Cast around the web and you will find numerous postings about the decline of the hobby and its impending demise. A particularly frequent remark is about declining magazine readership figures, and how they are “dumbing down” and not interested in “finescale”, to which someone with connections with the printed hobby media responds by saying that finescale is too small a market, etc. (On which basis, how is it that Model Railay Journal is approaching its thirtieth birthday?) This is the marketing tail wagging the editorial dog. There has been an interesting discussion on Iain Robinson’s blog, in amongst the excellent modelling he displays.

Here’s a contrary thought, based on the concept of action rather than reaction.

Forty years ago the Railway Modeller – about as mainstream and middle of the road as they come – had an audited circulation of 100,000. It was the first hobby magazine which I took on a regular basis, from the age of ten, and much as I now dislike the appalling strap line they used at the time (“For the Average Modeller” – who wants to be average, when average is an alternative word for mediocre?) they struck a good balance. Some featured layouts were frankly somewhat lacking in finesse (unballasted track with missing sleepers at the rail joiners) but others were leading edge. Indeed, the P4 layout “Heckmondwyke” came about when the then editor of the magazine, the late Cyril Freezer, stated the criteria for proving the concept of P4, sufficient to get a layout featured as “Railway of the Month”. Given the links with the parent company, Peco, it is perhaps not surprising that I cannot recall articles on how to make one’s own track, but it was not a requirement that all layouts used Streamline in order to feature in the magazine. My first issue contained articles on a variety of subjects, including EM gauge and a drawing of a prototype goods wagon. On balance I think they got things right. I also improved my standard of grammar and my vocabulary. I am told that CJF did not amend articles as such but he did discuss the writing style with authors and helped them to improve via suggested alternatives and positive feedback.

I believe that the circulation is 40% of that figure now. Quite a decline!

I know that hobby interests have changed, but we now have more free time, more spare cash, and we also offer a hobby which we all agree has more to offer than most (except by way of instant gratification – you still need to build a layout on which to run the trains which came out of the boxes; even if you pay someone to build it, it will take time). If the hobby is declining, then I suggest it’s more to do with how we present ourselves than anything, and I think magazines do have an important part to play here: how to get the best out of modern RTR (including putting new sides onto existing bodies). How to complement the “out of the box” models with a bit of variety via modification, kit-building and scratchbuilding to create more interesting trains. How to create a believable setting – which means we need articles on making buildings from scratch), how to operate it properly – and how to put signals on a layout to aid this. And ultimately, how to develop a trained, critical eye for things – and how to go about getting things right. There is plenty of potential material for this: just look at the blogosphere.

My wife buys “crafting” magazines. These are full of useful ideas which she regularly puts into practice. They also seem to be flourishing, and no one bemoans declining numbers nor do they say that they are simply interested in buying things – unless they be tools or raw materials, and ideas from the magazines. Why can’t we be more like that?

There is a massive opportunity here. Not necessarily for the mainstream magazines to grow, at least not immediately, but an opportunity for them to stabilise their circulation prior to leading the hobby to new growth, with the obvious ultimate benefit to all.

To quote The Beatles, and (with more relevance) Mike Cougill, “Tell me what you see”.

More years ago than I care to remember, I graduated in psychology. One of the things which really interested me was the processing of data. If we take vision, there is so much information streaming into our eyes and yet we can only process a fraction of it at any one time. To cope with this, we have evolved strategies to filter out the usual, and attend to the unusual, on the reasonable evolutionary basis that we need to identify things that might be food, friend or a threat and everything else is background. (When in a state of heightened anxiety, colour vision can cease to function as it requires a lot of energy to process the data, energy which might be needed for the purposes of a fight or a flight.)

A consequence of this is that the human mind is very good at forming stereotypes, particularly when it comes to uncommon things (like, for instance, someone not in the family group, or someone who models to finescale standards). If we see a coincidence of uncommon things, for example most railway modellers are normal people, and that includes finescalers, so a finescaler with a somewhat obsessive attitude becomes doubly unusual, then we form a stereotype based on the distinctiveness, but wrongly attribute the cause: so finescalers are seen as somewhat obsessive. The real problem comes when this becomes an archetype, and unfortunately this happened many years ago in our hobby. What the human mind then does is to look for confirmatory evidence to back this up, to preserve the distinctiveness, and myths arise and the “evidence” is routinely put forward to bolster the opinion of those who are threatened by things which do not conform to their way of thinking.

But it doesn’t end there: we do it all the time, and model what we think is there, rather than what actually is there. Hence, I think, the number of poor models of trees out there. Ask any young child to paint a tree, and you will be surprised to see omething which is not a variant on a theme of brown stick with a green blob, yet trees rarely have a brown bark, and the foliage is anything but a single colour blob. Clichés abound on layouts: “clutter” is added to improve the “atmosphere”, and we see lengths of rail (in anticipation or consequence of relaying work) left in yard areas where railwaymen on th night shift would trip over them. The result is inauthentic and, well, cluttered.

It is possible to train oneself to become aware of these processes, and to counter the negative stereotypes which can arise, but it isn’t easy: in fact it can be very difficult. This is one of the first things that art students have to learn: how to un-learn their preconceptions. When it comes to our hobby, I am afraid that lazy acceptance of the norm (well, it is a hobby and therefore supposed to be relaxing) is the norm, but for those who can be bothered to overcome this hurdle, the world is a much more interesting place!

I began with a quote, and will end with another fom the same song:
“Open up your eyes, now.”