The demise of model railroading…………

[ARTHILL]

I think the main reason peple are not into model trains is because they don't like them as a hooby. They prefer to do something else. Like any real hooby, trains take a huge amunt of time. People like to look at my layout once, but that does not mean they will want to drop all their other time consuming hobbies and spend all that time in the train room.

 I am willing to accept the fact that people avoid trains for the same reason they avoid golf or counted cross stitch, that is not what they like to do.

[IRONROOSTER]

I have fond memories of Tyco.  In the early 70's my wife bought me a set for Christmas with the ten wheeler locomotive.  It started me on the hobby.  I added the prairie shortly thereafter.  I had a lot of fun with those running on my Atlas snap track on my first 4x8 layout. 

The Lionel set I bought in the late 70's for my son was a disaster - it never worked right. It was junk.  The locomotive drivers were plastic, the trucks on the freight cars had only one plastic axle/wheels at each end - the other axle position was dummy.  The accessories didn't go together and work.  It became the first and only train I threw away. 

Enjoy

Paul 

[BRAKIE]

It seems to me every decade the pall bearers for model railroading was nearing the gates and the buzzards was begining to circle over the dying but,once proud hobby.

Any time I read a death song from a well known hobby shop owner I take it with a table spoon of salt after all the magic statement was ""The demise of toy trains came when everybody began to chase the $19.95 or $24.95 starter sets of trains from Sears and Montgomery Ward." That should warn the gentle reader that there is personal interest involved.

If memory serves Polk specialized in Lionel.

Also the 60 era saw Brass locomotives from $24.99-89.99..Saw several improvements to include things like the RP25 wheel,KD couplers begining to become the "defacto standard".

To my mind the 60 era was the first "boom" era of model railroading and the dawning of the hobby we have today.

[wjstix]

Having started with a Tyco HO set in 1971, I think the equipment was "OK" but the brass track was what really did me in. If I hadn't picked up an old Lionel train set for $3 and then spent 15 years as a tinplater then hi-railer, I probably would have been out of the hobby within a year or two. It was just impossible to keep trains running on that brass track...but as I recall when new the Tyco 4-6-2 ran pretty well.

[Midnight Railroader]

I don't think the cheapie sets were responsible for the decline in sales.

They were bought mostly for kids, most of whom didn't know any better. Some grew up and kept with the hobby, learning about better products as they went along.

But the kids who grew apart from the "toys"--yet came back later--didn't go buy Tyco sets from Sears when they became "serious' about the hobby.

There have been a lot of societal factors that have drawn kids' attention from trains, not the least of which is the fact that, nowadays, the only impact railroads have on their lives, if any, is to hold them up at a grade crossing. Blaming department stores is to ignore reality.

 

[CNJ831]

While I definitely acknowledge Nat's being a hobby authority from his involvement at the retail level, I would look to a number of other factors that most definitely influenced the decline of model/toy trains during the period in question.

First off, Americans were coming out of a deep, late 50's, recession. The cheap trains Nat mentions could have been largely in response to that, as folks were being much more careful with their money. In the post-war euphoria of the early to mid 50's, Lionel, et al, had no problem selling $50-$75 sets in great quantities. By 1959-60, that situation had totally evaporated and Lionel was loosing huge money annually (after seeing record profits less than half a dozen years earlier!).

Likewise, Lionel (for one) had gone from offering largely prototypical, unoffensive, freight cars and locomotives, to issuing increasingly disturbing, gimmicky items, or sets with a downright "dark" implication: nuclear waste, attack missles, exploding rolling stock, etc. These were not well received by a public that recalled the horrors of the recent Second World War and the perceived threats of the new Atomic Age.

Even more damaging was the advent of the Space Age. Kid's heros weren't locomotive engineers any more, nor were their dreams about operating the real thing (steam was dead anyway). Their heroes were astronauts and commercial airline pilots...a far, far cry from those at the controls of lumbering, smoke-belching, locomotives. Trains were looked upon as backward, dirty and an inconvenient method of transportation. Toy trains were largely considered a dinosaur by the public.

The final contributing factor, whose influence still reverberates in the hobby today, was the introduction of slot cars. Like it or not, their appearance on the scene replaced tin-plate trains for perhaps an entire generation of kids and were directly responsible for the hobby's "greying" we've seen over the past 20-30 years. The simple fact is that the fraction of teenage participants in the hobby dropped from 20% to just a few percent between 1956 and 1976.

All these factors contributed to the decline of toy trains and by association, our adult hobby.

CNJ831

[Doug T]

There may be some truth is what Nat Polk said. But sales dropped off because people bought trains at Sear and Montgomery Wards instead of Nat Polk's hobby shop (either in person or mail order).

There was a lot of really bad cheap stuff comng out in  the discount stores back in the late 50's and early 60's. A lot of people got burned by buying from the discount stores. The discount stores did not do repair work. The local hobby shop didn't want to repair stuff he did not sell.

I believe the biggest hit for model trains then was the "Model Motoring" concept that came out by Aurora. You could have moving electric cars running with your trains. The cars had their own roads (with slots to control them) and were to scale.

Kids like to run trains fast. Fast running trains do not stay on the track on curves. Take the Model Motoring cars and run them as race cars. Racing cars around the track was a lot more enjoyable/exciting to young kids than watching a slow moving train.

[jeffrey-wimberly]

I never had any 'cheap' sets as a child. Marklin, Lionel, Bachmann and Mantua. I had a Tenshodo brass steamer that never did anything but short circuit. Didnt own any Tyco stuff until around '79. That's about the time Bachmann slid down the slippery slope to poor quality. I have one of Bachmann's locos that I bought in '77 that had an open-frame motor that was still running last year when I tore it down to shoe-horn in a PPW can motor. I must say that the Tyco stuff was absolute rubbish and I no longer have any of it.

[jrbernier]

  In the early to mid 60's, there were two major issues with model train sales(both scale and tinplate): 

• Early plastic train sets were going for that $20 price point and were cheap.  Varney went downhill fast(pizza cutter flanges/rubber spring blocks), and the AHM stuff introduced us to the 'press-fit' king pins(nothing like loose king pins rolling around in a 'new' train set).
• Slot Cars - The world was changing, and slot cars took over a lot of the 'male' hobby time.  By the late 60's/Early 70's, the slot car craze had gone away, and scale model trains were again on the rise.  The Lionel/American Flyer lines were gone and brought back under several ownerships, with mixed results.

  Right now we are seeing electronic games/computers taking market share away from model trains - Nothing new here.  There will always be cheap train sets(as long as 'big box' stores set a 'price point').  Model train have been in a slide, but DCC has drawn younger folks to the hobby.  This same 'electronic' draw started earlier with RC airplanes/cars, and look how they have grown.  Those teens and 20 year olds will drift away from the hobby(we all seem to fall in love and have 'family' obligations).  And by the time we are 40, we are pulling that stuff out and 'playing' again....

Jim

[BlueHillsCPR]

Wow.  No I can't say that I agree with that.  My experiences were not the same.  I received a Tyco starter set around 1973 when I was about ten.  For me that Tyco set started what has become a lifelong fascination with Model Railroading.  I had hours of fun with that first set and a 4X8 sheet of plywood...later a cousin gave me an identical set and then I had two!  I still have some of those old sets around here.  Nothing but good memories attached to the old Tyco stuff in my basement.

 

The sets today may be a fine example of what you are suggesting but I sure liked my old Tyco! 

[Soo Line fan]

Down boys, I am not referring to present day.

I came across an interesting interview with Nat Polk. His theory of why trains declined back in the 60s was the following:

"The demise of toy trains came when everybody began to chase the $19.95 or $24.95 starter sets of trains from Sears and Montgomery Ward.

In other words, the manufacturers all thought that the starter sets had to sell for $19.95 or $24.95, and they couldn't come up with any kind of quality at that price, so things got worse and worse quality wise.

People had bad quality experiences with them. Even the small storekeepers had bad experiences with them.

You know it all culminated in that Scout set. The Scout set was the final ruination of all the cheap, cheap catalog sets that we all, sadly, had to have."  -Nat Polk 1995

Do you agree or disagree? I would have to agree.

I got one of the infamous Tyco sets for my son and proceeded to build a layout just prior to Tyco going under. If not for my own persistence and the help of a great LHS I would have given up.

I knew lots of people who got one of these from a retailer and then gave up in disgust.

I believe that while Tyco and others were responsible for getting many into the hobby, they drove many out as well.

Jim