according to an email I got this morning. They are selling off inventory on sale
Ordinarily I would not mention this on these Forums, but in addition to being a store and an online retailer, Trainlife performed a great service by posting online many complete issues of what could be called the second and third tier model railroad publications that sprung up decades ago, had their run, and then closed down. Many of those magazines catered more to the detail oriented prototype modeler than to the general modeler or layout builder/operator.
Dave Nelson
Those magazines are a great resource. There is information on another forum on how to download them. I liked RMJ the best due to the repowering / diesel detailing information.
Jim
Received the same email, which I have somehow managed to vaporize.
Anyway, it also said that Pelle Soeborg's layout which TrainLife had purchased was going to be saved by Scale Trains.
Concerning that magazine archive, I think the email also mentioned something about it needing to be supported possibly by some other entity. It would be a shame if this went away. I still miss that other all encompassing archive that Kalmback took over (?) and has now disappeared.
What happened to the Exact Rail line?
azrail What happened to the Exact Rail line?
Nothing. I think TrainLife was an outlet for ExactRail.
EDIT: I need to walk back my statement. Someone else read the same email as I and has a differing opinion.
I had tried getting into the magazine index today and was getting errors trying to get them to display. I know there was one article that I thought I had on my computer out of Mainline Modeler that I was looking for.
The site trainlife.com was a retail site, which was owned by ExactRail. I know this as fact as they were one of my customers. The ExactRail line is still in business as they were at the Amherst show. So unless something has changed since my last correspondence with them as of mid-February just the retail website was going away.
As of today, they are still showing pre-orders being taken on the PC&F reefers in HO scale. Let's hope they don't go away. I personally like their line of freight cars...
Neal
Trainlife began as a hobby site. They had message boards, blogs, member videos, images, etc.,
At some point they began acquiring rights to defunct hobby and railfan magazines as Dave mentioned, notably MRR and RMJ.
They were only available to view online, you could, using the print function, save a couple of pages at a time. The format was definitely PDF. At no point could you download a magazine.
Participation began to dwindle downward, similar to the Garden Railroad forum where they had literally 3 to 4 people posting.
At that point, Exactrail entered the picture and started a second website with the same name and announced they had acquired Trainlife. A link was present to the old site.
After a while the original site was shut down and the magazines appeared on the new retail site.
It’s been maybe 9 months at least since the magazine links actually worked.
On another hobby board/ magazine site, a thread is posted on downloading individual PDFs and then a way to download batches of the magazines. Some expressed concern once the site goes down the magazines will be gone.
If someone acquires these magazines, its unclear how money could be made. Maybe DVD archives for sale. Or as a carrot to bring traffic to a website.
It would help having a website to access older magazines. Having such access might prove invaluable. Who knows, I might even bother to check!
TrainLife's physical retail store was one of my local hobby shops, so it has been a shame to see them go. Yes it was a sister company to ExactRail, since both were owned by the same person (John Pestana) and shared staff between the two buisnesses. However as stated by ExactRail on social media after TrainLife closed:
I wish them, their current and former staff the best of luck with their future ventures. TrainLife at its peak was arguably the best train store in the Intermountain West, especially since the original Caboose had closed in Denver. Clean, well lit, big stock (one of the few retailers to even carry brands such as ScaleTrains or Moloco to boot), and the fun of seeing Pelle's layout in person. It will be missed.
I ordered rolling stock from TrainLife a number of times over the years, their prices, while not absolute rock bottom, were usually competative and coupled with free shipping for orders over an amount easily reachable with large orders of ExactRail, ScaleTrains, and Atlas often were the best deal for the items I brought. The Magazine archive was also pretty cool, kind of a history of the rise and fall of the second tier magazines (excluding Mainline Modeler).It will suck to see them go...why does it seems this hobby keeps smashing its...head in the door.