01-30-2012, 12:24 PM
Different strokes for different folks. One size won't fit all. My grandkids like trains right now. I don't know if that like will continue into adulthood. My brother in law built a layout on a 4x8 board for my nephew thinking he would like model railroading. The nephew was never interested and found it boring. He would rather race rc cars. When I first move to this house I bought a bunch of trains from my neighbor across the street, most of it Athearn. He had built a layout thinking his boys would like model railroading, but they were into surfing instead. Membership in the NMRA has been flat as long as I can remember. If I remember correctly when I first started model railroading in the 1980's, the membership level of the NMRA was somewhere between 30,000 to 35,000. The membership is still about the same. I think the strength of a hobby can be gauged to some extent by the number of magazines on the subject at your local Barnes & Noble magazine rack. At my local Barnes & Noble they will have Model Railroader and Trains monthly plus they will carry the various special annual issues that Kalmbach comes out with like Great Model Railroads, etc. They carry at least a half dozen general interest automotive titles, another half dozen hot rodding titles, at least 4 magazine titles focused on Chevrolet, just as many focused on Mustang, 4-6 that feature Corvettes only. I could go on. Model railroading is and always has been a minority hobby, and I just don't see a lot of change coming down the pike in terms of interest level. If you figure that there are probably 3-4 people interested in model railroading for each NMRA member, that would put total interest in model railroading at @ 100k-150k, or the equivalent of one small city, and I don't see evidence of the numbers changing much either way.