Nothing new from Miller, Leone or any of of the crew, some are going on 6 months or more.
I enjoy Trains.com and I'm reluctant to complain, but I'm a bit disappointed in the videos. I checked the layout visit videos and it seems that the Classic Toy Trains outnumber the MR layouts by a wide-wide margin. With all the great layouts on YouTube you'd think they could find more scale layouts to visit.
Ray
Thank you for this post, I've been wondering the same thing. I thought maybe my account had somehow been resticted. Its been quite a while since any new videos or updated series videos have been posted. The only new video I have seen is the CP Christmas train in Milwaukee.
@rrebell Off course you should complain! Every one of us Trains.com subscribers should complain because we are paying more for a digital service and getting very little. If you bought a burger from your favorite national hamberger chain and you received everything but the meat, you would complain to them. I've been an MR reader since the summer of 1957 and a subscriber for decades. My last issue is the April issue and it may really be my last.
slammin @rrebell Off course you should complain! Every one of us Trains.com subscribers should complain because we are paying more for a digital service and getting very little. If you bought a buger from your favorite national hamberger chain and you received everything but the meat, you would complain to them. I've been an MR reader since the summer of 1957 and a subscriber for decades. My last issue is the April issue and it may really be my last.
@rrebell Off course you should complain! Every one of us Trains.com subscribers should complain because we are paying more for a digital service and getting very little. If you bought a buger from your favorite national hamberger chain and you received everything but the meat, you would complain to them. I've been an MR reader since the summer of 1957 and a subscriber for decades. My last issue is the April issue and it may really be my last.
My subscription expires in September, and I will not renew. I also have a subscription to their largest competitor and that magazine is head and shoulders above MR. MR, along with MRVP, has become a disappointment and I only look through them once and I'm done. The last issue was horrible...mainly because of the overdone and overworked photos. On top of that, there is almost zero content that I find interesting. MRVP is just a shell of what it was.
Hopefully MR will get better, but it has been sliding downhill for awhile. In the meantime, I'll continue to enjoy the other magazine.
Chuck - Modeling in HO scale and anything narrow gauge
Trouble is the company is a private one, so no board. This can be good or bad depending upon the makeup of the board. They sure haven't veted thier software people very well, each misstep has been costly. They just bought a new company but don't know if they bought them to fix stuff or other reason.
rrebell Nothing new from Miller, Leone or any of of the crew, some are going on 6 months or more.
What I found interesting was that I saw one of the individuals on your list doing a video for one of the competitors.
What I found amusing was that in another video for this same competitor the presenter seemed to be wearing his Model Railroader t-shirt.
maxman Max -- You're probably talking about me! :-) Very long story short: I did the videos for MR's "Dream/Plan/Build" DVDs for 4 years Then about 5 years ago the video production company decided to start their own streaming service and I stuck with MR. However the production company owns the rights to the D/P/B videos and are using them now on their streaming service. Hope that clears things up! rrebell Nothing new from Miller, Leone or any of of the crew, some are going on 6 months or more. What I found interesting was that I saw one of the individuals on your list doing a video for one of the competitors. What I found amusing was that in another video for this same competitor the presenter seemed to be wearing his Model Railroader t-shirt.
Max -- You're probably talking about me! :-) Very long story short: I did the videos for MR's "Dream/Plan/Build" DVDs for 4 years Then about 5 years ago the video production company decided to start their own streaming service and I stuck with MR. However the production company owns the rights to the D/P/B videos and are using them now on their streaming service. Hope that clears things up!
gerryleone maxman Max -- You're probably talking about me! :-) Very long story short: I did the videos for MR's "Dream/Plan/Build" DVDs for 4 years Then about 5 years ago the video production company decided to start their own streaming service and I stuck with MR. However the production company owns the rights to the D/P/B videos and are using them now on their streaming service. Hope that clears things up! rrebell Nothing new from Miller, Leone or any of of the crew, some are going on 6 months or more. What I found interesting was that I saw one of the individuals on your list doing a video for one of the competitors. What I found amusing was that in another video for this same competitor the presenter seemed to be wearing his Model Railroader t-shirt.
I find that I have to agree in the frustration about the degrading of a delightful video service. I was an early subscriber to MRVP and spent many hour enjoying their content. I fact, a couple of David Popp's construction series got me out of my armchair and start building a layout. I enjoyed the heck out of the material provided. Gerry Leone is always informative and entertaining, Cody's Office was just plain fun to watch, "Rehab My Railroad inspire me in some updating to a display layout that I help with and Steve Brown always had the "regular guy" approach. I felt that MRVP was a good value for the content that I received. Now, not so much. Ever since they went to "trains.com" the Model Railroader staff seems to have been switched to a side track. A quick glance shows content from Trains and From Classic Toy Trains but little from the MR gang. The software is not user friendly. On the surface it appears that when they farmed the projects out to a vendor the Kalmbach management found an outfit that doesn't seem to know (or care) about the hobbies, the hobbyists, or about customer service. The whole thing is about like a sitcom where the family that owns the business brought in their failure of a nephew to run the company. The difference is that we aren't laughing!
I put in my two cents' worth on this recent similar thread about MRVP and Trains.com:
https://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/88/t/290814.aspx
so I won't repeat any of that here, other than to say I stopped paying for MRVP and am holding off signing up for Trains.com.
Just two new points for this thread. First, in terms of continuing to subscribe to MR (which I have done since 1965) you can complain about content, accuracy, slender page counts and a profusion of toy train people in the editor's seat (and a corporate leadership with no obvious personal interest in trains or model trains whatever -- meaning nobody in charge at the top actually has a personal ablitity to know if the content is good or bad or new or old or worth the money, and I am quite sure they never visit these Forums or even know what we are [usually] talking about) all you want, but you pay your money and you DO get the magazine you paid for, which is emphatically NOT the case with MRVP or Trains.com. So dropping the magazine to protest being had by the on-line content seems misdirected.
Point 2. Covid. A couple of weeks ago I had lunch with someone from Kalmbach and he mentioned that that very day was the day people were expected back in the office after nearly 2 years. I think the roll-out of Trains.com was snakebit by the pandemic. MAYBE after this omicron lockdown-reboot is over attention will be paid to where it needs to be paid. Maybe if we're lucky it will also mean the grocery store I go to will have the products that I prefer on the shelves.
Having said that, Kalmbach's history of IT decisions and staffing is both poor and of long standing. No disease can be blamed for it. Well OK maybe one disease ....
Dave Nelson
I really liked MRVP and looked forward to new videos. I should have known something was amiss when Cody's Office was cancelled. I will not be renewing my subscription to Trains.com.