Model Railroader mag -- observations and quesions

Thanks. I used to devour his articles, against the day when I could afford a car of my own. By that time, I had family, and it was easier (and more reliable) to take it to the professional mechanic. :-)

??? I didn't know Reader's Digest had staff-written articles back then.

Reply to
Wolf Kirchmeir
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Not entirely. There ain't no free lunch, everything is a trade off. Quality, initial quality, possibly has improved, but manufacturing tolerances are now far tighter. Which may sound like a good thing, but can work both ways. Things that are manufactured to function properly with "as new" tolerances will be found to degrade as the normal wear takes it's toll. Tighter tolerances in manufacturing won't always equal longer life or reliability, as normal wear comes in, parts will go out of tolerance, usually with notning in the design to compensate, failure is the result.

But it's going to be a throwaway, technicians have to make a living too, and the new sets are NOT made to be repaired. Anything goes wrong, you might as well set it in the trash and go buy another. Not a lot of improvement in anything there.

I've always preferred wood, and some of the plastic kits I built back in the 70's show that I'm not too far off, warped, curling, glue joints separating, plastic is for the short term. Not that wood doesn't have some of the same problems, but in wood, I can fix it, it's not the basic material aging and turning to something unknown.

Metal, I've always liked the older die cast locos, even though I know better than most that the diecast zinc begins to self destruct as soon as it goes into the mold, it's a basic nature of the metal. Adding certain other metals to the mix will slow it down, but never stop it. My hat comes off to the guys that cast in brass, brass isn't an easy metal to cast reliably, it's one of the most difficult. The fact that so many beautiful castings are available is a tribute not to technology, but to the skill of the people making them.

There will always be two kinds, those that have to have nothing but the "latest and greatest" and those that can appreciate something that's already old, still functioning, and still looks good.

Then again, it's a blooming hobby, not a life or death situation.

Rich

Reply to
Richard

Wolf Kirchmeir wrote in news:P4r8f.12932$ snipped-for-privacy@news20.bellglobal.com:

There is one Tom McCahill article I will always remember. When Oldsmobile first introduced their full-size front-wheel drive car, the Toronado, Uncle Tom pondered in print on the translation of that Spanish-sounding name. He said he could not find it as a word in Spanish...that as best he could tell, it was a combination of "toro" for bull and a form of the verb "nader" which means to float. Thus the Toronado was for evermore for me a "floating bull".

Reply to
Norman Morgan

Except for the personal satisfaction factor. While a Kadee RTR *may* look better it comes *NOWHERE CLOSE* to being as satisfying as assembling an old Ambroid, Silver Streak, Central Valley, Athearn metal or Campbell kit and seeing it run on a layout. I'd rather have a 20 car train of Silver Streak PFE reefers on my [future] layout than any plastic thing being offered on the market today, because the satisfaction of putting those craftsman kits together and making them look good far exceeds whatever improvements in detail is now available in today's RTR or kits.

Reply to
Rick Jones

Ah, nut see my response to Mark about this. For some of us the

*satisfaction* of assembling one of those golden oldies exceeds the improvements in detail, etc. that today's stuff offers.

Sounds like me. No matter how much Dullcote or flat finish I spray on plastic model that's supposed to represent a wooden prototype I have never been able to get rid of that lousy plastic sheen and make it look as good as a Central Valley or Silver Streak wooden reefer or boxcar. Ambroid or La Belle kits beat everything on the market today hands down for realistic looking wooden prototypes IMNSHO. Thankfully there's still the swap meets and Valley Model Trains for finding these gems.

Reply to
Rick Jones

Or could it have been a derivation of the Spanish word "nada" which means nothing. That would then mean "No bull". :-{>

Reply to
Rick Jones

On Fri, 28 Oct 2005 18:14:43 -0500, Rick Jones purred

Toronado was Zorro's horse. The name means a high wind, a tornado.

cat

Reply to
cat

I'd advising avoiding a wind high out of a horse.

Reply to
Steve Caple

And here

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I really love these old wood kits too and agree that they look darn nice when finished. But I love them more for what they taught me then anything else. If you need a few passenger cars or single cars they are great. If you need several cars or more you might as well just get one kit and use it as a template to cut up wood in your chopper and build the rest from scratch. The only difference in these old kits and scratch building is that they have the wood supplied in the box with directions and a few detail parts. Once you've built a few you don't need kits any more. At nearly $25 to $30 a shot plus trucks and couplers you can have a $40 scratch building project. With your own wood, a few detail parts and decals you can knock that back into the $15 to $20 range per car. I think this may be part of the reason these old kits aren't found on shelves very often. Anyone who has built a number of them can build most any wood car type he wants for less money with very little extra time or effort. Bruce

Reply to
Bruce Favinger

write.Rest of the content, compared to 5 or 7 years ago, was disappointing at best<

"I think some people just outgrown MR. If someone gets into the hobby and starts getting really serious about it they learn much in 5 to 7 years. MR is written for mostly a lower lever or entry level (not all but mostly). This is why you seem to think it's changed. It hasn't but probably you

have. "

I think they have changed.

There used to be a better mix of newbie and intermediate and even some advanced articles.

Now it's degraded toward being pritnear all newbie all the time.

Eric

Reply to
newyorkcentralfan

That may well be, but I wasn't comparing modern RTR with craftsman kits. I was comparing modern kits with craftsman kits. To me, they are far superior in every way, including the personal satisfaction factor. YMMV.

All the best,

Mark.

Reply to
mark_newton

Try painting the plastic model first, then spraying Dullcote or flat finish.

Once the surface is painted, the underlying material should be indistinguishable from normal viewing distance...

Reply to
mark_newton

This is an example of painted plastic,

Keith

Reply to
Keith

Reply to
Chuck Kimbrough

Eric Escribbled:

Model Railroader has been in a steady decline in both content and value since the day Russ Larson took the helm. "Model Railroader" is the "Cosmopolitan" of hobby mags, or if you prefer, the haughty, senile, arrogant, geriatric "Dowager Queen" of Hobby mags, jam-packed full of glitz and flash, but almost completely lacking in any substance whatever; in short, practically worthless.

Once the advertisers quit advertising- and many of the ones that interest me already have- I'm hosed. I only use the thing as a guide to find people who have things for sale that I want to buy. I don't actually buy a copy any more until i have looked through the ads to see if there is anything interesting for sale. Now, if I could subscribe to a magazine that had minimal modeling content (i.e., articles) but that was heavy on model advertising, I might do that.

Some while ago there was a spoof of MR that got passed around on this board. I thought it was quite humorous, and quite true as well. ( Can you say "quite" true. or is true an absolute word that cannot be modified? Do you have to simply just say "true"?) Anyway, some of the articles listed on the cover, which featured a photo of the best-known resident of the Island of Sodor, were:

"Thomas: Are we getting too realistic?"

"Placing cars on the track made easy."

"Opening packaging."

"How to purchase model trains."

Laugh, but this is the direction in which Kalmbach, Larson and "Model Railroader" are heading pell-mell.

If your interest in model railroading extends beyond occasionally dropping into the basement during the winter months of the year to blow the dust and cobwebs off the equipment and play with it for a few minutes, then you need a better hobby mag than anything Kalmbach publishes. Mainline Modeler is one, Rail Model Journal is another, and Railroad Model Craftsman is a third. RMJ is a bit rough around the edges, but that is part of its charm.

Froggy,

Reply to
Froggy

About a year and a half ago, at the LSR convention, Charlie Getz from Narrow Gauge & Short Line Gazette gave a talk about the hobby. He talked some about the various MRR magazines. IIRC, he mentioned that MR's circulation is about 2-3X that of RMC, the #2 magazine in circulation. The circulation is perhaps 5-6 times as much as NG&SLG and the other magazines mentioned. MR must be doing something right. OTOH Microslut is #1 too, and god only knows why.

Reply to
Rick Jones

Yes but I'm comparing kits with pre-painted sides - Central Valley, Silver Streak and Ulrich vs. Accurail, Walthers, Athearn, et al. I don't want to have to redo all of the lettering afterwards. The pre-painted wood sides of the former kits always look flatter than the latter kits, which was my original point.

Reply to
Rick Jones

Yes, extensive, heavy weathering is perhaps the one way to eliminate that plastic shine.

Reply to
Rick Jones

On Sun, 30 Oct 2005 17:48:06 -0600, Rick Jones wrote:

That does not mean that they are doing the perfectly right thing. It only means that habit and inertia is currently working in their favor. They also have a "catchy" name, which helps. Railroad Model Craftsman had a long, rough spell after Tony Koester left. That was Carstens' fault. Koester was an excellent, hobby-oriented editor. During his tenure at RMC it was by far and away my magazine of choice. You can't compare Model Railroader, which is a broad-spectrum magazine with wide distribution outside the usual hobby shop magazine rack, to a niche-market pub like NG&SLG. If every narrow gauge modeler in North America bought a copy of each issue of NG&SLG, the numbers would not change much at all. I am quite sure that if you made a study, you would find that one of the supermarket tabloids outsells all the others. This doesn't change the fact that the content is all crap. Now, I'm not saying that Model Railroader is all crap. It most certainly isn't. Some of the stuff in there appears to be useful to someone. But the style and content has nothing much for me. While Model Railroader may outsell other railroad-oriented hobby magazines, on the whole, Kalmbach's sales have been steadily declining over the last 20 years; most dramatically in the last five to eight. I believe that a lot of people are offended by the editorial style, which appears to be based on the same styles used for publishing magazines aimed at drafty-headed teenage girls. Model railroading is a relatively expensive hobby, as hobbies go, and a great many modelers are educated professionals- people who have a large enough disposable income to afford $300 model locomotives. Most are middle-aged, or slightly older. I am certainly in that group, and I resent being talked-down to. If one is a fifteen-year-old newbie, perhaps there is not so much "talking-down", but fifteen year-old newbies are not the rank and file of this hobby. They are a distinct minority. Never the less, Kalmbach has chosen to steer Model Railroader in the direction of so called "dumbing-down". It's getting to be more about playing with ready-to-run toy trains, and is abandoning the arena of modeling railroads as a hobby.

Froggy,

Reply to
Froggy

Wow Froggy you read the same stuff I read and don't read what I don't read.

Reply to
Jon Miller

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