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I'm going to retire in three years and have decided to build an N scale layout as a hobby. So, as a new guy here are some thoughts on the subject. When my son was small in the 70s I bought a cheap N scale package. We were moving around a lot in the military and didn't have the room or the desire to build a layout that we would have to take down every couple of years. However, back then the toy stores and department stores sold engines and rolling stock at relatively good prices and we began collecting some. We didn't see many of the LHSs around. We could package up the N scale stuff easily for moving and I've kept it over the years. I realize some of it probably isn't going to run well, but I can work on it or use it as scenery. Unfortunely, Star Wars came out and my son developed an interest in that. He now has a basement full from collecting over the years. He just tried to convince my wife to go with him at midnight on Friday to go around to Walmarts and Targets to get the unique next generation issues that will be gone in a few hours. However, my grand daughters are very interested in trains - started with the Thomas the Train stuff and I can get them interested in working with me. I've restarted on N scale by doing research and this forum is one of the best places to get info. I don't see the need to run a topic for new guys every few months if the search capabilities or navigation around the forum were improved. There are some real gems that aren't discussed very often and thus don't move up in the forum. It is a real pain to try to go to pages deep in the forum. It would be nice to have a go to page capability. The keyword search produces disjointed results. It is nice to be able to follow the full discussion on a topic rather than getting a mass of one or two responses from different topics. When I see something I think might be useful I put it in my favorites file and also copy to topic files I'm creating. Based on suggestions from the forums, I've begun buying a few of the suggested books. When I first started reading the forums I thought there was a lot of elitism. It is like fly fishing for trout here in Colorado. If you don't have the $1000 dollar rod, the $300 reel, and Scottish wool pants with the heated waders or tie your own flies, you are looked down on. It takes the fun out of it. I'm just as happy fishing at times with a cane pole and worms with a bobber. However, the more I read in the forums, I've seen that it isn't necessarily the case and a new person can learn a lot from the experienced people. I used to build plastic model airplanes and had over 400 when I quit. It is a good example of an industry that has lost the range of models it had in the 50s and 60s and is pricing itself out of the market. On the other hand, I've been involved in the graphics market and the prices of things like computers, printers, and digital cameras have come down drastically as they were made available to the mass market - while the technology has improved significantly. The more people involved in a market is a major market expansion driver. I agree that model railroading is somewhat of a niche market and it would be difficult to expand the market significantly, but the principal still applies. The second point I would like to make is that new people coming into the hobby can bring in new ideas. For example, when putting together buildings, I've seen a little on using and printing on card stock - but not much. With photoshop and today's inkjet printers a person could do some really nice work. My concern would be texture, but I've gone to the LHS and looked at the pre-moulded styrene and the texture is almost negligible for N scale. I think I could print some very realistic looking streets with more realistic variations and print them on photo matte film that is similar to styrene rather than on card stock. I've also had experience printing on different media such as watercolor paper, tyvek and canvas that do provide some texture. I've worked with some artists that print on even more exotic medias. I've looked at some of the forum threads on backdrops. I haven't seen anyone use actual scenes taken with a digital camera and printed on various media. With even an average digitial camera, one could take a series of photos, put them together in a panaroma (I've even seen a $9 application that would do this), and have it printed out on some of the large format printers for the price on an expensive locomotive - if the reprographics shop had a good raster image processor (RIP). I worked for a company that built very large format color scanners and we worked with the large format printer companies. I've scanned postcard size documents at 300 dpi and printed them out 36 inches wide with almost indistinguishable loss of resolution and excellent color renditions. I've printed documents as long as 25 feet with the printers. Today's desktop injet printers use the same ink technologies and printheads and have gotten better with 6 and 8 color capabilities. The backdrops could even be backlit and set up to vary the light conditions. I've read that some of the museums do this. I've even thought about some of the display systems that are available for exhibit booths that can change scenes or have a moving scene. These are expensive, but it wouldn't be too difficult to build one from scratch with a slow rotation motor that would be significantly less expensive. Bottom line is I think there are more positive benefits from expanding the number of model railroaders than negative ones.
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