12-08-2012, 05:00 PM
This forum has been boring of late so I figured it was time to stir the pot. I've been flipping through some old model railroad books today. N scale in the '70s. HO scale in the '80s. Track planning from various decades. What once was the latest how-to guide is often now a quaint historic record.
The hobby has come a long way in the past 20 years. Now we have knuckle couplers as standard equipment in most scales, an incredible variety of rolling stock, computer controls instead of daisy-chained toggle switches, an abundance of good-looking ready-to-lay track, and ready-made trees that don't necessarily look like flocked ping pong balls. Of course, anybody can still do it the "old fashioned" way, should he (or she) desire.
Everybody loves to gripe about change, for better or worse. So what exactly were the good old days of this hobby? What about the bad old days? Are these in fact the good old days?
Model railroading IS fun, d----t.
The hobby has come a long way in the past 20 years. Now we have knuckle couplers as standard equipment in most scales, an incredible variety of rolling stock, computer controls instead of daisy-chained toggle switches, an abundance of good-looking ready-to-lay track, and ready-made trees that don't necessarily look like flocked ping pong balls. Of course, anybody can still do it the "old fashioned" way, should he (or she) desire.
Everybody loves to gripe about change, for better or worse. So what exactly were the good old days of this hobby? What about the bad old days? Are these in fact the good old days?
Model railroading IS fun, d----t.