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[quote user="IRONROOSTER"]The future of the hobby may will be in bringing in new modelers in their 50's and 60's who have the time, space, and money.  Their children are launched, careers are winding down or they're already retired.  That's the group from which to recruit new members. In my case, even though I have been in the hobby for 35 years, I had a long period of relative dormancy while the kids were growing up.  Once I hit my 50's, my hobby activity picked up along with available funds and space. Enjoy Paul [/quote] Paul, I not only agree, but don't even think that's the "future" so much as the past, present AND future. Heck, go out and get a copy of Model Railroader from the decade of your choice - preferably a couple different decades. Read it, and examine the age of the owner/builder of the feature layouts. Read the letters and look for clues as to the age of the correspondents, things like "after my kids moved out" or "when I worked in ____"... I think this hobby has long been the domain of empty-nesters, retirees or at least folks far enough along in life to have some good disposable income. I guarantee that you won't find any issue of Model Railroader from any decade suggesting that the hobby is driven by the youth. There's the occasional dedicated teenager or 20-something around, sure, and we applaud them highly. Rick of Rix products built an impressive layout by the time he was 30-ish, but that's the exception. Did the magazine used to have a column called "student fare" that they dropped? Absolutely, it fits right in with the pattern of 'returning to the hobby later on in life' that I've seen in my own family and circle of friends for multiple generations. The pattern of how young people "get into" the hobby there also looks a lot to me like "back to the future"... I had a Tyco box-set as a kid on a 4x8 sheet with green sawdust paper. I left off messing with it about the time I noticed girls, and totally dumped it once I could drive. I didn't reapproach the hobby until my 30's... My father had Lionels as a kid, dropped them in high school, and came back to the hobby only when I started into my childhood trains. My uncle inherited Dad's trains, and followed the same path, but never got back into it. Every single model railroader I know has similar sequence of events. They might be in their 30's-70's (and I'm sure beyond, but that's just my group), but they all had trains as kids, dropped them about the time their hormones kicked in, and returned to it after establishing homes, careers and families. And you know what... My kids have a 'toy' train set, my neighbors kids have toy train sets. I can't think of any family I know with kids who doesn't at minimum have an O- or G-scale setup they break out at Christmas.  And sure "kids these days just want video games."... Frankly, my kids just want computers and the Internet, and considering how critical use of those is to success in today's world, I'm all about that... (Plus when they're a little older, they'll be able to get into JMRI source code and make it do everything I want!). Guess what? They still LOVE trains. So what? It's just history repeating itself... When I was a kid it was "kids these days just want that fancy new Pong game." When my father was young, he remembers my grandfather railing that TV and BB Guns were destroying the youth... At some point, my great grandfather probably predicted the demise of mankind due to 78 RPM records... I take the whole "kids these days..." line with a HUGE grain of salt. Hell, cavemen probably complained that kids these days were spoiled and ruined by their new flint-chip-embedded clubs instead of using a good old fashioned log to club food to death... I look forward to repeating this soapbox rant 30 or 40 years from now too.
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