galaxyTo me, spending the $52 for MR
The current subscription rate is $31.65 per year if you sign up for three years. That's $2.64 per issue.
How much less than that do you think the magazine should cost?
Look, that is a nice economic argument for bulk purchasing ($2.64/equivalent price monthly) and I would love to do it, but my CFO wife would not appreciate me purchasing a 3 year renewal of MR at the offered price, and so I must preserve our lovely marriage by renewing annually. Perhaps after I retire in a few years, that multi-year method will be more feasible, but not with other competing expenses right now. For the same reason, I have not yet purchased that $200.00 MR back issue DVD!
As a graduate-degreed instructional technologist, I remember the shock I had realizing that most things are written for the average 6th grade reader- particularly technical training manuals and such, but then- remembering some of the boneheads I worked with in the service, I guess there was a good reason for that.
Today, the lack of reading as a characteristic of the general population is epidemic. MR sells to a segment of the population (older, perhaps better-educated from the 1960s-1980s) that is more comfortable with the written word and can grasp verbal concepts and turn them into images mentally. Such is not the case these days- as per my experience with present-day high school students. Their ability to abstract is improved in some ways, but deficient in other ways. MR must adapt to the best means of delivering concepts and content that will include those less literate than their elders. We are just expressing our frustrations with that process here in these posts, and I really don't think that the hands of time are going to reverse in the near or long term.
The more in-depth and explicit articles we seek do exist out there in the ether- as per my suggestion in an earlier post above that MR look to the "lone wolf" self-published D-I-Y-ers for new and fresh material. Getting them from public domain to a copyrighted print page- or electronic page- is not something I can suggest strategies for.
I also do not know if MR has the profitability wich would sustain paying for new material from such sources- others may be more informed and could speak to that aspect of this thread.
I will still maintain my subscription, as a nostalgist and hands-on modeler, for to abandon the last redoubt of the hobby would be- in some ways- turning my back on the original impetus for me to become a model railroader in the first place.
Just some more thoughts...
Cedarwoodron
I have also found MR magazine become quite stale for me. My biggest complaint are the articles about the layouts. I don't want to read many paragraphs of what code rail is used, what scenery method etc....These are covered in the Layout at a Glance sidebars. I want to read how the railroads are operated. My favorite articles have always been the railfanning articles. There are alot of great layouts in the magazine but they all seemed to be written using the same boilerplate.
MR, and Kalmbach Publishing in general, has very, very good genes. It was founded by Al Kalmbach who, I have always believed, was a "published word" man first, and a model railroader and railroad enthusiast second. In the early magazines, I grew up reading Al, John Page, Paul Larson, David P. Morgan, Linn Westcott et. al. I could see the practical application of what I was being taught at school. Misspellings and poor grammar were never to be found in a Kalmbach publication. You could actually allow yourself to be seen reading a Kalmbach publication in public without fear of being labeled a "train nut", because such literate fare couldn't be produced or understood by nutty people. Other hobby publications (railroad and otherwise) were generally held in lower esteem for good reason.
Kalmbach's high standards have generally been maintained into the present day, although incorrect usages and spellings are sometimes allowed to slip through the built-in cracks in Spell Check. I was a bit put out when Kalmbach editors "remodeled" the text of an article I wrote some years ago. A fellow who worked on the article with me was even more upset because he felt that the editing shifted the emphasis. I recognize that this was done to keep the article in conformance with Kalmbach's general policies and because the editor (rightly or wrongly) thought the changes improved the article. That's life.
Those of us who have been reading the magazine for a long time would love it if every issue could contain exactly the info we need at the moment, and we don't appreciate it when space is "wasted" on something we have known for years, or that we don't care about. But we have to recognize the fact that newbies need a lot of information that is old hat to us, and we have to let some of "our" magazine be tailored for them.
Nowadays, a lot of MR's have very little info that is of great importance to me. But without MR (and RMC and others), we would miss out on reviews of new products, and articles on innovative uses of new products. Would we have DCC at all if some of the pioneers hadn't pushed the envelope in the pages of these magazines many years ago? Would we have ever graduated from the plywood 4x8 to the use of better and better track on better and better roadbed atop better, lighter, and cheaper benchwork? Without MR's publication of John Armstrong's layout design concepts, we'd still be playing the roundy-roundy game.
There are things I'd like to see return. I'd like to see scale drawings come back. Once upon a time, you couldn't pick up an MR without seeing a drawing by George Geissel, but that's sadly gone now.
Yes, there have been changes (including this forum), but overrall Kalmbach in general and MR in particular has served us well over the years and continues to do so. I've never subscribed, but I've got just about every issue since the late 1940's when I was a kid, and I refer to those old mags a lot. So on balance, I don't have many complaints.
Wow...I never expected this kind of response! As the op of this thread, I would like to thank everyone for keeping this thread argument free. I do appreciate the different opinions as it makes for a lively conversation.
Now, on to modeling! I'll be posting a few pics soon of a couple of N scale projects.
Chuck - Modeling in HO scale and anything narrow gauge