Our two best failures

Our two best failures: In toy train publishing there are few “sure things”

Let me introduce you to two very handy books that you have probably never seen, nor will you ever read an updated edition thereof. These were based on the twin assumptions that train guys buy trains, and that train guys who buy trains, might want extra information about them before they plunk their money down. I believe both books filled a need, but the marketplace didn't agree.

What are these two Titanics of toy train publishing? Greenberg’s Roadname Guide to O Gauge Trains published in 1997 and The Buyer’s Guide to Toy Train Locomotives published in 2001.

In the late 1990s the Zeitgeist of the hobby was dramatically shifting from collectors who do a little operating to operators who do a little collecting. There was a virtual tidal wave of new production that ranged from reproductions of postwar trains to scale and semi-scale models of seemingly everything under the sun. The players were K-Line, Lionel, MTH, Marx, Pecos River, Right-Of-Way, Third Rail, Weaver, and Williams. And modern era production was just getting warmed up!

First up was Greenberg’s Roadname Guide to O Gauge Trains.

While many people who operated disavowed the title of collector, there was a collector-like pattern to their method of accumulating trains such as purchasing by roadname, era, or type of equipment. So former CTT staffer Kent Johnson (who was an editor in the Books Department) began the daunting task of creating a database listing O gauge locomotives and rolling stock by manufacturer, railroad road name, model type, product number, brief description, production year, and a value range.

This was a major task that required keyboarding virtually every catalog issued by every O gauge producer from the postwar era through 1996. This task would probably be impossible today.

But Kent got it done and he wasn’t finished there.

Another key feature would be a second section where locomotive hunters could search by locomotive type, from “Steam Engines: 0-4-0 “ to “Electric Locomotives: Rectifier” identified by manufacturer and number, description, production year, and a value range.

I found this book to be an astonishing valuable resource because I had one source to discover who made gear for the Florida East Coast, or the Chicago & Illinois Midland (not many of either at that time), or how many 2-8-2 Mikados were out there (Nine in 1997 –  two by Weaver, five by Williams and two from Lionel).

I was confident this 197-page book would sell like hotcakes. Road name purists would surely buy a copy! The reality was that sales were too soft to revisit the subject. It was more like “Is this mic turned on?”

Insert unhappy face. I don’t know why anyone with a sizable fleet of locomotives and rolling stock wouldn’t have wanted this slim volume. It is a genuine shame it didn’t get off the ground.

Interestingly, as recently as the Spring 2015 TCA Eastern Division Meet in York, Penn., at least two readers suggested this concept as a good idea for a book! Alas, as the saying goes, "Been there, done that."

The next very handy book that seemed to miss the mark, was the 2001 Buyer’s Guide to Toy Train Locomotives. The book covered O gauge locomotives made between 1990 and 2000 and would be a handy guide for someone shopping for something they missed, or were just getting interested in.

This was a project by the late John Grams, a prolific contributor to Classic Toy Trains under his own name and the byline Ray L. Plummer. This concept was directed at hobbyists interested in buying new or used modern production trains in the secondary market.

John went through reviews published in CTT, picked the models he thought had the widest appeal, digested the text and captured the vital statistics from the reviews (of which I had written probably half). More than 100 locomotives were included and they were indexed in the back of the book by model type (F3, E8, RF-16, SD45 …) and by manufacturer.

While I think this would have been a very handy book, especially for operators taking their first steps away from postwar trains, I think it fell shot for one key reason: A lack of photos.

Locomotive reviews could be located by model/wheel arrangement and manufacturer. Oh, there were a few color photos showing a handful of locomotives in the book. These images were more-or-less beauty shots to illustrate the recent wares of the various manufacturers. None of them directly linked to particular review pages. A lack of photos tied to specific locomotive reviews, even black and white images, is probably what doomed it.

Our staff does not produce books (that is the job of Kalmbach’s Books Department), but these two titles show that you can take a concept that virtually everyone who was asked about it was sure it would be a home run, only to see it fall short of expectations.

Of course, with the increased sophistication of the internet you can turn up a fair amount of information (and opinion) of the material covered in both of these books, but I’m still largely a dead tree guy, and like to have a book in my hand before I set off on a quest to find a product.

I guess the good side is that if we’d still been doing the O gauge roadname guide, it would probably be 800-pages-long by now! You live and learn.