Every year, I take a stab at projecting what I think may be trends for the model railroad industry. I generally just about break even with the Psychic Hotline, so don’t get your hopes up, but it’s a fun, annual exercise that’s better than making bonehead resolutions. And so, here we go once again.

This year I think things will be a little different. Normally I project some technology or purchasing trends, but this year I see the changes as being very much external to the hobby. First of all, 2008 is slated to be a huge political year. I would normally like to coat myself with Teflon and pass through it untouched, but I can’t. Like everyone else, I’ll have to endure endless, tasteless political ads, watch the posturing of candidates, and observe them as they engage in political changes to help them get elected. Some of these changes could very well impact our hobby.

There will be no incumbent president, so each party will have to nominate a hopeful, all 435 seats of the House of Representatives will be up for grabs as will be a third of the Senate, a similar proportion of state and local officials, and we can expect no small number of ballot measures. Just once I’d like to see a presidential candidate who is also a model railroader since I think a model railroad layout keeps a person honest. You can’t lie and say your trains stay on the track when they don’t. Model railroads get you thinking about transportation and the economy, which presidents really ought to do at regular intervals.

These election shenanigans will probably have some effect upon our hobby; count on it. While our nation grapples with its leadership, we are also facing gasoline prices that are — as this is being written around Thanksgiving 2007 — hitting some early warnings of four bucks a gallon. Real estate values are declining, as are retail sales while Americans look at their home budgets and decide maybe they can’t afford a whole pile of new toys and clothes for Christmas. They also have to choose between more consumer goods and a tank full of gas. So far, we’ve been willing to ante up, but at some point, when do we say enough is enough and make lifestyle changes that cut our fuel consumption in half? That probably won’t happen in 2008.

During the Great Depression, Americans spent more on hobby merchandise than most people ever expected. Why? Because hobbies gave satisfaction out of proportion to the dollar spent. So while big-ticket items may fail to keep up in our energy-dollar economy, don’t be surprised if many folks still continue to add to their layouts or even enter the hobby despite the financial woes of the times. Model railroading is far more engaging than watching political ads.

There are other intersections with the larger world, however. In a prior editorial, I discussed the problems of metal commodity prices and export taxes from other countries, especially China. Then, too, we haven’t heard the end of the falling dominos as a result of the recall of toys. Manufacturing plants have been shuttered in China, we have problems within our own government that have yet to be addressed, and a new administration in 2009 may see all sorts of interesting changes, some of them very provocative. This is a time of great change, and it would require a whole trainload of denial to suppose the model railroad industry would miss out on all of this.

Model railroading has an opportunity to opt out of the general retail economy in an interesting manner. If the rest of retail is chained to the cycle of big holidays and either lives or dies according to how well they do on Mother’s Day, the Fourth, Back-To-School, Halloween, and Christmas, the world of model trains has an opportunity to go beyond this, and perhaps we will. First, when many of the big box retailers more or less dealt us out of their game, they may have cost us some new members who might have come in via the cheap train sets they stocked around the holidays.

However, if you’ve ever cruised a toy aisle and seen the stack of train sets scattered around, broken open, and crunched in half, they weren’t going to sell much anyway. Train sets are now coming in new form factors that are more durable and are sold through toy stores, hobby shops, and on-line services where the packages are treated with more respect, leading to better sales and buyers with more appreciation. This, in turn, is more likely to lead to new model railroaders.

While there are annual ups and downs in the model railroad business, and some of this is by scale, there is far more consistency than there is in — say — women’s clothes. The train hobbyist likes to add a car or two every month to his layout and perhaps do some scenic projects. In his mind, it’s less than what his wife spends on shoes in the same time period, and she doesn’t mind or even notice. He gets these packages from UPS or FedEx just like she does, and so long as it’s all small stuff, nobody cares.

Of course, between higher gas pump prices, rising airline ticket prices, and the crowded skies, train shows may have some problems, and that venue for bargain hunting may get peeled back some this year. It’s interesting to note that railroads in America carry the same percentage of the nation’s freight as trucks (40%) but only consume 3% of the petroleum fuels. The amount of fuel used per ton/mile on the rails is a fraction that of trucks and is microscopic compared with air freight.

This explains why your models are so much cheaper when shipped via UPS Ground then 2nd Day Air! I live in Oregon and ordered some stuff from Illinois. By ground, it was loaded into a trailer that was then put on a flatcar in a UPS unit train, pulled out to Portland, and there trucked south on I-5. My part of the fuel charges was small because the overall fuel charges for that train load was fairly small and spread out over six thousand tons of packages, of which mine was just a pound. I can confidently predict that the year 2008 will see Ground shipping be a more economical choice than ever before, and I don’t need to be a psychic to see that! — John Sipple