All right, this thread seems to have degenerated into an argument overnight. Time to lock it. Move along, everyone.
--Steven Otte, Model Railroader senior associate editorsotte@kalmbach.com
BMMECNYChave you stopped for a moment to consider that MR applies to a broad base of skill levels?
Traditionally, mgazines tend to be aimed at participants in the activity that they support. Introductory material is provided in books. Would you expect Motor Trend to publish an article explaining that a red light means stop?
BMMECNYCWhat, specifically would you find more interesting?
Once again in your rush to defend you have not bothered to try and understand the point of the post. I look forward to the magazine and enjoy it. Every month I flip (actually click) through it page by page and read the articles that interest me. The trend over the last year or so has been that it takes me less and less time to get through each issue.
I enjoyed each of the articles you mentioned, I'd just like to see more. I'm not looking for "more interesting" articles as much as I'm looking for more "interesting articles".
According to a post from Steve a while back, they have an extensive backlog of articles ready for publication. They don't need suggestions from me, just print them!
I do not find the sentimental "memorable MR moments" to be interesting and would prefer they put that effort into something else. I offered progress on the Canadian Canyons and Ask MRVP as alternatives.
And BTW...
BMMECNYCI want to know how Pelle Soeborg makes his corn fields, they look really nice.
I can't believe you include an example of information they LEFT OUT as an evidence of how great the issue was.
And if you really are interested, I think it was Cody that did an article explaining the corn field a few months ago. I would think that if you paid enough attention to the articles to justify your enthusiastic defense of the magazine you would know that.
I have the right to remain silent. By posting here I have given up that right and accept that anything I say can and will be used as evidence to critique me.
I would find this to be an interesting thing to know. Just out of curiosity, did you provide feedback in the comments on the 4th birthday video what you would like to see on MRVP? I think that the video was intended (this is another assumption) a "vehicle" for a centralized place for customer comments on what they would like to see on MRVP, plus a interesting backround story about all the new people brought in since MRVP was started.
carl425Sorry, I was using the word "thin" as a metaphor for the trend toward less interesting content.
What, specifically would you find more interesting? You have not said anything about what would interest you to back up your statement. You just have a blanket statement that "MR has less interesting content", and a single example of what you did not find interesting.
On that point, have you stopped for a moment to consider that MR applies to a broad base of skill levels? Would someone not familiar with model railroading that picks up a issue at the newstand understand scene composition well enough to know that an HO model of a scene must be vastly compressed compared to an N scale version of the same scene to fit in the same space?
carl425The fact that you are concerned that your relatively brief post could "spoil" the issue kinda makes my point.
Not really. I dont feel that you have a point. Not everyone gets the print edition the same time as you/not everyone has digital archives access. I put that in there in case someone has not received the magazine. My post was relatively brief because:
1. I did not wish to re-type the entire magazine into the forums, which is probably a violation of forum policy or copyright.
2. In previous posts about magazine articles, forum several forum members complained that the months issue was spoiled for them by people posting the content on the forums. Not wanting a repeat, I am allowing people less fortunate in mail service than you and I to receive May's MR (some magazines do not arrive until the 2nd week of the month).
I don't count pages, I'm interested in what's in the issue, and I thought the May issue was interesting, as I do most issues.
I took the cab ride around Pelle's layout, and it's a nice ride. I really like the way his backdrop blends everything together. In the video, it's amazing how it looks, and catch that abandon barn at the beginning. I would like to see an article on that.
Mike.
My You Tube
BMMECNYCWell if anything, MR is consistant. Jan 1965 MR 84 pages. Feb 1965 80 pages. Probably for similar reasons that Steven Otte posted earlier.
Sorry, I was using the word "thin" as a metaphor for the trend toward less interesting content.
BMMECNYCIf you have not gotten your May MR, stop reading this post, it contains some spoilers.
The fact that you are concerned that your relatively brief post could "spoil" the issue kinda makes my point.
Well if anything, MR is consistant. Jan 1965 MR 84 pages. Feb 1965 80 pages. Probably for similar reasons that Steven Otte posted earlier.
If you have not gotten your May MR, stop reading this post, it contains some spoilers.
After further reading, I found the Bachmann E7 review useful (if they run a roadname Im interested in without DCC installed, I'll buy one). I might build a modified version of Lou Sassi's Iphone holder. I would make it a little longer so the phone sits in a full cradle and cant be knocked out/add a hinged and latched door on top so if the cats knock it over, I dont end up with phone all over the floor.
V.S. Roseman has a decent article on upgrading streamlined cars, my biggest take away is that the walthers dining cars dont have room for legs, so instead of hacking up full legged people, I should buy the unpainted Preiser figure pack which has half people and full people. No the article does not say this, but its a nice little hidden extra. The half people can go in the diner, the rest can go in other cars that have legroom (Rapido etc). Unpainted figure pack costs $12 at LHS, Painted $37. <- The issue paid for itself.
Diesel handrail replacement by Cody is a piece I will keep in my back pocket for later, and it applies not just to warped handrails, but also broken or missing handrails.
A step-by-step or how to article on how Scott Lamoureux built the Cisco Bridge would be neat.
I want to know how Pelle Soeborg makes his corn fields, they look really nice. The couplers on his trains look amazing too.
The overpass article is directly useful, as a highway bridge crosses my prototype in a similar manner.
While you may not have found this month's MR useful or interesting, others may have. Not every article every month can be tailored to your specific interests. If it were, you would be the only customer.
Despite my disagreement with "the future of model railroading" article last month, I found the rest of the April issue to be interesting.
mvlandsw "Who who have thought? Of course a 1' x 12' N Scale ISL requires the same space as a HO 1' X 12' ISL.." What is an "ISL"?
"Who who have thought? Of course a 1' x 12' N Scale ISL requires the same space as a HO 1' X 12' ISL.."
What is an "ISL"?
Industrial Switching Layout ISL for short.
I picked up that moniker at a advanced switching layout seminar around ten years ago that covered several new layout designs covering various sizes of layouts,types of industries,etc..The day long event ended with hands on switching.
Even though 90% of my layouts has been switching layouts I manage to pick up some excellent design and industry ideas.
Larry
Conductor.
Summerset Ry.
"Stay Alert, Don't get hurt Safety First!"
Sir Madogrrinker If everyone out there thought like that, what would you be paying for? A bunch of blank pages? Or about 4 pages, an editorial, a DCC page, a Operations page, and Tony's Trains of Thought? Note that you DO get paid for published contributions, so yeah, if you contribute, you aren't paying as much for the subscription any more. --Randy Thank you for that answer, Randy! I thought the argument to be a lttle thin in itself, pun to the thread title intended.
So which issues contain the articles you two have written?
Old timers (and Steve) correct me if I'm wrong, but The grand old issues were chock full of multipage articles on how to build an 8-phase electro-framistat with self switching Johnson circuits, replete with schematics that would bewilder an MIT grad--- but were probably clear as day to the average reader back then (only reason I'm familiar with these is I have the digital archive). Those articles supported a whole advertiser base for the parts needed to build all that stuff. We no longer need to build this stuff, we buy it off a shelf or with a click. Bang, editorial pages and advertiser pages lost.
But I still look forward to my MR every month. I have a good deal of experience in magazine production (on the design and prepress end) and unless you've experienced it, its much more complicated than you think. Kudos to the MR team, especially the graphic design dept. Keeping things clean and organized in an ad driven editorial world is a difficult task, and they've done an exemplary job at it.
rrinkerIf everyone out there thought like that, what would you be paying for? A bunch of blank pages? Or about 4 pages, an editorial, a DCC page, a Operations page, and Tony's Trains of Thought? Note that you DO get paid for published contributions, so yeah, if you contribute, you aren't paying as much for the subscription any more. --Randy
Thank you for that answer, Randy!
I thought the argument to be a lttle thin in itself, pun to the thread title intended.
We have been through similar discussions before. Each model railroading magazine worldwide depends on reader response and contributions. Apparently, in this age of "over-communication", people are more and more reluctant to take the time to write a feature. Luckily, a few still are, but then you get the comments of there being too much Pelle Soeborg, Tony Koester, Lance Mindheim, (fill in your name of choice) by the same set of people claiming the lack of content.
Well, I guess you just can´t win `em all!
carl425How many useful videos could have been produced with the effort spent on all the self-congratulatory "memorable MR moments" videos?
I found those to be useful, as they lead me to read some of those articles/issues of MR. Im guessing you didnt watch all of them. I didnt know about the Soo Line alien cover before. I found that one funny.
carl425Who cares?
I care. I found these videos interesting.
Chessie and George also found Neil Besougloff's video interesting.
I also re-watched Blazing Saddles that day...
Getting the DVD makes sense if you need still refer to content actively. I have found in the past 10 years I rarerly do anymore, what with internet and youtube and forums etc. Good for those who still read old content and want to shed the physical mass and volume of hardcopy.
Rio Grande. The Action Road - Focus 1977-1983
I thinned my magaziens a long time ago - I got the 75 year DVD and purged everything older than 2007, except for the full set of 1944 I picked up at one time. It still works fine in Windows 10 and it's faster than the All-TIme Archive online when it comes to searching or even scrolling through the issues - and I deliberately did NOT install teh content to my SSD because it would use too much of the space. I can now purge more though, since i have the Archive access. When it's time to renew I will probably not renew print and go all digital. By the time someone starts commenting here ont he latest issues, I'll have finished it days before - no mail delays or "I never got my issue" any more.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
carl425 Sir Madog If you think MR needs more content, well, pick up your pen and write an article! That old cop out always comes up. You ignore the point that I as a subscriber pay for content. If I wanted to write it myself, why would I pay for the magazine?
Sir Madog If you think MR needs more content, well, pick up your pen and write an article!
That old cop out always comes up. You ignore the point that I as a subscriber pay for content. If I wanted to write it myself, why would I pay for the magazine?
If everyone out there thought like that, what would you be paying for? A bunch of blank pages? Or about 4 pages, an editorial, a DCC page, a Operations page, and Tony's Trains of Thought? Note that you DO get paid for published contributions, so yeah, if you contribute, you aren't paying as much for the subscription any more.
Steven OtteI dunno, because you're proud of your modeling and want to share it with the world?
Regardless, the fact that I don't contribute is not a valid excuse for lack of interesting content.
It's funny you should mention "editing MRVP" as one of the other staff activities. How many useful videos could have been produced with the effort spent on all the self-congratulatory "memorable MR moments" videos? Then that's topped off with the MRVP 4th birthday? Who cares? We can tell from the workshop webcam that there's lots of Canadian Canyon video that you could be editing. How many "Ask MRVP" questions are queued up?
Don't get me wrong, I like the magazine and I like MRVP. I'd just prefer to like them more.
trwroute carl425 That old cop out always comes up. You ignore the point that I as a subscriber pay for content. If I wanted to write it myself, why would I pay for the magazine? YEP! I was about to write the same thing...
carl425 That old cop out always comes up. You ignore the point that I as a subscriber pay for content. If I wanted to write it myself, why would I pay for the magazine?
I dunno, because you're proud of your modeling and want to share it with the world?
But if you aren't, don't worry. We get plenty of articles from modelers who are to keep us going for many years to come.
Every time I move, I thin my magazine collection and mostly what gets kept are the articles about trains or specific rail cars that are historically useful to keep. It tends to be the stuff that is, to me, dated that gets tossed. The historical magazines I tend to keep are Trains, CTC Board, Pacific Rail New and the like, and the modelign magazines tend to be very dated and are more likely to get tossed. I expect to go through another round of thinning my magazines this year.
Sir Madog This thread is "kvetch as kvetch can" - like may others.
This thread is "kvetch as kvetch can" - like may others.
Do you really expect otherwise from the clientel here? The pattern is well established and isn't changing unless the kvetchers leave, like thats going to happen!
Steven Otte And on the topic of MR staff man-hours -- we have ways of dealing with that. For one thing, MR isn't the only thing we work on. There's also annual issues like Great Model Railroads and Model Railroad Planning, usually one other special issue a year, a project railroad to build, taping videos for MRVP, etc. Each month, in addition to the articles for the regular issue, the staff usually prepares and edits one to three articles for what we call the contingency or "tornado issue." That's the group of pre-edited articles that, if a disaster were to strike like a tornado hitting our building, we could pull out and put together into a regular issue while regular operations were restored. Articles generally stay in the "tornado bin" for three to six months before being rotated into a regular issue of MR. In months where there's extra work to do, like crunch time for an annual or an extra-big anniversary issue, we work on fewer contingency articles and maybe pull more articles out of the contingency file for publication. We then replenish the contingency file in slack months. You don't really need to know any of this, and it's not even particularly relevant to the topic of this thread, but I think people like to know these behind-the-scenes kind of things. And it keeps people from making their own erroneous suppositions.
And on the topic of MR staff man-hours -- we have ways of dealing with that. For one thing, MR isn't the only thing we work on. There's also annual issues like Great Model Railroads and Model Railroad Planning, usually one other special issue a year, a project railroad to build, taping videos for MRVP, etc. Each month, in addition to the articles for the regular issue, the staff usually prepares and edits one to three articles for what we call the contingency or "tornado issue." That's the group of pre-edited articles that, if a disaster were to strike like a tornado hitting our building, we could pull out and put together into a regular issue while regular operations were restored. Articles generally stay in the "tornado bin" for three to six months before being rotated into a regular issue of MR. In months where there's extra work to do, like crunch time for an annual or an extra-big anniversary issue, we work on fewer contingency articles and maybe pull more articles out of the contingency file for publication. We then replenish the contingency file in slack months.
You don't really need to know any of this, and it's not even particularly relevant to the topic of this thread, but I think people like to know these behind-the-scenes kind of things. And it keeps people from making their own erroneous suppositions.
I find it interesting.
"If we can use your article, we'll send you a contract to purchase the article and we will pay once we have received a signed copy of the contract rather than waiting until the article actually appears in Model Railroader. Our rate is between $75 and $100 per printed page in Model Railroader, depending on the content expertise. That rate includes drawings and photos. Our standard acceptance agreement specifies that Kalmbach Publishing Co. is buying all rights to publish the article. Contact us to arrange a different rights contract."
http://mrr.trains.com/magazine/about-us/contributor-guidelines/2010/03/submission-guidelines---model-railroader
Steven OtteBMMECNYC Fast forward to 2016. You are the editor of a magazine. You want to celebrate the 1,000th issue of your magazine that has been a cornerstone of a hobby for the better part of a century. Your staff must work continuously to make deadlines for each months article so that it can go to press. If you increase the size of the magazine one month, other things have to give (article quality or number of articles in months that bracket that extra long month) to conteract that a lot of time was spent putting together the special edition. Not quite. Magazine size isn't determined by staff man-hours available. If that were the case, we could fill 20 pages with double-page-spread photos and knock off early each Friday. binder001 is closer to the truth. We allocate a certain number of pages for editorial in every issue. What makes a magazine thicker or thinner is ad count. If we have a lot of ads, that not only gives us more pages, it gives us the revenue to add more pages of editorial content as well. But we never drop below that minimum level of editorial content. And although our 1,000th issue did draw more ads than the usual because of the special nature of the issue, most of the extra pages in that issue were editorial -- which is why we needed to charge more for it on the newsstand. The extra ads weren't enough to pay for the extra editorial pages. Spring issues traditionally tend to be thinner, because advertisers concentrate their ad buys around the winter holidays and on the autumn-winter model railroading "season" in general. Come spring and summer, they pare back their ad buys, so MR slims down. That happens every year. You're only noticing the size of this May's issue because it's such a contrast to the extra bulk of the April special issue.
Thank you for responding.
Chuck - Modeling in HO scale and anything narrow gauge
BMMECNYC Fast forward to 2016. You are the editor of a magazine. You want to celebrate the 1,000th issue of your magazine that has been a cornerstone of a hobby for the better part of a century. Your staff must work continuously to make deadlines for each months article so that it can go to press. If you increase the size of the magazine one month, other things have to give (article quality or number of articles in months that bracket that extra long month) to conteract that a lot of time was spent putting together the special edition.
Fast forward to 2016. You are the editor of a magazine. You want to celebrate the 1,000th issue of your magazine that has been a cornerstone of a hobby for the better part of a century. Your staff must work continuously to make deadlines for each months article so that it can go to press. If you increase the size of the magazine one month, other things have to give (article quality or number of articles in months that bracket that extra long month) to conteract that a lot of time was spent putting together the special edition.
Not quite. Magazine size isn't determined by staff man-hours available. If that were the case, we could fill 20 pages with double-page-spread photos and knock off early each Friday. binder001 is closer to the truth. We allocate a certain number of pages for editorial in every issue. What makes a magazine thicker or thinner is ad count. If we have a lot of ads, that not only gives us more pages, it gives us the revenue to add more pages of editorial content as well. But we never drop below that minimum level of editorial content. And although our 1,000th issue did draw more ads than the usual because of the special nature of the issue, most of the extra pages in that issue were editorial -- which is why we needed to charge more for it on the newsstand. The extra ads weren't enough to pay for the extra editorial pages. Spring issues traditionally tend to be thinner, because advertisers concentrate their ad buys around the winter holidays and on the autumn-winter model railroading "season" in general. Come spring and summer, they pare back their ad buys, so MR slims down. That happens every year. You're only noticing the size of this May's issue because it's such a contrast to the extra bulk of the April special issue.
The new magazines just aren't the same as the old, and that is unfortunate. I find myself looking, and studying, the articles in the older magazines more and more. I would love to get the archives by itself because I don't have a whole bunch of years worth of magazines, but you need a subscription to get the archives. Therefore, I have neither.
But, I do pay monthly for MRVP.
Colorado Ray BMMECNYC mvlandsw What is an "ISL"? Independant Short Line, I think. Larry is the ISL expert around here, but I'm pretty sure that ISL is short for "Industrial Switching Layout". Ray
BMMECNYC mvlandsw What is an "ISL"? Independant Short Line, I think.
mvlandsw What is an "ISL"?
Independant Short Line, I think.
Larry is the ISL expert around here, but I'm pretty sure that ISL is short for "Industrial Switching Layout".
Ray
You might be right.
Sir MadogIf you think MR needs more content, well, pick up your pen and write an article!
Industrial short line. I think Brakie (Larry) does these to get a lot of switching in, in a small space.
Paul