As I was laid up in the hospital after by-pass surgery, I had some time alone to really think about some things, including my life. My wife of 36 years stopped by to visit me twice a day, bringing me special gifts and family news, reminding me why she remains my top priority in life. The rest of my family is important, too, even if the grandkids weren’t allowed to visit because the hospital considers them to be diseased little monkeys. I thought about home and community, but I didn’t watch that much TV and lost track of current events, not that I missed much.
Of course, I thought about trains. I pondered the real ones and missed hearing the Nathan 3-chimes and the 5-chime Leslies I can detect at my house. I really wanted to go trainchasing. I also missed my model trains. I realized how much model railroading creates peace in my soul. It is generally a quiet, thoughtful pursuit, one that requires intense concentration. As with meditation, it pushes your cares and concerns to one side for a while. My wife quilts and I do trains.
Model railroads help you dream and plan. They help direct your reading and study, leading to research and perhaps writing. I come up for air quite often, play with the grandkids, and fulfill the general duties of husband, father, and granddad. Then, when I’ve had enough stress, I submerge myself again into my world of trains.
As I went to Cadio-Rehabilitation, the topic of Stress came up. Sometimes, stress is not a bad thing in small quantities. It displays appropriate concern, elicits forethought, and provides motivation, all useful functions. When Stress becomes a dark cloud over you, dominating your thinking and your day, it ruins your health and damages your heart. As I took the surveys on Stress, I realized that I’m not dominated or even bothered by negative Stress.
That wasn’t always true. Teaching in a public elementary school featured plenty of stressful moments over several decades. Stress leads your body to release glucose into your blood stream, there to help you fight or take flight. In our modern world where you do neither one, that extra blood sugar contributes to the development of diabetes. I have that disease and that contributed, in turn, to cardiovascular disease and my current surgery. Apparently, I didn’t retire soon enough, or I didn’t play with enough trains.
Yes, there’s always some Stress in the publishing business, but I try to buffer it against the fun of model railroading. At times I’ve let the Stress into the model work, and I had to learn to keep it out. Getting upset about anything is a sign of that. If you work carefully, with reasonable caution, you should get few unpleasant surprises. Getting wound up over a malfunctioning item doesn’t help you out at all. If it’s in warranty, send it back. If it isn’t, either get it repaired, replace it, or just do without it. Take it seriously, but don’t take it too seriously!
What’s up with the Large Scales?
I’ve fielded some questions of late about our coverage of Large Scale products, especially rolling stock and locomotives. A few years ago, we had new products appearing in the garden scales virtually every month. We had steam and diesel and electric locomotives. We had freight and passengers cars, both modern and old time. We enjoyed covering all these new products, but then the bottom dropped out. What happened?
As with any scale, there are a limited number of prime manufacturers. By “prime” I mean those who make the foundation products of locos and rolling stock, track, and buildings. Alphabetically, I would list Accucraft, Aristo-Craft, Bachmann, Hartland, LGB, MTH, and USA Trains. Of this group of six, only Aristo-Craft, Bachmann, and USA Trains have consistently contributed review samples to Model Railroad News.
At this moment, this slowdown in coverage seems to be the result of some specific causes. To make a new product in Large Scale is much more expensive than in, say, HO. 1/87 is a third of 1/29, and this is true in all three dimensions. If the HO boxes are proportional to the model in the same manner as the larger versions, the 1:29 box will take the same space as 27 HO boxes, and most of that is air. Perhaps every Large Scale boxcar should be filled with N-scale products before being shipped from China.
Proportionately more is required to make molds, and perhaps 27 times more injected styrene is required. Large Scale products require much larger molding machines, and their cost-per-shot is higher as well. More paint and larger painting facilities are needed. The miracle is that a garden boxcar doesn’t cost more than it does in relation to a comparable HO product. All of this supersizing requires venture capital, really big bucks, and that pool of money seems to have dwindled.
The other dwindling is the market. Two factors currently limit the Large Scale market. The first one would be the many scales that use the same size track. For those of us already in the game, the rules are easy enough, but from the outside, it’s as confusing as a game of cricket. I personally know several families who have started to get into garden railroading and then backed out because of their discomfort around this topic. The market is incoherent, and that is driving away some sales.
The other factor is a splintered market. If some people are willing to mix and match scale sizes in their garden without any trepidation, renegade rivet-counters from HO (and at times I’m one of them) aren’t so forgiving. There are really only two “pure” scales: 1:32 and 1:20.3. The first represents exact standard gauge and the other is exact 3-foot narrow gauge. Everything else is brokered. LGB supposedly represents the pure meter gauge of Europe, but they dismiss their own efforts as toys, not scale models.
So we have narrow gaugers at one end of the spectrum and standard gaugers at the other end. In the middle are folks with storybook little garden railroads, requiring everything to be cute, if nothing else. Track, power, and space requirements vary widely. Added into this is the ongoing controversy between track power and battery power. While this is a logical dispute, given the problems of operating outdoors, it scares the bejabbers out of the newbies.
We want to carry more news about Large Scale in the garden, but I don’t think we’ll be doing much on garden tools or ornamental plants. We’ll still carry reviews on major product any time we get a hold of them, but we’d like to keep a presence in our pages, even on those months when there are no marquee products. Most of all, we’d like to hear from garden railroaders telling us about your interests and desires for coverage. Stay in touch!
Of course, I thought about trains. I pondered the real ones and missed hearing the Nathan 3-chimes and the 5-chime Leslies I can detect at my house. I really wanted to go trainchasing. I also missed my model trains. I realized how much model railroading creates peace in my soul. It is generally a quiet, thoughtful pursuit, one that requires intense concentration. As with meditation, it pushes your cares and concerns to one side for a while. My wife quilts and I do trains.
Model railroads help you dream and plan. They help direct your reading and study, leading to research and perhaps writing. I come up for air quite often, play with the grandkids, and fulfill the general duties of husband, father, and granddad. Then, when I’ve had enough stress, I submerge myself again into my world of trains.
As I went to Cadio-Rehabilitation, the topic of Stress came up. Sometimes, stress is not a bad thing in small quantities. It displays appropriate concern, elicits forethought, and provides motivation, all useful functions. When Stress becomes a dark cloud over you, dominating your thinking and your day, it ruins your health and damages your heart. As I took the surveys on Stress, I realized that I’m not dominated or even bothered by negative Stress.
That wasn’t always true. Teaching in a public elementary school featured plenty of stressful moments over several decades. Stress leads your body to release glucose into your blood stream, there to help you fight or take flight. In our modern world where you do neither one, that extra blood sugar contributes to the development of diabetes. I have that disease and that contributed, in turn, to cardiovascular disease and my current surgery. Apparently, I didn’t retire soon enough, or I didn’t play with enough trains.
Yes, there’s always some Stress in the publishing business, but I try to buffer it against the fun of model railroading. At times I’ve let the Stress into the model work, and I had to learn to keep it out. Getting upset about anything is a sign of that. If you work carefully, with reasonable caution, you should get few unpleasant surprises. Getting wound up over a malfunctioning item doesn’t help you out at all. If it’s in warranty, send it back. If it isn’t, either get it repaired, replace it, or just do without it. Take it seriously, but don’t take it too seriously!
What’s up with the Large Scales?
I’ve fielded some questions of late about our coverage of Large Scale products, especially rolling stock and locomotives. A few years ago, we had new products appearing in the garden scales virtually every month. We had steam and diesel and electric locomotives. We had freight and passengers cars, both modern and old time. We enjoyed covering all these new products, but then the bottom dropped out. What happened?
As with any scale, there are a limited number of prime manufacturers. By “prime” I mean those who make the foundation products of locos and rolling stock, track, and buildings. Alphabetically, I would list Accucraft, Aristo-Craft, Bachmann, Hartland, LGB, MTH, and USA Trains. Of this group of six, only Aristo-Craft, Bachmann, and USA Trains have consistently contributed review samples to Model Railroad News.
At this moment, this slowdown in coverage seems to be the result of some specific causes. To make a new product in Large Scale is much more expensive than in, say, HO. 1/87 is a third of 1/29, and this is true in all three dimensions. If the HO boxes are proportional to the model in the same manner as the larger versions, the 1:29 box will take the same space as 27 HO boxes, and most of that is air. Perhaps every Large Scale boxcar should be filled with N-scale products before being shipped from China.
Proportionately more is required to make molds, and perhaps 27 times more injected styrene is required. Large Scale products require much larger molding machines, and their cost-per-shot is higher as well. More paint and larger painting facilities are needed. The miracle is that a garden boxcar doesn’t cost more than it does in relation to a comparable HO product. All of this supersizing requires venture capital, really big bucks, and that pool of money seems to have dwindled.
The other dwindling is the market. Two factors currently limit the Large Scale market. The first one would be the many scales that use the same size track. For those of us already in the game, the rules are easy enough, but from the outside, it’s as confusing as a game of cricket. I personally know several families who have started to get into garden railroading and then backed out because of their discomfort around this topic. The market is incoherent, and that is driving away some sales.
The other factor is a splintered market. If some people are willing to mix and match scale sizes in their garden without any trepidation, renegade rivet-counters from HO (and at times I’m one of them) aren’t so forgiving. There are really only two “pure” scales: 1:32 and 1:20.3. The first represents exact standard gauge and the other is exact 3-foot narrow gauge. Everything else is brokered. LGB supposedly represents the pure meter gauge of Europe, but they dismiss their own efforts as toys, not scale models.
So we have narrow gaugers at one end of the spectrum and standard gaugers at the other end. In the middle are folks with storybook little garden railroads, requiring everything to be cute, if nothing else. Track, power, and space requirements vary widely. Added into this is the ongoing controversy between track power and battery power. While this is a logical dispute, given the problems of operating outdoors, it scares the bejabbers out of the newbies.
We want to carry more news about Large Scale in the garden, but I don’t think we’ll be doing much on garden tools or ornamental plants. We’ll still carry reviews on major product any time we get a hold of them, but we’d like to keep a presence in our pages, even on those months when there are no marquee products. Most of all, we’d like to hear from garden railroaders telling us about your interests and desires for coverage. Stay in touch!