Welcome to our quickly

Welcome to our quickly growing group and a real great group of people thay are.

Is it really for the 5 year old?

Hi Steve. Welcome to site. I am sure you'll find it enjoyable.

< I am trying to convince my wife that it IS for him.>

You don't sound like you think she'll believe you.  But let's be honest, the model railroad is almost never really for the kids even though we try to rationalize it that way. It's primarily for us with the kids being a covenient comouflage of the fact that most of us are still "5 year olds" when it comes to this hobby. I won't go into all the reasons why but I will says this. Wives almost always see through our feeble attempts to convince them the layout is for the kids.

Having said that, let's admit that we enjoy the hobby ourselves and we'd love to get our kids involved. Many of them will get involved in one way or the other, but most will quickly lose interest after they realize that Dad won't let them run the trains at top speed until the trains fall off the tracks and create chaos. It takes a skilled father to teach his kids what it is that trains really do and when they are old enough to understand that they kay decide they like the hobby. That require's patience too and many of us don't really have that after we come home from a hard day (are there ever really any other kind?) at work.

So we get into the hobby because want to and not because the kids do.

As a kid I never had electric trains primarily because they were expensive and my parents couldn't afford them. What I did get was usually battery powered and didn't anything interesting but run around in circles until the batteries needed replacing. Trains running in circles gets old pretty fast so you need them to do more than just that. Todays model trains make soing something really easy especially if you run DCC. But you can do the same thing in DC if you wire your track into separate blocks and let the engineer of each train control those blocks as needed.

In any case, alot of what you are going to probably want to do will be way beyond a 5 year old's understanding and knowledge. When that happens, the Mrs. is bound tosee it and when that happens you will need to include her in your hobby in some way. She may not be interested at first, but curiosity will get her to see exactly what it is you are doing in your basement or other hobby area that you've set aside for your layout.

Irv

Situational Railroading

Some of those thoughts might be good to share as part of your blog or perhaps an article for Joe's magazine..

Welcome to the site!

Chris

Situational Railroading

Yes, that is what I was thinking.  I'm sure lots of guys would be interested.

Welcome!

pro railroading

Steve,

 You are right about the work schedual. I have been on the railroad for many years. My family has gotten used to it, although now the FRA is implementing the 5 day work week so to speak, which will be nice. im looking forward to having the 48 hours each week. I will let it go at that as  really dont want to get into those type of issues on a modling forum.

         Anyway tell us more about what you are doing from a modeling stand point, we would love to see some of your work and operations ideas.

Joe's magazine

Thanks Chris for the welcome;

I would love to share them in Joe's magazine. How do I get info about that? I actually typed a small book full of ideas that I would love to share. Any info would be appreciated.

Steve

See our contributor guidelines

If you believe you have an interesting article idea for MRH, see our contributor guidelines.

We are eager to get more article submissions! Since we're the new kid on the block, we don't have a huge article backlog. If we ever hope to become more frequent than quarterly, then it's very important we develop a good supply of articles so we can balance the mix in each issue and can crank out issues more frequently (when that days comes).

That's a long-winded way of saying: please submit articles! If you can write halfway decent and take decent digital photos, then you're likely a shoe in to get published with us.

article contribution

Hi Joe:

I am a new subscriber to your website. I have some modeling ideas I would love to share with everyone. They both total about 10 pages long. I wrote a mini book myself. Any info you can give me about sharing in your book would be greatly appreciated.

Steve

You've read our contributor guidelines?

Steve,

I take it you have read our contributor guidelines? They cover most of what you need to know.

Think about how you would explain things to someone standing right there and write your article the same way. Shoot some nicely lit and in focus digital photos of the article subject and include them.

Let's say you wanted to tell us about how you built a train station structure to follow a favorite prototype. Make sure you have some nice photos of the real structure, and then take some nice photos of the built up structure - some taken on a well lit table top with no distracting background clutter and some taken with the structure in place on the layout in a finished scene. If you can get some shots of the structure under construction all the better - but that's not totally necessary.

If you can shoot a short video clip of a model train running past your station, that also helps, or if you can get a lazy susan turntable and shoot some 3D click and spin images of the structure, that's also a plus. We can coach you on how to shoot the 3D click and spin images.

Then package it all up and upload it to our upload web site at:

http://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/upload

Give us 2-4 weeks to review your article and get back to you with either an acceptance email or questions/comments about your submission. If we accept your article, we will also give you our estimated payment amount and ask you to fill out some tax reporting paperwork so we can forward payment to you.

uploaded files

Just wanted to let you know that uploaded my 2 files for you to look at. Let me know what you think. If they are what you are looking for then please feel free to share them with everyone.

Thanks again;

Steve

working on the railroad

I'm glad to hear you family has gotten use to the "railroad hours". That is the biggest hurdle, at least to me, that you can overcome. It's so hard to explain WHY your leaving AGAIN. The long nights, short rest, short calls, furloughs, layovers, deadhead time......etc. The list goes on and on. But that's what we love about the job, right?

I think it's about time the FRA steps in and does something about the hours. I'm sure it will upset some of those with "whiskers" but it will give some junior employees a shot to get hours. I think that a system like Amtrak tried would be great - the "back in 12" rule, where all crews tried to get back to the home terminal in 12 hours. It would take some planning but I'm sure it could be done.

I left the railroad with just shy of 20 years. I wanted my kids to "see" daddy every once in awhile. Working the road pool wasen't the best place to raise a family. I didn't have enough seniority to hold a yard job. What to do? Had to try a more "family friendly" career. So out of the blue I hear FedEx was hiring. I jumped at the chance. That was a SMART move!!!! Now I'm home every night, at a NORMAL time and I am home on weekends - unless I want the OT and work Saturday, which I do every other week. The pay is comparable to "road pool" pay but the benefits are far better than the railroads. I am very fortunate to have gotten this job!

As for modeling the PC, that's my favorite railroad, no kidding! I am old enough to remember that railroad operating near my home in Utica, NY. To me, that's a great era to model. So many choices of rolling stock and locomotives and don't forget those cabooses!

Hope all goes well with the modeling. I do have some PC employee timetables if you need some "modeling" info. Let me know. You can reach me at szabko@roadrunner,com

Stay Safe!!

Steve

Did those files upload

Hey Joe;

I just wanted to know if those 2 files I sent back on 3/6/09 uploaded sucessfully. If not, I can resend them. I am new at this and I just wanted to make sure I did it right.

Steve

Yep, they're fine

Yep the files uploaded fine and got the notification that you uploaded them.

Focusing on finishing up issue 2 right now, then will get to the submissions queue once the rush to roll out issue 2 is over.