001.pdf, pg002.pdf..)

Then open a terminal ("cmd" on windos systems) and navigate to the directory ("cd mr_01_01").

Type the following:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=out.pdf -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH pg*.pdf

You'll find the file out.pdf which contains all pages (pg*.pdf) in that directory after a minute or so.

Much faster than using any GUI program ;-)

Yes.

Have fun.

Reply to
Bernhard Agthe

ray wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net:

Yes it is free, so accept it as is. I for one am only interested in specific articles and to have to D/L a whole issue for just a single article is a waste of bandwidth. Besides, I am not interested in reading ads from a decade ago, which is what you are getting.

Maybe some of you who would like other fotmats might want to make a donation to help TRAINLIFE offer alternate formats ? A valuable resource like TRAINLIFE should be supported so that it doesn't end up having to fold for lack of funds, or need to REQUIRE paid subscriptions.

Just my opinion.

Reply to
John Carter

Agreed!!

Reply to
Lobby Dosser

And to find the issues you want, the index is back:

formatting link

Reply to
Lobby Dosser

Because it's usually better than the alternative.

Reply to
Twibil

"gs" (ghostscript) isn't a command installed on most PCs.

Reply to
Mark Mathu

But it can be trivially (and freely!) installed.

formatting link

>
Reply to
Robert Heller

PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.