Adults who are into model railroading, usually had electric trains of some sort when they were kids and saw the prototype at railroad crossings all over the country when they were kids.  Today there are many kids who may have never seen a real train.  Lionel has shifted it's focus to collectors, and away from children.  Today's Lionel is Thomas, but does he translate to model railroading as effectively as the old Lionel sets we had as children in the 1950's and 1960's?  If trains are seen as irrelevant to today's or future children, the base may be eroded.  I went to Toys-R-Us to do some Christmas shopping for my grandsons a couple of weeks ago.  They had a Thomas section with the trains using magnetic couplers and push track for preschoolers.  There was one set of large "scale" plastic battery powered trains for k-3rd grade, but I didn't see any electric train sets.  There was an entire section set aside for R/C cars and planes.

Even though trains aren't quite the romantic fad toy they were in the 50s and 60s, the pubic is still very fascinated with them as a romantic form of transportation and as a fascinating toy that does something.

Polar express, for example, did very well at the box office - and the local Mt. Hood railway excursion line captialized on that by offering a "Polar Express" run to the foot of Mt. Hood daily from Thanksgiving to New Years. You bring your kids in their "jammies", they serve hot chocolate on the train, and the kids get to meet with Santa Claus at the end of the run. All runs are typically sold out by Thanksgiving.

Somebody's wanting to ride on a drafty old train in the winter!

I've been to various shows with Thomas booths - they've been 5 and 6 layers deep with parents and kids trying to get in.

Reuters has reported train set sales have been on the rise since 2005. The Millenials generation (age 0 to 20 something right now) is larger than the famed Baby Boomers, so given the public's fascination with trains, we just need to provide venues to capture that fascination, even if the prototype is no longer there.

My grandson is a case in point. He's 9 years old and loves trains with a passion. He's drawing pictures of them all the time - and guess what - he's drawing *steamers* ... not diesels. That's because he grew up on Thomas, and they're steamers. His first loco he purchased with his own money was a steamer.

So much for the "they gotta seem 'em on the real railroads to want to model 'em" theory.

While I agree the dynamics have changed, I think the end result may not be all that different. One very important thing I believe we need to keep in mind is the trainset craze in the 50s and 60s was a fad and not the "norm". What we're seeing now is more the "norm".

Marketing 101 says your market size affects your sales. The Boomer generation was until recently the largest generation alive. The next generation - the GenX'ers were the *smallest* generation alive. Now the Millenials are larger than the boomers.

Marketing 101 then says you'll sell more trains to Boomers, fewer trains to GenXers and more trains to Millenials. If you also factor in the fad element that was present when the Boomers were kids, but is now gone, then I would expect Boomers will hold the record for train set sales, GenXers will have extremely low sales of trainsets (double whammy of being the smallest generation after a fad has died), and Millenials will usher in a resurgence of train set sales, but not to the fad level seen by the boomers.

And that's what we see - Reuters has been reporting every year since 2005 train set sales are up.

For all the flap in past decades about the "population explosion" we forgot the other side of the equation - if the population growth drops off, your market shrinks and your propserity also drops off. A larger population can also mean a larger market and a return to hobby growth!

The natural conclusion from your last post, Joe, is that the younger members of our fraternity should perhaps spend more time in the bedroom and less in the trainroom in order to boost the population and ensure there are plenty of eager youngsters to underpin the next growth phase of the hobby.

But back to your original set of questions.......although I think DCC is the most beneficial technical advance by far, it is hard to deny that the internet has transformed the way we can now so easily access information. Not just data or images about prototype railways, industries, etc, but the growth of blogs, forums and personal websites allows us to interact with others and learn from each other like never before. This helps to flatten the learning curve considerably, thus giving us the ability to strive for standards we never thought we'd be able to attain previously.

Can't really think of a negative development over the last few decades.

What I would like to see in the future is the reduction of the cost of scenic items. Trees, figures, building kits are very expensive and there is really no limit to what you can spend because your scenery is never really "finished". The cost of scenery and scenic materials on my N scale layout is 35% of the total.......so far. It will only grow.

As for a sense of purpose, I think the advent of DCC has allowed a much greater focus on operations and I can see this as a major growth area. Many people, like me, who never thought they'd be interested in ops, now have the ability to do more than just "run trains", thanks to DCC removing the restrictions of DC block control.

Tony

The big change in the past 20 years is technology; DCC, sound, the internet, highly detailed model tooling, etc.  

I would like to see the digital technology become more user friendly as time progresses.  DCC is still a very difficult technology for many to master.  DCC/Sound still feels like MS DOS-clunky and for tech nerds (no offence intended).  We need to move towards DCC/Sound having user interfaces that are far more user friendly.  We need a Apple/Mac experiance for the DCC/Sound end user.  (I don't want to start a Mac vs. PC discussion here - I'm a PC guy BTW)

Personally, I like all the RTR offerings out there.  With my limited time, I can focus more on building and running a layout (which I enjoy) rather than focusing on scratch building, kit bashing, etc which are more focused, time intensive activities.

I didn't think Patty was old enough to have a grandson 9 yrs. old.

Bob Hayes

Submitted by rocdoc on Wed, 2010-12-22 23:14.

The natural conclusion from your last post, Joe, is that the younger members of our fraternity should perhaps spend more time in the bedroom and less in the trainroom in order to boost the population and ensure there are plenty of eager youngsters to underpin the next growth phase of the hobby.

That has got to be the best line I have heard yet for increasing the potential of the hobby.                                     You sir are a genus 

Okay, back to trains!

Significant developments, imho.

1. DCC as most everyone has pointed out.

I was intimidated by the electronics involved by command control, especially after having viewed photos of the CTC-16 and later the CTC-80 command control systems back in the 1980s.  DCC has been an incredible benefit to this hobby. The ability to operate locomotives independently and in MU lashups has made prototype style operation a simplified reality today. Cool factor today is that wiring up a basic DCC system has become a straight forward process. Even for a novice model railroader with a 4'x8' layout like the classic Atlas "Great Eastern Trunk" , the elimination of those pesky cab routing blocks makes life so much easier!

2. Sound with DCC!  I'm in my 40s and still remember wishing, back in the 70s as a teen, that HO locomotives could have sound. It was wishful thinking and I never imagined that fantasy actually coming true!  I'm especially appreciative that I can now relive fond memories of hearing turbocharged EMD Dash-2 units and GE FDL "chuggers" and even more so, the wide variety of Leslie and Nathan horns.  As the late Jackie Gleason used to say:  "How sweet it is!"

3. Code 83 track for HO (and its counterpart in N-scale).  Made it easier to get more realistic looking track without having to go the handlaid method route.

Guys,

I know that it's not traditional; however, there's more than one way to have fun with the wife in the trainroom!

You can boost the population while running trains at the same time!!!  Just use your imagination!

Rick

Something I've not seem mentioned, when I first started in the hobby 40+ years ago most structure kits were made out of cardstock with basswood trim (Suydam) or all basswood with maybe some corrugated aluminum or paper shakes for roofing (Campbell.) Injection molded kits were nonexistant (parts on a sprue) like scale car and military kits have been for many years. Today we have many Structure kits, signal Kits, detail kits, vehicle kits, on and on...that are easy to build and make a fairly nice model. Examples are Walthers Cornerstone, City Classics, DPM, Rix products, Bachmann, on and on...  These fun to construct kits were unavailable back in my early years. In fact, if we had to go back to the old days with DC power, cardstock kits, ground foam, on and on...I might not even be in the hobby today.

Another big improvement is accurate prototype models. I remember when Intermountain Railway released their PS-1 boxcar kit. Finally we had an accurate kit that was fairly easy to construct! Many of the earlier kits weren't a model of anything! Often they had car-ends from one railway vendor, a roof from another, doors from another vendor and rivet patterns that never were! Today most freight cars seem to be fairly accurate.

All in all, today is much better!