I've been building an index for my old Model Railroader magazines. Not everything, just the articles that I want to reference in the future. Mostly construction items, whether buildings, bridges, rolling stock, electronics, or scenery. I also model the era around 1900, so articles on building a container loading facility or an XYZ RR diesel just didn't make the grade :-).
The results were interesting, at least to me. I thought I'd inflict them on the newsgroup as well. Below are counts of items in my index, grouped by five years.
Note that the the last half of '04 was extrapolated from the other 4.5 years since I dropped my subcription.
1960-1964 62 1965-1969 61 1970-1974 59 1975-1979 64 1980-1984 52 1985-1989 46 1990-1994 42 1995-1999 38 2000-2004 30This is not meant to trash MR. If anything, they just reflect where the market is. I'd still recommend the magazine to newcomers, at least till they've been in the hobby for 5-10 years. And there were other articles that were interesting to read, they just weren't reference material to me.
OTOH, the downhill slide (from my perspective) in construction and plans started in the '80-'84 period, and Al Kalmbach died in '81. Hmmmm :-).
I've checked out other magazines and they don't seem to be any better. I guess the "buy and operate" theme has just about snuffed out the modelling or scratchbuilding market.
As you can probably tell, I'm not a "model railroader", I'm a "railroad modeller".
The Gazette is the best of the bunch, but I'm not interested in narrow gauge. And may I be struck by lightning if I add another Colorado layout to the plethora that are out there :-).
The good thing is that if I built something from my index every month, I wouldn't finish till I was 105!