03-20-2014, 04:54 PM
John your appreciation of Lance's work is well documented. 
I see his style of railroading to be just one of many. He's enthusiastic about it...that's fine. There will always be those of us who fill our basements with lots of track, grades and whatnot. If the entire modeling world decided to create shelf-styled switching layouts only, I'd still be watching trains go around on my large folded dogbone.
In addition to questions about how much money and how much space we can justify regarding the hobby, the point about how much TIME is also a good one, not only as far as issues like RTR vs scratch building are concerned, but also in terms of how we balance participation in the hobby with the rest of our lives...and maybe how much energy we want to spend getting into arguments about something like model trains.
I see his style of railroading to be just one of many. He's enthusiastic about it...that's fine. There will always be those of us who fill our basements with lots of track, grades and whatnot. If the entire modeling world decided to create shelf-styled switching layouts only, I'd still be watching trains go around on my large folded dogbone. In addition to questions about how much money and how much space we can justify regarding the hobby, the point about how much TIME is also a good one, not only as far as issues like RTR vs scratch building are concerned, but also in terms of how we balance participation in the hobby with the rest of our lives...and maybe how much energy we want to spend getting into arguments about something like model trains.