It was a very helpful "go to" resource...

R.I.P.

Happy Modelling,
Prof Klyzlr

Wow.. that really really sucks.. huge resource..

It always was quirky.. now we know why.

Hopefully someone will find a way to make it available again.

Chris

What a wasted opportunity. Kalmbach could have used the index to their advantage.

Jaime

Did you read the reason they put up? They didnt just arbitrarily decide to take it down.

Chris

And while I can respect the many challenges with thie problem, there are a wealth of programmers out ther who would relish such a challenge.  Given time, and creativity, Kalmbach could overcome this.  I hope they choose to.  But as long as they approach these information management problems from a paper publishing house perspective (instead of an integrated information media desemmination enterprise) I fear these opportunities will keep cropping up.

10 to 20 years ago and way before that actually Kalmbach was the cutting edge in Model railroading and Train Magazine Publishing.

Then about 1995 it seams that they dulled their blade and seemed unable to cut the cheese so to speak. Their quality as well as quantity of new and innovating ideas seamed to just drop off. They did a lot of republishing articles and Ideas from 30 years before also they started taking their track plans from old issues of model Railroader and combining them into Books which they sold as "NEW" track Plans from the pages of Model Railroader.

This is when I lost interest in Model Railroading (not Completely but to a point that I didn't care as much) and it wasn't until mid to late 2004 when I revised my interest as I revamped The Narrow Gauge Bug in my system.

One of the best things "Trains" magazine and "Model Railroader" had going for them was that around every March or April they published their "Index" pages in a pull out section for the previous year. Now for those of us that use the Yearly hard back notebook folders this made researching the different years all so much easier and now because they can't take the time to program the index instead they decide to delete it.

I wonder how much they would realize just what we see in these indexes and what if because they no longer want to take the time to make our lives easier that we delete the magazine subscriptions we now receive simply because there is no longer any order to them or at least the order they have given as part of the magazine over the past 50+ years. While their at it, they should remove the covers and just wrap them in brown paper bags with Train written in crayon on them for what good it would do.

Dan

Bad news about the index for sure.  This is the first I've heard of it because I don't "do" Model Railroader any more.

I'm not surprised.  Kalmbach seems to be mired in the past or something.  The internet is the future of publishing so rather than embracing technology and making the MRR index even better they take a step backwards by taking it offline.

At the very least, they could give something back to the hobby and explore options for making the index open source with a core of volunteers maintaining and developing it...

Of course. I'm just thinking out loud and know nothing about what would be involved.  Maybe it just won't work?

I must wander over to Moldy Railroader's web site and see if I can find out what the story is...

on the ldsig group.  The reason they are dropping it, that I read, said that it was "impossible" to glean the information out into another format for use.  This is the part that kind of raises my eyebrow.  There is enough expertise out there that would voluntarily take on this task and could do it.  The underlying reason is that it is not cost-effective for Kalmbach to maintain the information and it would only make sense for them to discontinue it on that premise.  They are a business, not a charity, but just come out and say its not cost effective to continue, don't provide reasons many of us know aren't correct. 

However, Joe posted that he is trying to get them to turn over the program to the NMRA who can then have volunteers to extract the information into a modern, usable format.  Let's hope that Kalmbach will hand it over to them.

However, Joe posted that he is trying to get them to turn over the program to the NMRA who can then have volunteers to extract the information into a modern, usable format.  Let's hope that Kalmbach will hand it over to them.

Dave

That makes sense and I hope they do it!

Thanks for the info.

Leave it to Joe to step in and pull and old friend out of the toilet before we all just flush them.

JoeF is going down in history as one of the great Model Railroaders and someday I hope to meet him just to shake his hand and say thanks.

Dan