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Many years ago I remember going to several NMRA regional conventions. I was interested in joining but they weren't too interested in high school students so I didn't. I haven't seen any public announcements of regional activities in years and so have no contacts to find out if I would want to join now. When I last attended these events you paid your registration fee and attended, member or not. The last time a national convention was near me and I was interested in going I looked at the registration fee, then looked at the membership fee, and asked a local hobbyshop owner to let me look at a couple of recent issues of the Bulletin. It wasn't hard to figure out that getting in the door was going to cost me way more than I was willing to spend and the publication wasn't even suited to line a birdcage with. Why bother. Then I find that the last "standards" project they were involved in basically was an endorsement of an existing commercial system privately developed and put in the public domain by its inventor. I have been looking at their web site (the only public source of information) for the last year or so and find little evidence of any progress in anything except trying to force all the local areas to submit to greater central control. NMRA standards that I have seen never addressed magnetic couplers (KaDee created a defact standard and now everybody really has to work with that or be left out), they never addressed the flange issue in N scale, and I could go on. I bought their standards gauge for N scale and now use it merely for quick checks - for serious work I go to my micrometers and digital calipers; it is just way too sloppy. I just saw the articles on track in MR and have started thinking about checking the gauge with my instruments to really see how accurate it is - my gut instinct is that it isn't. While I have great respect for what the organization did 60+ years ago I agree with those who say "What have you done for me lately?" Not much I can see. BTW, I never got a reply from an email to them about policies to use their library should I get the chance to travel to HQ and a friend now tells me they charge to get in if you're not a member (can somebody confirm if that's true?) Doesn't seem like a friendly bunch to me.
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