26,000+pages at your fingertips

on Monday, August 3, 2015

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We were happy guys around here when we got the green light to begin work on the Classic Toy Trains: 25 Years and Counting on DVD-ROM. Every page from every issue of CTT from Volume 1, Number 1 in the fall of 1987 through the December issue of 2014, right on our computers! How cool is that?

Even better, every article is linked to a powerful search engine. Past issues can be revisited by flipping pages one-by-one or, if you know what you’re looking for, just type it in the search box and – presto! – you zip right to that article.

Type in a search term. We used 'postwar' and more than 200 articles came up in the search!

Double-click on an article to read it. Note the highlighted 'postwar' search word in the headline.

I took a tape measure and did a little counting. Those 212 issues include 26,234 magazine pages, which makes a stack of CTT’s four feet high!

Last week, the finished Classic Toy Trains: 25 Years and Counting on DVD-ROM arrived in our warehouse. All those years, all those articles, product reviews, fascinating ads, and so much more – are now just a mouse click away.

Carl Swanson holds the newly arrived CTT on DVD in the Kalmbach warehouse.

As Bob Keller mentioned in a recent blog post, the editorial staff performed quality control checks by randomly clicking through various issues on the beta DVD. In my case, these checks were incredibly time-consuming … because I kept pausing to read an old favorite all the way though.

There’s a lot of great reading on these DVDs, the search function makes the content easy to find, and the high-resolution pages images are a joy to behold. We live in an age of wonders!

There are 4,684 articles in the first 212 issues of CTT. Do you have a favorite article from those years? Share it in the comments below! If you’re interested in buying your own copy, the computer DVDs are available now in the “Shop” link in the banner above.

Happy reading!