State of the hobby

Lots of us have been and still are prone to sitting around, say over lunch, or in a bar, slinging gloom about how model railroading is fading away as the old guys pass on — everyone at meetings has white hair — there are practically no more hobby shops — you never see young guys —modern railroads are boring — and so forth. I would bet that most if not all readers of this blog can cite memories of events exactly like this.  

Well, is any of that (aside from the judgement on modern railroads) true? It’s true you don’t see that many young guys at meets; it’s the retired who have the time and money to do that part of the hobby. But are young guys even in the hobby? Sure they are, and I’ll come back to that point in a moment. 

First, an overview of attendees at the Cocoa Beach meeting in January, 2020. Plenty of older men, but middle-aged ones too — and a few young men.

Some of the grumbling you sometimes hear is about the attitudes of younger modelers. How amazing, they don’t think exactly like those who are two generations older. 

I could remind you that at least as far back as ancient Greece, elders have been bemoaning the younger generation, who have no respect for anything, don’t understand how things ought to be done, and are clearly going to destroy civilization in one generation. Really, it’s practically one of the duties of every older generation to complain about the young ones coming behind them — or believed not to be coming forward at all.

But aside from that, what about our hobby? The complaint I mentioned above, about the loss of hobby shops, is quite real, and we all know why: commerce in all standard products (things that you know exactly what they are, and can be bought anywhere) is continuing to move onto the internet. Really, that just means you buy stuff from a different source. And it’s been noted for a couple of decades that model railroad manufacturers are producing and selling as much or more than ever.

For some years now, Joe Fugate, editor of the online magazine Model Railroad Hobbyist (full disclosure: for which I write) has been offering editorials from time to time on this exact topic. This month, he placed another one, in the August issue. You can read it for free in on-line version at http://mrhmg.com .

Joe made several points. He began with the surprising (to many) fact that membership in the NMRA now comprises 30 percent people under 40. It’s long been the case that men tended to enter model railroading when their kids began to be grown up, and they were looking for a hobby — in the past, often in their 40s. This younger NMRA membership suggests that that may be changing. 

Another point is that younger modelers, with home ownership getting ever harder, are turning more and more to modules or switching layouts in the space they do have. The visibility of younger builders of Free-Mo modules illustrates this (for more on Free-Mo, you can visit https://free-mo.org/ ).

The most striking thing in Joe’s editorial for me is that many younger modelers are choosing to model the transition era, though it’s a lot of decades in the past. Why? It’s regarded as the most interesting time in railroad history, much as World War II continues to be the dominant period in military modeling.

So is our hobby fading away? In my opinion, not at all. I often quote an editorial in Model Railroader from the early 1950s, when MR conducted annual surveys of its readers. The editorial observed that the average age of surveyed modelers increased about one year in each successive survey, and therefore that the hobby was on its last legs. Seventy-five years later, it’s still the wrong conclusion.

Tony Thompson