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My father was an enthusiast. When we moved into their current house (1988), the builder had the option of a three-car garage or enclosing the third-car section, and that was intended as a railway room. He favoured the large German "LGB" trains, in part bought because they were among the more durable products on the market, so it would be child-resistant for the kids to use. He built the framework and a track plan but never really had the time he wanted to work on it. I, in turn, moved on to smaller American (HO scale) and British (OO) trains, using the same room, but now find that the tables designed for big 1:22.5 trains have irregularities enough to make 1:87 trackwork unreliable. Will probably need to rework them. The hobby itself has definitely changed though: Yes, today's modern models are higher quality than a lot of the old "Blue Box" Athearn kits, but they're also $50 instead of $7, and come ready-to-run, so the hobby aspect of building and customizing it is gone. Many models don't even come as an undecorated version anymore, if you wanted the classic "paint it for your own custom railway" narrative. You don't get the same "hours of fun per dollar" out of that side of the hobby anymore. What's interesting is that there's definitely an opportunity for synergy with the rise of hobby electronics-- the trains have moved from "variable DC on the rails" to "AC with a command bus" and sometimes even Bluetooth, so there's a lot of interesting stuff you could do with computer or microcontroller interfacing. I bought a project for an automatic traffic-signal design using some 555 timers and capacitors, and thought "this is 10 lines of code on a $3 Arduino, for this generation of hobbyists." Shops are closing-- I make it a point to try to find a model-railway shop and pick up something exotic when I go on holiday, but even pretty big cities don't have one, or it's a billion miles from anywhere. I was sort of saddened to get a note from Hattons (an excellent UK retailer-- surprisingly cheap shipping to the US) that they have started to wind down operations in the last month. |
Berlin has two or three big shops and some smaller ones.