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It is not merely that pleasure, once it is defined as an end in itself, takes on the qualities of work. . . . Personal life, no longer a refuge from deprivation suffered at work, has become as anarchical, as warlike, and as full of stress as the marketplace itself. . . . [A]ll of life, even the ostensibly achievement-oriented realm of work, centers on the struggle for interpersonal advantage, the deadly game of intimidating friends and seducing people.Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism
 Foothill Model Railroad Club Swap Meet, Sunland, CA, August 30, 2003 |
Let me start by pointing out that I'm not a sociologist, I don't play one on TV, I don't have a Ph.D., and if I did have one, it wouldn't be in Sociology. On the other hand, the hobby of model railroading represents a set of social institutions and social relationships that are worth attention, and nobody else seems willing to look at the hobby from a systematic perspective. In his extended definition of Sociology, one of the founders of the discipline, Max Weber, suggests that our task is to ask, in his words, what is the "social action" that is taking place in the model railroading hobby? How can we "arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects?" In other words, what are we trying to accomplish in the hobby via our relationships and institutions? Most important, are we doing what we say we're doing?
The method he suggests is, in effect, to try to determine what a rational person would do to accomplish these goals, and then to ". . . treat all irrational, affectually determined elements of behaviour as factors of deviation from a conceptually pure type of rational action."
One of the most clearly stated goals of the hobby is to improve its public image. There is a long-standing stereotype of adults "playing with trains" as a feckless or immature activity, and it is likely that some people are deterred from participation in the hobby due to a fear of being characterized as such. It is a general goal of hobby participants to be seen as engaging in a serious and challenging pastime, and it's generally understood that as the public views the hobby in this light, its prestige will increase, and business for hobby suppliers will also increase.
The World's Greatest Hobby campaign was begun in 2001 by Kalmbach Publishing Company the publishers of Model Railroader magazine to ". . . raise public awareness of the hobby of model railroading and to make it easy for newcomers to get started." While the web site doesn't say it, Kalmbach began the campaign following a ten-year decline in circulation and advertising pages in Model Railroader, which has been regarded as the hobby's flagship publication.
The publisher has implicitly explained its own business outcomes by pointing to a perceived decline in the hobby overall, and implicitly expects an improvement in its business if the public image of the hobby improves. (This explanation appears to have succeeded within Kalmbach's internal corporate environment, since the managers who presided over the magazine's decline continued until recently to be employed there; the Publisher's early retirement at the end of 2003 may or may not have been related to the magazine's decline.) These assumptions are also not controversial within the hobby industry; as the web site points out, "This is a program that has the backing of the Model Railroad Industry Association with funding provided by the companies whose logos you see on these pages."
But as with all conventional wisdom, there's cause for some skepticism here. Even in a severe recession, capital has been available to fund a major high-end startup supplier, Broadway Limited Imports, as well as major new products and innovations like ready-to-run models, from traditional suppliers like Athearn. It's likely that the business analysis that justifies this level of continued or increased investment in model railroads as a commercial venture does not actually see the hobby in a state of decline -- and certainly not just an activity pursued by children or eccentric adults, or limited to the holiday season.
Nevertheless, promoting the image of model railroading as a serious and challenging lifetime activity hasn't been an easy sell. Even in a time when society has accepted lifestyle choices that in the past would have been regarded as eccentric, immoral, or deviant, many people who participate, or would like to participate, in the hobby see a tradeoff in a potential lowering of social and self-esteem. Indeed, at a time when news media style sheets have attempted to extirpate all stereotypical language in dealing with racial or ethnic groups or lifestyle choices, newspaper articles dealing with model railroading continue to take a heavily condescending, "cute" attitude toward the hobby. How, then, are members of the hobby working to improve their image through their social interactions and institutions? Are they succeeding? And while the overarching goal of improving the hobby's status is important, are these institutions succeeding at the more specific tasks they pose for themselves, either explicitly or implicitly?
I want to look at the following model railroad hobby institutions, in ascending order of complexity, to try to make some kind of an assessment of how we're doing, and to make recommendations:
However, the more purely economic motivation in a commercial enterprise has clearly resulted in the current generation of hobby suppliers, such as Athearn, Atlas, Kato USA, Life-Like, Intermountain, Stewart, Walthers, and others making a remarkable series of correct calls in product innovation and quality, in part during difficult economic times. The magazines and the volunteer organizations, with the exception of the technical and historical societies, simply haven't been able to match this record. The possible reasons for this contrast probably belong to economic analysis and are beyond the scope of this discussion.
Some recent experiences have also brought forward in my thinking the position of clergy as participants in the hobby. Of those who have identified themselves in online forums as clergymen, my experience has been uniformly bad, and this has begun to cause me enough concern that I've added a section to the end of my discussion of e-mail groups and on-line forums to discuss why this may be the case.
 Foothill Model Railroad Club Swap Meet, Sunland, CA, August 30, 2003 |
Swap meets are the most primitive of formal model railroad social events. In Southern California, with good weather for much of the year, they are almost always outside, on parking lots roped off for the purpose. They are organized by clubs, museums, and hobby shops, primarily as fund raisers or as part of a business promotion. They are formal insofar as they take place at a particular date and time announced by the organizer; often vendors pay a fee to participate, and sometimes the customers must also pay an admission fee. However, they are informal insofar as efforts are seldom made to enforce state sales tax laws, and there is no warranty offered on merchandise by vendors. Indeed, buyers can't be fully assured that some merchandise on offer is not stolen, and conversely, vendors have no way to assure themselves that checks from buyers are good.
A Weberian, rationalistic approach to swap meets would assume that they are meant to be efficient local markets for second-hand merchandise. They would, for example, be a means for hobbyists or those leaving the hobby to liquidate unneeded supplies in a fast, informal way, without the potential heavily discounted effect they would see by trying to sell them back to a hobby shop. Some swap meet vendors are able to negotiate with heirs to purchase the model railroad assets of estates and then sell these assets at swap meets.
The rationalistic assumption would be that the consumer goes to a swap meet expecting to find a lower price for merchandise that she may find acceptable, though it may be outdated or in imperfect condition. One might also assume that a seller, finding price resistance to goods at a particular level, would be prepared to negotiate in order not to have to carry the goods back from a swap meet unsold.
A major factor that contradicts these rationalistic assumptions is the fact that many hobby goods of the type that are offered at swap meets have simply lost all economic value -- while hobbyists are fond of calling swap meet merchandise "junk", much -- probably a lot more than half -- of what appears at swap meets can't realistically be sold at any price. It is literally trash, kept from the landfill by the expectations of the putative sellers. Often it's dusty, broken remnants of merchandise that was already schlock when it was new in the 1970s or earlier. The effort to restore it to operation, if it's practical at all, is greater than the still-low cost of new, better-quality merchandise, and the original junk hasn't even got sentimental value.
Another problem is the non-model railroad merchandise on sale, equivalent 30 year old military toys, toy racing cars, broken model airplanes, and the like. For those not involved in collecting or restoring such material, it's hard to estimate its value, but at a model railroad swap meet, the stuff is essentially not sellable. If the aim of such vendors is to sell the merchandise, they are simply not acting rationally.
Unrealistic expectations by the sellers clearly inhibit the efficient operation of a market at swap meets. The conventional wisdom that old toy trains are somehow always worth a lot of money probably operates here. Another factor is probably the need for the seller to counteract the "feckless" stereotype of the hobby. He may feel he has to show in his own, his peers' or his family's eyes, for instance, that he is "making money" off the hobby rather than simply pursuing it as an idle interest.
But a major obstacle to efficient swap meet transactions is in fact the low cost of new goods. The quality of hobby items has increased enormously in the last 30 years, with only an incremental increase in cost (especially factoring in inflation), assisted both by technology and by production in Korea and China. If I can go to a hobby shop or mail-order discounter and buy a new item, in a shrink-wrapped box with a warranty, at a lower cost than an equivalent, dusty, used, and imperfect item at a swap meet, there's simply no contest, as long as I, as an informed consumer, know this.
In an efficient or rational market, sellers would quickly receive the price-resistant message once their prices went above something close to the cost of a new item. This doesn't appear to happen at swap meets. A bubble or first-stage Ponzi-scheme psychology appears to account for this.
Certainly some swap meet consumers aren't well informed, and will simply buy second-hand items at a price higher than what they'd pay for a new item in a hobby shop. They assume, I guess, that if they're buying at a swap meet, it must be cheaper. Many vendors seem to hope for this customer, but giving human nature some credit, not all people are this poorly informed.
And many of the transactions at a swap meet take place, not between vendors and customers, but among vendors. A vendor will show up on the parking lot at some time early in the morning (most swap meets advertise a start time of 7:00 AM, but "unofficial" transactions can take place among those who show up earlier), and if other vendors think his goods are cheap enough, they'll buy them from him and put them on sale at a higher price themselves, either at the same swap meet, at a train show, or on eBay.
The problem is that the margin between what one vendor will sell an item for and what a customer down the line is willing to pay is, realistically, quite small. An efficient market can't tolerate infinite markups, but swap meet dealers don't recognize this. The problem isn't much different from the mathematics that make a Ponzi scheme impossible: there are only so many suckers, and then you run out of people. One swap meet vendor, however, described the early-morning activity of other vendors buying his low-priced merchandise to me as a "feeding frenzy", words again highly suggestive of bubble psychology.
The conventional wisdom of swap meets has become, "you have to get there early before the good stuff is gone." However, the "good stuff" may not actually leave the swap meet; it's simply resold to the point that its price reaches a sales resistance level. The vendor who bids the merchandise up to the price at which no one will buy it is the primary victim here, and it's hard to sympathize, since he's largely the victim of his unrealistic expectations. Those expectations, however, appear in practice to keep him from deciding to cut his losses and cash out of his acquisition by lowering his price.
A quick check of the model railroad listings on eBay shows economic activity that is what would be predicted by these observations. One finds 30-year-old, low-quality Tyco, Bachmann, or Athearn cars, for which no bids are received at the $2-3 reserve range -- this equipment has economic value now only for parts in certain cases, and might sell at the 25 to 50 cent range, but the sellers won't acknowledge this. More recently discontinued items, such as from the former E&C Shops, are offered at the $7-10 reserve range, with no bids. (I was at a swap meet where I observed an individual purchase a number of E&C Stops items at $5 each from a seller; these items on eBay may in fact be the ones I observed.)
The hobby at large also suffers from swap meets as they're currently run. The bubble psychology inhibits the operation of an efficient market in realistically priced second-hand items. The dealers who buy equipment reasonably priced at $5 and mark it up to the sales-resistance level are keeping these items from productive use, just as the treasures buried in tombs by the ancient Egyptians kept those from productive use. The enormous profusion of unsellable trash -- both model railroad items and unrelated toys -- creates a depressing atmosphere and puts model railroaders in a bad light. The occasional use of swap meets as venues for selling stolen merchandise also needs consideration. Most participants in swap meets resist calling law enforcement under such circumstances, since few vendors observe sales tax laws, and they do not wish to draw attention to themselves.
While I still enjoy swap meets, I've found that locating true bargains is an increasing challenge. Unrealistic expectations have made sellers less willing to haggle. However, the herd mentality on what constitutes "good stuff" can result in finding bargains if the vendors aren't fully informed on what they have. In addition, some vendors clearly continue to focus on providing worthwhile second-hand material at realistic prices. Fixing what's currently wrong with swap meets while preserving an efficient market in second-hand items will be a challenge to hobby leaders in the future.
On the other hand, if a public-spirited hobbyist determined that for the benefit of the hobby, swap meets should be put out of their misery, such a person could probably do it single-handed in his area by simply reporting the date and time of each swap meet to the appropriate state sales tax authorities.
However, many swap meet vendors also sell at train shows. Part of their business model is to acquire stock at putatively low prices at swap meets, then sell it at higher prices at train shows -- but as we've seen, prices at swap meets are already quickly bid up to the sales-resistance level due to the bubble mentality of these same dealers. As a result, it's common to see outdated, imperfect, or used merchandise and remnants on sale at train shows for prices several dollars above what you would pay for equivalent new items at a hobby shop. The presence of essentially unsellable non-model railroad junk toy items, noted at swap meets, is also a problem at train shows.
In addition to the admission charge for such shows, there's usually also a substantial parking charge, so that the full cost of admission to the show isn't trivial, and that cost must also be added to the cost of any merchandise acquired there. This total is likely to be significantly more than the cost of shipping paid to a discount web or mail-order vendor, or the sales tax paid at a hobby shop. Consumers who buy merchandise at train shows without being well-informed on prices risk a real fleecing.
In fairness, there are several very reputable vendors who do most of their business at train shows, though they sell important niche items like historical photographs that don't correspond to what's sold at swap meets. In addition, a few shows, like the winter show at Springfield, MA, rival industry trade shows in importance, and are key regional venues for hobby suppliers to announce or display new products. The great majority of shows and vendors, however, do not approach these levels of quality.
Train shows add one attraction that isn't normally found at swap meets, modular railroad layouts. These layouts are assembled from interoperable modules built by individual members of clubs and normally kept in storage. Several times a year, the pieces are assembled into an operating layout and displayed to the public in venues like malls or train shows. Key limiting factors for such layouts are the size of the individual modules, which must be small enough to be moved in vans or small trucks, and the restrictions on complexity, scenery, and detail that stem from the need to handle the modules extensively, as well as the need to set up and take down the layouts in a short period of time. This means that a modular layout won't have features that would allow a permanent layout to show what the hobby can accomplish in its best light.
Added to these restrictions is the problem most clubs face, the need to accommodate tactfully the varying skill levels of the members. Most modules will be completed to an average level of quality; some number will be less competently done, with scenery consisting of features like dusty plastic dinosaurs. The overall effect of a few well-done modules, with most ranging from mediocre to horrible, is not inspiring.
Again, in fairness, there is a small number of modular layouts completed to a uniform high standard that can be found at a few train shows, but their presence at a given show is a highly touted event, and the great majority of layouts at such shows does not remotely approach such standards.
A friend recently attended a train show and, calculating the trouble he took to get to the show, as well as the cost of parking and admission, and comparing that to the low quality, limited variety, and high prices of the merchandise, the poor quality of the modular layouts on display, and the generally depressing atmosphere of futility caused by the profusion of unsellable junk, resolved not to attend such shows in the future, and wrote the organizer a letter to that effect. My friend hasn't reported a reply to his letter, and I imagine the organizer ignored it as the rantings of an isolated disgruntled person. But my friend, an accountant, was making a rational decision based on an evaluation of pros and cons, the sort of decision other intelligent people can be expected to make.
The problem for the hobby is that a show that's generating some kind of an income for its organizers, but which casts model railroaders in a poor light by featuring mediocre layouts, overpriced merchandise, and a depressing atmosphere, is perpetuating the kind of feckless stereotype we in general want to avoid. There is a conflict for the hobby's overall good if a show organizer admits every vendor who will pay her fee and meet her very minimal standards, yet those vendors put the hobby in a poor light by, for instance, displaying broken GI Joe paraphernalia and the like, creating an overall sense of cheapness.
Add to that the fact that, for informed consumers, attendance at a typical train show may not be an economically rational decision, and the issue arises that the purpose of such shows is to cater to the uninformed and undiscriminating -- in other words, to suckers. This is an issue the hobby's leaders and visionaries need to address, an essentially political problem not much different from the one community leaders face if some residents, by misuse of their property, damage the community as a whole. We as hobbyists have a right to expect proactive leadership on issues like this from those who represent themselves to us as leaders.
An innovation in the hobby that has come with the Internet is the rise of e-mail lists and forums. Among the most popular e-mail lists are those found at Yahoo Groups, but others exist hosted by other value-added providers, as well as on independent servers. A forum differs from an e-mail list in that all messages are posted on the server and are viewed by visiting the site, rather than by receiving broadcast e-mails. A popular forum site is Trainorders.com. There really hasn't been a form of communication like e-mail lists or forums before the rise of the Internet; the closest equivalent was round-robin letters, in which each correspondent added sheets to a group letter that was re-mailed in sequence to a list of participants. This, of course, was slow and unwieldy. It was used, however, by model railroad pioneers such as John Allen and others to develop techniques that we now regard as standard for model railroad operation.
Clearly it's useful for a group of people whose interests focus on a common subject to exchange views on a real-time basis. If the information is complex and technical, doing it in writing will be more productive than a conference call. The rationalistic assumption would be that such an activity would be most productive if all members of the group are at an approximately equal (and relatively advanced) level of familiarity with their subject area, though necessarily some members will be better-informed in particular fields than others. Each member can then expand her knowledge of the subject by using the contributions of the other members, while providing her own contribution to the group from her specialty field. As one hobbyist put it, "nobody knows everything, but everybody knows sumething."
This assumes an egalitarian model, where each member has equivalent respect for every other member's specialty knowledge, as well as a shared view of the common goal of the group. It's possible to imagine ways in which such an egalitarian-cooperative model could break down. A central problem is that each member feels he has an equal claim on every other member's attention, and his opinions are of equal merit to every other member's. The result is likely to be trivial, disorganized discussion, or variations on bullying, which I will go into below.
Considering all the factors that can make a group's focus, productive discussion, and fellowship a fragile thing, it's amazing that many such groups function as well as they do. The ingredients for success include strong, yet tactful and subtle leadership, as well as general good will and good judgment on the part of all members.
However, there also appear to be clear ingredients for failure on the part of e-mail groups and forums. Past a certain point, it appears that groups can be too large to be successful; in the case of model railroading Yahoo! groups, this number seems to be in the 1000 range. If the group is in an area that's being promoted by the hobby magazines, such as layout design or operation, it may attract too many wannabes. Too many members may result in too many messages. The most popular lists can generate hundreds of e-mails in a single day, a potential technical problem for many people's in-boxes. (It's also plain that some participants receive group messages primarily at work, and reading hundreds of messages and actively responding to many of them during the work day is likely to have bad effects on work performance.)
The biggest sign of failure is flaming, public attacks against group participants, usually involving character assassination. Regular flaming in a group is a failure of leadership, since most e-mail groups and forums have the technical capability of banning users who don't adhere to basic guidelines. Everg dog, as they say, gets one bite, but once a group leader recognizes a flamer, it's the leader's failure if that individual isn't banned. Yet flaming is very common on e-mail groups and discussion boards.
Mail bombing is, I think, a more serious abuse than flaming, less common on model railroad e-mail groups and forums, but it happens. This involves sending unwanted and abusive e-mails to the individual's personal e-mail address. The good part of this abuse is that, even if a group leader is unwilling to ban a flamer, you can contact a mail bomber's ISP directly, and such a complaint may result in the mail bomber's own internet access being cut off.
I've also seen cases where individuals who participate in e-mail groups or on-line forums from work have sent me mail bombs from their employer's servers (this is evidenced by the sender's address showing as something like joe.blow@employer.com, where "employer" is a recognizable corporate name). Corporate information security policies typically specify that use of corporate computing resources is for business purposes only. Some amount of surfing the web during slow time at work may be tacitly allowed. However, I've seen one specific corporate policy prohibiting participation in non-business forums using a company e-mail address. And sending an abusive e-mail to a private individual from a corporate server, using a corporate e-mail address, is reckless activity.
Every domain is required to have an active "abuse" mailbox where such behavior can be reported. Anyone who receives an abusive e-mail from a corporate e-mail sender is entitled to forward that e-mail to the address "abuse@employer.com". I've probably received three or four such e-mails over the years. I always reply to the sender that his e-mail is likely to be a violation of corporate policy, and any further e-mails will result in my forwarding them to the "abuse" mailbox at his employer. Only once have I had to follow through and forward the e-mail to the "abuse" mailbox. (Interestingly, the individual whose e-mail I had to forward then began posting indignantly on the forum complaining about what I had done. The reaction of those on the forum was nearly unanimous that my doing this was completely out of bounds, since it could get the individual in trouble with his employer. Apparently the prevailing view on such forums is that bullying and abuse, including mail bombing using an employer's computer, is acceptable, or should be tacitly permitted, and any effective reaction to it, after a clear warning, is out of bounds. This situation has led me to question the overall level of maturity and realistic thinking among many forum participants.)
Flaming and mail bombing, it seems to me, are forms of bullying. The UK and Australia seem to have a much clearer understanding of this subject, perhaps due to general awareness of a bullying culture in their schools. Bullies are thought to exist in traditional English boarding schools largely because they are useful to the school administration in keeping the students in line. Ordinary discipline can be left to the bigger boys who are willing to dominate the smaller ones, and there's less work for the teachers. The difficulty, of course, is that petty jealousies, cronyism, corruption, violence, and even sexual coercion go along with the bullying, but are conveniently ignored.
In this interpretation, a flamer who is tolerated in a group or forum is performing a function that the group's leadership finds useful. The clearest case, as the example I linked to above suggests, "is sometimes directed at unwitting but opinionated newbies who appear in a newsgroup". It's much easier for a leader to let a flamer deal with a beginner who commits an obvious faux pas than to handle it tactfully and helpfully. But flamers are also useful for defending the prestige of the leadership and favored group members, and indeed for ensuring that only an accepted range of opinions is given in posts.
At worst, if a member stands up to a flamer and challenges him either for an unsupportable opinion of his own or for flaming in violation of established guidelines, the owner/leader (or his trusted designee) will ban the dissident -- for flaming, of course. Flamers are also useful for inconsistent enforcement of off-topic posts. For some reason, a number of model railroad e-groups discuss Krispy Kreme doughnuts in addition to the stated topic. Ordinary members who make off-topic posts on most subjects are flamed. Leaders and favored members who post on Krispy Kreme doughnuts are not flamed.
My experience and observation have been that, on groups or forums where flaming is tolerated at all, the group owners or forum proprietors are complicit and allow it to exist. Here's what I think is a typical situation:
The bottom line is that where flaming exists, it's probably because it's tolerated and even tacitly encouraged by the leadership. When this happens to me, I leave the group or forum, because the aims of the group appear to be to maintain a social pecking order where a usually very mediocre high-status group gets to abuse those they feel are beneath them. Hobby related fellowship is secondary to a few third-rate guys getting their jollies. Life is too short for this.
Electronic groups are at their worst if they have to deal with controversial subjects. In fact, a tendency toward rigid conformity is the other potential downside of electronic groups. This manifests itself in messages that can continue for days on a single, obscure topic, doing every possible detail to death. I think the reason for these sometimes maddening threads is that members appear to want to participate in the discussion and want to appear knowledgeable, but are too timid to initiate new topics, and indeed too timid to contribute in any but the least consequential way to existing topics. The penalty for misjudging one's contribution in this way is, of course, flaming.
One finds a certain bias toward the non-controversial and the trivial on forums as well as e-mail lists. A check of one such forum, for instance, the trains.com Model Railroader General Discussion, shows topics ranging from "How old are you?" to "Are you a member of a club?" to "Model railroading and my brother-in-law's wedding." There may be some specific threads regarding technical issues relating to specific hobby products, but very little in the nature of "what are we trying to do here, and are we succeeding?" Topics that may appear to address this, such as "How can we attract more young people to the hobby?" usually don't stray far from non-controversial remarks and conventional wisdom ("interest in the hobby is declining, there's nothing we can do.") As with e-mail lists, there is probably considerable peer pressure in forums to avoid truly maverick opinions.
I've read discussions of abusive family situations where there was a "walk on eggs" atmosphere, a sense that any slight misstep could trigger an extremely unpleasant reaction. Groups where flaming is common seem to have a similar ethos. As a result, I think that flaming, threads that go on and on over trivial issues, or a feeling that normally reasonable opinions will not be accepted by key members of the group are all signs that it's not worth participation. An atmosphere where flaming is excused because the victims "had it coming" is also classically abusive. Clearly the best solution is for individuals to understand that participation in such a group is less valuable than a sense of integrity and peace of mind.
I'm currently a member of some groups that approach my theoretical 1000 member limit, but the discussions are uniformly courteous, and epidemics of trivial and repetitious posts on a single subject are relatively infrequent. (I don't want to identify either good or bad examples for fear of upsetting equilibrium.) Clearly there are variations among groups, and this is probably a testament to the effects of good versus bad leadership, as well as to the good effects of tactful and intelligent key members.
Membership or participation in an e-mail group or forum can be a rewarding way to get information and experience good fellowship. But if we want to advance the status of the hobby, we need to be concerned with maintaining a high level of courtesy and mutual respect. We should withdraw immediately from groups that do not enforce a high standard of conduct on all members, and we should insist that our leadership maintain such standards. We have both the right and the responsibility to report anyone who sends unwanted, abusive e-mail to their ISP, and if the e-mail contains actual threats, to law enforcement. Hobby activities should not need to concern themselves with this kind of behavior.
That said, forums and e-mail lists are clearly not good places to try to express strongly dissenting opinions or controversial viewpoints, due to peer pressure among all participants to adhere to received opinions and the likelihood of "enforcement" via bullying tactics. It should also be noted that all such forums have a bias in favor of talk and against doing things. Other forms of web-based opinion, such as blogs, may be more effective.
Another factor I've begun to notice more recently has been the tendency of some posters to post the exact same post at multiple forums -- at least half a dozen at a time. This probably reflects an immature (or to use a more current term, narcissistic) need for attention, as well as the likelihood that these participants see the potential for quick gratification of this need in such forums. It also suggests that some fringe participants in the hobby spend more time on line than they do in actual hobby activites. This goes to a perception I've begun to have that certain adventitious aspects of the hobby are more important to some hobbyists than the hobby itself -- a kind of sub-hobby consisting of narcissistic games devolving from actual hobby activities. One function of the internet, unfortunately, has been to enable this development.
While flaming and other abusive behavior are common to both e-mail lists (such as Yahoo! groups) and on-line forums, on-line forums present an additional problem for the hobby's image, because they're more visible and can be found by members of the general public via search engines. Flaming or bad language in an e-mail group is at least limited to a small audience that might know what to expect. This isn't the case with forums, where the general public may expect, but not necessarily receive, family-friendly content on a model railroad site. The absence of a small number of objectionable four-letter words in and of itself (though there's no guarantee of this) doesn't mean the tone of discussion isn't frequently vicious, and not the sort of thing children should see.
There's another problem on many lists, and that's the remarkably low level of literacy in posts. It's very common to see, for instance, phonetic spellings of what I would call "uneducated speech" -- for instance, "I've been workin on this year model engine", "I got a Athren kit", and so forth. I have vivid memories of elementary school in a small New Jersey town, where teachers in the first and second grades were assiduous in getting students to avoid saying "this here", or making sure we said "an" instead of "a" in front of a vowel. The level of elementary misspellings and phonetic representations of speech patterns that suggest a lack of training in the early grades is a feature of on-line forums that I simply find discouraging. Many participants are simply semiliterate. I would assume that conscientious parents would not wish children to be exposed to this kind of an example in self-expression.
Add to this the fact that one of the worst forums in this area, Trainorders.com, charges money for members to participate, when there are many free forums available. In fact, it puzzles me that semiliterate posts of the sort I've described are almost the norm on Trainorders.com. (A quick search turned up this one on the front page of the model railroad forum on that site: "is the yellow that is used by both kato and atlas on there sante fee war bonnets the corect coler or is it to orngish i am refering to units that would be fresh from the paint booth thanks in advance for your answers". Another poster then answered, "I have a atlas gp 38 and a kato gp 35, the paint on them is a little off becuase kato painted the blue first, so the yellow is dark. Atlas paint the yellow first so it is a true yellow. But as far as correctness goes, it really doesnt matter becuase different shops painted with different shades of the yello and blues.") One possible explanation would be that the forum members, who are currently paying $29 per year for the privilege of posting there when many other forums are free, are a self-selecting group of uninformed consumers, or "suckers", similar to those already discussed in relation to train shows.
The Trainorders.com forum was at one point acquired by Yahoo!, with the forum's host apparently taken on as a Yahoo! employee. Trainorders was, however, dropped by Yahoo! in fairly short order, I believe at least in part because the bad atmosphere, bad language, and semiliterate posts appearing under the Yahoo! trademark were simply unacceptable to the company. (Trainorders.com's owner described the situation as follows in August 2007):
1998: While [I was?] looking for a job, Mark Cuban, co-founder of Broadcast.com came across the site on my resume and purchased it. I stayed on board to run the site. A year later Broadcast.com was purchased by Yahoo. One [year?] after that Yahoo was on the verge of shutting down the site and pointing the domain to a Yahoo club that later became Yahoo Groups. After a chain events (that I am not permitted to talk about do to a perpetual non-disclosure agreement) I regained ownership of the site.
In an attempt to clean up the posting environment, Trainorders.com instituted reforms designed to keep children from signing on and posting, but the continued low literacy level of the posts only reinforces my sense of the odd nature of the population that frequents that and other forums. I'm also somewhat distressed to see frequent posts on all such forums where visitors discuss upcoming exploitive train shows with great enthusiasm. Forums are in many ways a way for the least-informed, least-educated strata of the hobby to reinforce a set of generally dysfunctional attitudes. Often the questions posted in forums are of the sort that could be answered via a simple Google search, or by purchasing and reading a hobby magazine. This suggests that many forum visitors lack a certain level of basic initiative, even if they're well enough off to pay exorbitant prices for forum membership or train show admission. It hurts all of us for this behavior to be so prominently visible.
There's an incentive for commercial web sites to include forums, since the visitors update their own content, and frequent return visits to view the updated content contribute heavily to the commercial site's traffic -- thus allowing the site to eke out an income from advertisers. But it's not in the interest of the commercial site to spend time (which is money) paying much attention to what happens on the posts. Thus flaming, bad language, and a vicious atmosphere are common, and are not dealt with by the moderators until the situations are well out of control.
As with train shows, I think commercial on-line forums represent a situation where bottom-feeding commercial ventures are damaging the image of the hobby. I'm puzzled, though, that established hobby businesses like Kalmbach Publishing with the Trains.com forums, and Atlas with its model railroad forum, contribute to the problem, since they are investing considerable resources in hardware, bandwidth, and administrative overhead to provide "free" content that brings in no direct income. In fact, since some portion of what hobbyists now pay for Kalmbach publications or Atlas products pays for these forums, I think hobbyists should begin to question the price level of those companies' products in this light. I've both experienced and heard of an increase in quality assurance problems with Atlas products lately, for instance -- could the staff time and investment Atlas currently puts into its forums be better spent upgrading its quality assurance procedures?
It seems to me that Yahoo! made a correct corporate decision in deciding the typical content and behavior of a model railroad on-line forum simply didn't fit its corporate mission. I am waiting for Kalmbach and Atlas to reach similar conclusions. While there is little to distinguish the high-traffic forums, the Atlas forum seems to have a particular penchant for uninformed, uneducated posts. This post appeared on June 30, 2007:
about a month ago i accused engineerkyle [the nickname of an Atlas forum member] of being the person who had riped of numerous to [apparently referring to Trainorders.com] members in a interstate fraud scheme. i felt i had seen pictures of his private rr ARCHER GRAIN CO on the atlas web site. after checking the atlas web site i find that in this i was wrong. i have all ready apologized to enineerkyle and anything further between him and myself will remain that way. i am now apologizing to both the atlas web site members and to the atlas web site its self for my unwarranted actions.This sort of thing isn't unusual. Atlas is devoting what must be significant corporate resources to providing a platorm for semiliterate, potentially libelous material that emanates from the very bottom layer of the hobby population. A month earlier, in response to similar posts on the Atlas forum, I sent the following letter to Atlas:
May 29, 2007Mr. Thomas W. Haedrich, CEO
Atlas Model Railroad Company
378 Florence Avenue
Hillside, NJ 07205Dear Mr. Haedrich,
Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a number of threads on the Forums at the Atlas web site in which participants make unfounded allegations against Atlas dealers. Over the Memorial Day weekend, for instance, pseudonymous members accused An Affair With Trains, a hobby store (and presumably an Atlas dealer) in Phoenix, Arizona, of downgrading its business following a change of ownership. This prompted the store’s owner to reply, providing a photograph of the store’s upgraded interior and explaining that he’d expanded it by knocking down a wall and taking over the neighboring storefront as well.
A few weeks earlier, another pseudonymous forum member criticized M.B.Klein, which is certainly an Atlas dealer, for its move from central Baltimore to a suburb, again into expanded quarters. This also prompted a reply from Klein. Before that, pseudonymous members criticized another major Atlas dealer, Allied Models in Los Angeles, in the same way.
Mr. Haedrich, do I detect a pattern here? I’m glad I’m not a hobby store owner and have to deal with the risk of a major supplier maintaining an internet forum in which people who don’t identify themselves can make wildly inaccurate accusations about my business. Why should a hobby dealer carry Atlas products or support your company in any way if your moderators don’t make any effort to limit this sort of defamatory material?
I often wonder what Atlas employees could be doing if they weren’t babysitting your forums. The often ungrammatical, uninformed, poorly expressed, and immature posts that a visitor sees there put the hobby as a whole, in addition to Atlas, in a bad light. Why not do Atlas, your dealers, and the rest of us a favor and redirect those resources?
Very truly yours,
John Bruce
Mr. Haedrich has made no reply.
In August 2007, a thread on the Atlas forum grew to five pages within a day on the subject of the moderators' suspension of a regular member, who goes by the handle "Spikre". Spikre, one of the most prolific posters on the Atlas and other forums, routinely violated the Atlas forum guidelines, although tolerance for such violations, as we've seen above, is a routine feature of such venues. At one point, the Atlas moderator made a post saying that Spikre had been warned repeatedly of his violations, and had finally been suspended. The discussion on the thread continued, on the theme that Spikre posts on other forums, and in fact so do most of the others. In fact, it began to occur to me that posting on most forums is done by a hard core of maybe two dozen individuals, all of them narcissistic, semiliterate, and quick-tempered. It also began to occur to me that Atlas staff had spent some amount of time babysitting Spikre and the other two dozen, all of whom would suffer no hardship if Atlas were to discontinue its own forum -- there are many others where they post already and would continue to post. How much staff time is Atlas spending on this useless task?
It occurs to me that one service a group like the NMRA might perform would be to offer a "ratings" system for forums similar to the US film rating system. The rating could be based on criteria such as overall family friendly language; a subjective judgment of "atmosphere" based on flaming, cliquishness, and courtesy; an objective judgment of usage, grammar, and spelling to be found in posts (a family-friendly feature for children); a judgment of content level (beginner, intermediate, advanced); and an overall judgment of the moderators' willingness to be proactive and even-handed in deleting offensive posts or banning troublesome members. One suspects this would be too useful a development for the current NMRA leadership to consider.
I've encountered enough clergy posting in online forums to have some concern about how they identify and conduct themselves in this hobby venue. As I've observed above, the combination of anonymity (or at least invisibility), the egalitarianism of a forum or e-mail environment, and the sense of conformity that develops in such groups can lead to flaming and other types of immature and abusive behavior. It seems to me that clergy, with a particular 24-by-7 commitment to seeing people deal fairly and courteously with each other, have a special challenge if they participate in such groups at all. No clergy I've encountered who identify themselves as such in on-line groups has met this challenge remotely, in my opinion.
In fact, the three who come most prominently to mind, an American Baptist pastor in Kansas, a United Methodist minister in the Southeast, and an Eastern Orthodox priest in an East Coast city, strike me as having abdicated their pastoral roles on various groups to the point of irresponsibility, apparently to avoid appearing controversial. Each identified himself clearly as a priest or minister on the forums, so that an observer would be entitled to match expectations with performance. And it should be pointed out that priests are always priests -- you don't get time off, especially not when you say that's what you are.
The first issue is whether a member of the clergy chooses to identify him or herself as clergy in such a group. Certainly everyone is entitled to a hobby, and clergy more than many need to relax from a demanding profession. In fact, I may have seen many clergy in on-line groups who are there for relaxation, but haven't identified themselves as clergy. On the other hand, if your on-line handle contains identifiers like "Rev", or if you make a point of your calling in your posts, you are drawing attention to yourself and creating a set of expectations.
So I suspect in part that my bad experiences with clergy in on-line groups are because the group I'm seeing is self-selecting: they choose, likely for reasons of prestige or deference, to call themselves "Rev Mike" or whatever, or refer ostentatiously to their status in the body of their posts. These, of course, are the sorts of people who make a public show of their religion, about whom Jesus of Nazareth said in the gospels they've already got their reward -- they won't find it in the beyond. So in part I think we're dealing with an unpleasant bunch here in the first place, and there may be many clergy in on-line forums who have the spiritual humility and good taste not to make a big show of their status -- and as a result I haven't recognized them. Good for them. Sort of.
I've also chatted with clergy who express disdain for colleagues who wear clerical collars to do something like buy a car, hoping to get a better discount. I think clergy who call attention to their status in on-line forums but don't exercise constructive leadership are also vulnerable to similar disdain. It's also worth pointing out that clergy who call attention to their presence yet do not attempt to moderate abusive behavior are implicitly endorsing that behavior by participating in the discussion, whether they themselves are abusive or not. There are, of course, clergy who have chosen the profession out of a desire to gain social prestige, and I suspect that we're looking at some of these characters in this kind of a situation. Despite their years in divinity school and their ordination, they're phonies. God knows it, too. Heck, they know it.
The model railroad hobby, like any other activity in life, offers some spiritual obstacles. One of the biggest is certainly idolatry, a tendency to confuse one's ultimate concerns with trivial hobby-related issues, a loss of proportion or priority. One feature of on-line forums is often a rigid social hierarchy, in which flamer-bullies either prevail or enforce the status of the "leadership", who are almost uniformly mediocre in their modeling, other hobby skills, self-expression, and human relations. This, as C.S.Lewis has pointed out in his essay "The Inner Ring", is a feature of in-groups: they reinforce the status of their members by exempting them from the normal criteria of merit.
Taking one's relative status in a group so seriously that one has to resort to bullying or flaming, it seems to me, is a sign of fairly major spiritual confusion. It seems to me that a member of the clergy has a problem if he or she finds himself in a group suffering from this kind of confusion, and I don't have a good answer. Even more so, I think some clergy, who may be inclined to a type of authoritarianism themselves, may actually feel it is their duty to endorse the "authority" that attaches to in-groupery, cliquishness, and bullying. Of those I've seen who seem to feel this way, I can only say I'm deeply concerned for them and their parishes, as this strikes me as a profound misunderstanding of the Christian message.
Certainly if the pastor is keeping a low profile, the problem is less than if the pastor is signing on frequently as "Father Ed", but it's worth pointing out that the Good Samaritan didn't pass by on the other side of the road claiming he was trying to relax from a hard day.
So I don't envy clergy the problem they face when they participate in poorly-run online forums. On the other hand, there are times when, based on Christian teaching, all of us, clergy or not, are called upon to make some positive effort to improve what we see. This would include various forms of idolatry, cliquishness, and bullying that we encounter in the hobby. There is such a thing, most clergy would agree, as a sin of omission. So I have special disdain for those who sign on as "Brother Bob" or whatever, but only slightly less for those who stay silent under any circumstances when they ought to speak out.
I received an e-mail in response to this section from an individual who says he is one of the clergy I had specifically mentioned above. In light of the policy on e-mails I've posted on the home page of this site, as well as his remarks at the conclusion of this e-mail, I think this e-mail is worth reproducing here as an example of the type of "Reverend" I'm discussing. I've edited out references to a third party here, but I've included the rest of the e-mail as it was sent:
Mr. Bruce:
I was told by several on the Atlas Forum of your recent diatribe against clergy on the Atlas forum over the flap over Model Railroader, et.al. I want to first of all tell you, that I certainly do answer to God FIRST and not you as far as my conduct, what I do and don't do, and anything else that happens in my daily walk. Second, I answer to the congregations that called me, Third I answer to the denomination I am a part of, and somewhere in there, my wife is included. After reading through all that "stuff" I guess you are of the opinion that clergy should not have a part in anything controversial in these forums and indeed, I don't intend to, and did leave the forum at one time over some very obscene stuff. I returned after hearing from the moderator it wouldn't be allowed to happen again.
. . . . In short, you can disagree with me, but you can't condemn me, or Mike [apparently referring to the non-existent "Rev Mike" I mentioned above], and that is what you have done. You have identified me in your ramblings on the website by location and denomination. A large number of people from the Atlas forum have read it and commented to me about your tone, and that will spread, so you have labeled me before a hobby community that I have been a part of since my Seminary days back in the late 1950's.
I have worked in the computer field to support myself so that I could pastor small congregations that did not have the resources for the big salaries to have a full time pastor, think Paul and making tents, and when I took early retirement in 1996 from the computer field, I took two small congregations full time, using pension and the salary they can pay me, along with Social Security, to support myself. In the years past, I was also used to start new congregations while working. So I will let God/Christ judge me, but certainly not you.
I will pray for you, that you might have a change of attitude, I will not write any public forums or emails to any one else about you, I will not curse your name in the "temple". But I am not going to engage in an open debate with you and drag my profession through the mud as you seem to want.
And, I will put a filter block on my email account so I won't have to deal with your continued ravings.
Bob Miller
West Franklin Baptist Parish
[e-mail address redacted]
Since I hadn't previously e-mailed the Rev. Mr. Miller over ths matter (I may have corresponded with him non-confrontationally about his calling several years ago), it's puzzling that he should put a block on his e-mail so I can't reply. It strikes me as something of a "late hit" -- he gets to vent, and he doesn't want me to reply in kind (which I wouldn't have spent the effort to do in any case). However, this made it impossible for me to request his permission to use his name on his e-mail before posting it here. I wouldn't, in fact, have posted this e-mail at all except in regard to his assertion that he "will not write any public forums or emails to anyone else about you". The good Reverend, however, posted the following on the Atlas forum on March 20, 2004:
As for Mr. Bruce's right of free speech, he certainly has that. So did Adolph Hitler, and a lot of people died for it and because of it.
Bob
A Reverend who insists he won't engage in open debate (think Paul and addressing the Areopagus), who promises he won't post on forums about someone and then apparently has second thoughts (and compares me to Hitler, with incoherent mutterings about people who died), who won't even let someone reply to an angry and ill-considered e-mail -- some "Reverend". This is exactly what I'm talking about here, and it seems to me that, since I'm not a member of the clergy myself in any case, it's not me who's dragging the profession through the mud.
An item in the Railroad Model Craftsman "Editor's Notebook" for August 2007 points out some of the problems that face clergy who wish to become prominent in the hobby. The piece featured two photos of the Rev. Douglas Harding, who is Pastor of the First United Methodist Church of Eldora, Iowa, as well as an author of articles in Railroad Model Craftsman and a high-profile member of various Yahoo! groups (as we've already seen, this is a potentially bad sign). One of the photos showed Harding in his clerical vestments, in the act of performing a wedding ceremony at the NMRA Pacific Coast Region convention in Santa Cruz, CA. Harding, a pastor in Iowa, marrying a couple at an NMRA regional convention in Santa Cruz?
Let's start by granting that people get married every day in all sorts of strange venues, under all sorts of different auspices. They do it while whale watching, while skydiving, while tree hugging, and they're free to do it as wiccans, as Buddhists, as radical feminists, or anything else. I don't have a problem with this. I do have a problem with seeing a wedding of almost any sort prominently featured in Railroad Model Craftsman, and here's where the problem starts. (Actually, small blurbs about the weddings of magazine staff members are fine, but this is different.)
If the wedding is specifically identified as religious (in this case, Christian), then we're simply entitled to certain reasonable expectations. This piece made a big deal of Harding, the fact that he was a UMC pastor, and of the couple he married, Patrick LaTorres and Veronica Shadlo. LaTorres and Shadlo, according to the piece (confirmed to me later in e-mails from LaTorres)chose to marry, in effect, in the NMRA rather than in the church, because all their friends were in the NMRA. It was a little odd that they went out of their way to have a Methodist pastor tie the knot, when it could have been a civil ceremony. But aside from that, the piece had nothing to do with model railroading outside of the fact that the couple took time off from the NMRA regional convention to do it, and, were it not for the fact that they weren't enjoying their 15 minutes of fame, the piece would more appropriately have appeared in People magazine. The main problem here is Bill Schaumburg's editorial judgment, of course, and in that context, I certainly hope that with a new Publisher in charge, Carstens Publications and Schaumburg are actively planning for succession in Schaumburg's job.
But given reasonable expectations I might draw from seeing a UMC pastor presiding at the ceremony, various questions began to bother me about it. Why was a pastor from Iowa at a California regional NMRA convention in the first place? Well, turns out he goes there every year. "If I lived in Iowa, I'd go to California a lot, too," said my wife. That's the only explanation I can see. As a pastor, Harding probably can't go to Vegas to blow off steam like some other Iowans do, so he does the next best thing and goes to regional NMRA conventions in California.
So that's strangeness number one. Strangeness number two is why this Iowa pastor is marrying two residents of California -- something that would be problematic in some Christian denominations. In fact, in some states (though not California), it's illegal for an out-of-state pastor to perform a marriage. In other words, this is a little hinky on the face of it. Among the questions that stem from that circumstance are whether the couple are members of a church, or intend to join one. This is the sort of question a pastor normally asks, and normally a pastor would take the answer seriously. They apparently wanted a religious ceremony (something LaTorres confirmed to me in an e-mail), but apparently not badly enough to approach a local church and a local pastor to conduct it. Ronnie, the bride, wanted a beachfront wedding, said LaTorres, though a California pastor might have been a choice for that, too.
Because Harding is a high-profile member of several model railroad Yahoo! groups, his e-mail was easy to find, and, identifying myself as an active Christian, I e-mailed him privately with a detailed list of my concerns, indicating that what I saw in RMC bothered me, but perhaps I didn't understand all the circumstances, and I asked him if he could give me more information. My concerns were why, when his parish was in Iowa, he did the ceremony in California; whether he was satisfied that the couple intended to join a Christian community; whether he had performed all necessary premarital counseling in such an unusual context; and whether it was appropriate to hold the ceremony in the context of a model railroad convention.
Harding's first answer was, in full, as follows:
John, as many pastors do, I was officiating at a wedding for a friend who asked. Many clergy are called upon for such "special" occasions for family and friends. In the United Methodist Church I am an Ordained Elder, which entitles me to preform ministerial functions anywhere in the world. John Wesley, founder of Methodism, said "the world is my parish" and we Methodists practice that belief.Elmer Gantry meets Captain Marvel! Harding seems to have repented of this almost immediately and sent me a second e-mail that discussed my concerns at greater length, although his basic point remained the same: he cited only his status as an "Ordained Elder" for his authority to perform the ceremony, and he repeatedly claimed John Wesley (not a scriptural authority) somehow gave him permission to do it. Now, there are lots of things I can do anywhere in the world. The question is whether doing them anywhere reflects good judgment. He did say in the second e-mail, however, that ethically, he could only perform such a ceremony in California outside a church. To do it inside a church, he would need to be invited by that church's pastor, something the pastor might or might not agree to. But this was moot, since the couple wanted a beachfront wedding, in Santa Cruz. So let's party!Doug Harding
He also insisted that the wedding was legal in California, he'd checked. In his second e-mail to me, he also said
I cannot control or dictate what Bill Schaumburg writes in his column. I was as surprized [sic] as you were when I got my copy this week. You need to ask him your questions about his column, his email is [bills@rrmodelcraftsman.com].I really felt this was a good point. My main concern was less that the wedding had taken place, but that it had been publicized. Harding's strong implication was that this had happened without his approval. If this was the case -- and given my increasing skepticism on whether Bill Schaumburg is hitting on all cylinders, I thought it might be -- then my problem was in fact with RMC, not Harding. On the other hand, I felt Schaumburg might be too absent-minded, too busy at a wine tasting, or too preoccupied otherwise to read my e-mail, and he might just blow it off anyhow. So I thought a better recipient might be Henry Carstens, the new Publisher of RMC, and just for fun, his dad, Harold.
I sent them both an e-mail saying I thought the religious content in "Editor's Notebook" was inappropriate, and beyond that, Harding had told me he hadn't expected to see it. And beyond that, given the circumstances Harding had outlined to me, many Christian clergy would have refused to perform the ceremony, since it was outside the pastor's venue, and the couple's commitment to joining a church seemed questionable. I copied Harding as a courtesy.
Surprise! (or Surprize!) The Rev. Mr. Harding apparently lost his temper big time! He sent me a third e-mail, saying
I said I was surprized [sic] when I saw Bill's column. Never once did I indicate I did not give my permission, or that I was unware the wedding would be mentioned. I was anticipating some mention, I was not expecting a photo. . .So he did in fact have something to do with Schaumburg's column. This, it seems to me, changes the circumstances, and it suggests he'd been less than frank in his first explanation. I can only conclude that he was involved in putting the column together, and that raises for me the question of why. We'll get to this.
The other thing the Rev. Mr. Harding did was e-mail Patrick LaTorres, the groom in the NMRA wedding, copying him on both the initial e-mail I'd sent Harding, and on the e-mail I sent to Carstens Publications. Seems like e-mailing Schaumburg himself was one thing (which I figured out for myself); e-mailing Henry Carstens with a complaint was something else indeed. It seems to me that e-mailing the groom over my complaints was something completely out of place and unprofessional for Harding to do. I would take Harding's intent as basically inciting LaTorres to harass me, which in fact LaTorres did, sending me two e-mails on his own, and a third through Harding. The one Harding forwarded, with his implicit approval, rambled among other things about gays, which had nothing to do with the discussion. I assume LaTorres, discovering I was Episcopalian, either thought I was gay or that I hated gays, so he figured he'd say something that would be obtuse and offensive either way! That Harding would forward this to me goes again to his unprofessional conduct. Some Reverend.
Three harassing e-mails in a day, in addition to an angry one from Harding himself, goes to what I've already said about "mail bombing" and the abuse of e-mail. I told LaTorres that any further e-mails would result in a complaint to his ISP, and I suggested to Harding that more of the same would result in forwarding the correspondence to his bishop. I haven't heard from either since, and I hope I don't, since the opportunity to discuss these matters with Harding's bishop would make my day.
The spiritual issue here, as far as I can see, is an unhappy one. The RMC piece, confirmed by LaTorres's e-mails to me, suggests that the couple's entire social, intellectual, and spiritual life (insofar as it exists) centers on the NMRA and other model railroad activites. These include many of the things that make up what I would call the "narcissistic structures" of the hobby: clubs and their politics, NMRA committees and their politics, operating sessions and their politics, on-line groups and forums, and appearance in hobby magazines. It's very easy for participants to get involved in these and have very little to do with enjoying the model railroad hobby for itself. Playing social games becomes primary, and even a second hobby that's more important than the first one.
In some ways, I sympathize with this couple. They appear to have attached themselves to Bill Schaumburg and Douglas Harding as the strongest, most attractive (even glamorous), and most authoritative figures they can see in this closely circumscribed environment. Schaumburg and Harding appear to be flattered by this. Schaumburg calls LaTorres a "friend", as does Harding, except, of course, that any friendship either can offer is limited to their presence for a few days at an annual NMRA regional convention, and e-mails now and then. If Harding, as a Christian pastor, had had an ounce of decency at any point in this process, he should have been referring the couple to whatever local resources in California he could bring to bear within the UMC or any other organization he could find. Instead, he appears to have kept these folks to himself as people who admired him and Schaumburg (what some psychologists might call "narcissistic supply"). He served as an enabler of their somwewhat confused desire to be married in effect in the NMRA, rather than in a church, when, as a pastor, he had a different responsibility. Neither Harding nor Schaumburg is what I would call a "friend" of this couple.
There's another question that bothered me from the start, but I wouldn't have been able to bring it up had not LaTorres volunteered the information in one of his rambling e-mails. Harding, we know from the RMC piece and his own version of events, is a regular attendee at the NMRA Pacific Coast Region conventions --- he's gone there something like four years running. So his travel expenses would be something he'd pay in 2007 like any other year. How he paid for his trip this year would normally be none of my business, except that LaTorres volunteered that he and his bride paid his expenses for this trip. So what would those expenses come to? The closest big airport to Eldora, Iowa is Des Moines. The closest airport to Santa Cruz is San Jose.
I checked Travelocity.com, and the cheapest round-trip fare from DSM to SJC is about $400 with taxes and fees. LaTorres didn't mention if they paid for his rental car, but the cheapest rental for a compact from a Thursday to a Sunday at SJC is about $120. Hotel rates (assuming Harding is staying at the convention hotel at some preferred rate) I would guess to be $150 a night, all taxes included. So leaving food, gas, airport parking in Des Moines, tips, and incidentals aside, LaTorres and his bride apparently paid Harding something like $870 to reimburse his travel costs -- except that Harding would have made this trip anyhow, even if he didn't perform the wedding ceremony. This to me creates an ethically ambiguous situation: normally a couple would pay clergy travel expenses assuming the clergy wouldn't otherwise make the trip. This isn't the case here. Money is fungible, so this reimbursement added $870 or so to Harding's hobby budget.
On top of that, LaTorres's explanations (volunteered to me via his e-mails) of the chronology indicate that the major premarital counseling Harding conducted took place in Santa Cruz, where he'd traveled on LaTorres's nickel. Harding would have had very little incentive to ask probing questions of any sort in such a situation. Normally clergy would have the option of not performing the ceremony if potential problems emerged in counseling; in this case, Harding had already accepted travel reimbursement and had made the trip -- more ethical ambiguity, as I see it. LaTorres didn't say whether he and his bride paid Harding an honorarium over and above his travel expenses, but this would certainly be customary. A quick internet search reveals honoraria to clergy for wedding ceremonies running in the $2-500 range. A productive weekend for the Rev. Mr. Harding, it would appear. I'm sure he can find some saying of John Wesley to justify it, too.
Harding gave me what I feel are conflicting accounts of his involvement with the "Editor's Notebook" piece. It appears to me that he wanted to give me the initial impression that he'd had nothing to do with it, but when it became plain that his crony Schaumburg would look bad to his boss based on that version, he changed it. Some Reverend.
On top of that, I'm puzzled that Harding and Schaumburg would get together in some fashion to produce an "Editor's Notebook" piece more appropriate for People magazine than RMC. My guess is that two things are involved: one is, as Harding put it to me in his second e-mail, that Schaumburg often discusses things he does with his friends in "Editor's Notebook". Schaumburg does have many, many friends, if his editorials are to be taken seriously, though given the number, I would call them "friends". (My hobby dealer tells me he's a charming guy, though that's not always a recommendation.) The trouble is that Schaumburg seems less and less interested in the hobby itself and more and more interested in pumping up his cronies. That the content of RMC is increasingly repetitious and based on half a dozen contributors is part of the same problem.
The second factor is it's hard to avoid the impression that Harding felt that appearing in his clerical capacity in RMC would be a boost to his standing in the hobby -- and that this essentially narcissistic boost was so important to him that he'd employ any nasty tactic (mendacity and mail bombing, for instance) he could think of to get back at someone who raised questions about it. In fact, considering the amount of money that apparently went to Harding for his participation in the wedding, there's some reason to think that the couple was implicitly buying a package that included publicity for themselves and their wedding, courtesy of Harding's "in" with Schaumburg. Some Reverend. My sense is that the socially narcissistic side of the hobby -- including the drive to make a public display of secular status in places like e-mail lists and hobby magazines -- is so tempting that some clergy have a very difficult time with it. I'm sorry that the Rev. Harding's congregation has someone of his apparent caliber to deal with.
The phrase "prototype modeler" has considerable resonance and prestige in the model railroad hobby. It came to currency in a grassroots movement in the mid-1970s as modelers became dissatisfied with the low quality and poor selection of the commercial products that were available to the hobby at the time. By the mid-1970s, many railroad technical and historical societies were well-established and publishing research on railroad equipment that was much more thorough than what had been available. Extra 2200 South, a specialty magazine publishing detailed information on contemporary locomotives, provided much more information on locomotives' technical features, history, and variety than the mainstream hobby magazines.
There was a general sense that those mainstream magazines were neither encouraging improved products from the hobby industry (who were their advertisers), nor publishing material that suggested that improvements might be made to existing products on an aftermarket basis, again presumably because it might offend advertisers to imply that their products were less than perfect. But it might even be going too far to impute commercial motives to the editors for their complacency, since complacency alone was probably a sufficient explanation. The magazines were also, it was felt, giving insufficient attention to railroads in interesting parts of the country, such as the Rocky Mountain states and California.
A Massachusetts hobby dealer named Bob Longo began to meet the wish for more complete, region- and railroad-specific information by publishing a series of newsletters with names like Western Prototype Modeler and Southwestern Prototype Modeler, each issue of which stressed various aftermarket detail improvements and technical enhancements that could be made to models then on the market, or information that would allow a modeler to build models for which no commercial product was available. In 1977, he combined the newsletters into a new, full-size magazine called Prototype Modeler, which continued to innovate in providing articles that covered interesting subjects in a more detailed and complete way than the mainstream hobby press, which at the time was producing a bland, predictable, and generally superficial product. (In mid-2005 I had a chance to chat with a modeler who had frequent articles in Longo's version of the magazine. He said Longo was apparently quite well off, with a private jet in which he flew from Massachusetts to meet in person with his authors all over the country. However, the author with whom I spoke said that he never saw any money for his contributions.)
At the same time, groups of modelers began to meet in informal groups that called themselves "prototype modelers' meets". In part reacting to the perceived organizational rigidity and complacency of the National Model Railroad Association (NMRA), which had accomplished nothing of interest for some years, the groups deliberately avoided formal organization. Anyone could announce a meeting and declare, should she be so inclined, that it was a "prototype modelers' meeting".
The impulse motivating the "prototype modeler" movement was anarchic, iconoclastic, and innovative. In some ways it presaged the same impulses that generated the computer revolution in the 1980s, a sense that useful information was worth distributing widely regardless of institutional constraints, a willingness to work hard and take risks to support worthwhile innovation, and a certain subordination of individual ego to the general purpose. If the existing magazines wouldn't publish the challenging and exciting material informed readers wanted, they'd start their own magazine. If the NMRA's existing activities couldn't support modelers who wanted an organization that would help them achieve their goals of getting innovative, challenging, and exciting products, they'd start their own anarchic activity to achieve those ends.
Bob Longo died within a few years of starting the magazine, which then passed through various hands, declined, and finally ceased publication in the early 1990s. In the meantime, the NMRA made its peace with the "prototype modelers" -- though given the anarchic style of the original groups, it's difficult in hindsight to determine with whom and on what authority this could have been done -- and the informal "prototype modelers" were then given separate meeting rooms for their use during NMRA national conventions (This was an enormous public-relations coup for the NMRA, allowing it to seem more innovative and flexible than it has ever actually been).
The new magazine, however, convinced other publishers that a market existed for additional hobby magazines. The interest in more accurate, more representative, better-quality, and more highly detailed model equipment convinced manufacturers that a market existed for new models to higher standards, and in fact the movement was probably a major factor in the phenomenal increase in product quality, accuracy, and variety that's taken place over the past 30 years. Within a fairly short period of time, the "prototype modelers" acquired more prestige than was probably good for the movement -- assuming the goal of such a movement (on a Weberian rationalistic basis) would be the continuous improvement of the hobby environment, rather than the introduction of any particular generation of products, or the publication of any particular magazine with any particular content.
Since the original "organization" was essentially anarchic and the result of loosely coordinated independent efforts, no one can say what its objectives were for sure -- but if I'm as competent a spokesman for an anarchic group as anyone else, I would say that its objective ought to have been a continuous state of mind, that of seeking challenge and excitement in the hobby, regardless of personalities or prestige.
To that extent, the "prototype modeler" movement has fallen somewhat short of its original task, or at least its original potential. But every movement loses its original spontaneity after a time, and the "prototype modeler" movement is now about 30 years old. In addition, every movement has its hangers-on and heavy-breathers, and as the initial excitement has dissipated, the tendency toward distracting secondary effects like ego-tripping and pedantry has increased.
A "prototype modeler's" meet is now a highly ritualized, predictable event, with participants bringing large numbers of models to display on thigh-height tables covered in white linen in hotel ballrooms. These are remarkably poor conditions to view or discuss small-scale models, but there is no move to improve or innovate in this area -- such a move would now likely be resisted as not what participants were used to. "Clinics" or presentations on various subjects are given in adjoining meeting rooms. The clinics vary widely in quality, and they are frequently disrupted by attendees pursuing questions on obscure details, in an attempt to one-up the presenter. Ordinary good manners in such cases are clearly a secondary consideration.
The biggest problem is that the "prototype modeler" movement appears to see itself as separate from an "operation" movement in the hobby. Highly accurate models are often constructed without the intent of actually running them -- significantly, facilities for running the models on display at a "prototype modelers'" meet are frequently not provided; they just sit on the white linen. In this respect they more closely resemble static military models than operable railroad models. The modelers who are most prolific at building highly detailed railroad models often do not build layouts on which to run them -- they focus exclusively on the essentially static models of equipment.
Finally, a major focus of the "prototype modeler" movement has become e-mail lists, and many of the lists suffer from the leadership failures outlined in the previous section. The anarchic, egalitarian nature of successful e-mail lists would complement the nature of the movement -- but the potential absence of the leadership qualities needed to ensure success in e-mail lists is a potential ingredient for failure. Another factor is the disruptive conduct of some attendees at in-person meets, as well as the personality issues that might be expected from people who take such a movement too seriously. Humility and good humor are qualities in short supply as the movement currently exists. The tendency to subordinate ego (in whatever minimal way) to the group purpose that was present in early phases of the movement is less evident now. A disturbing trend, to my way of thinking, has been the tendency of "prototype modelers" to infiltrate the technical and historical societies, so that their focus is less on the overall picture of the railroad as a historical entity and more on the pedantic details of equipment and the specifics of modeling.
If this means that "prototype modelers" don't always have a fully-developed sense of proportion in approaching a hobby that ought, after all, to involve running the models in a more fully-realized miniature environment, on the other hand, the continuing minimalist style of the organization has allowed it to avoid self-destruction on schismatic or organizational issues.
A welcome recent trend in "prototype modeler" meets has been the presence of modular layouts, so that equipment can be seen in operation as part of an overall picture, as well as the innovation of using higher-level tables, rather than standard hotel banquet hall-style tables, to exhibit models.
On the other hand, an unanswered question is the eventual impact that high-quality, moderately-priced commercial models will have on the movement. It got started during a period when the best models available were, by current standards, clunky. Now it's possible to buy models off the shelf in the $100 range that have a level of detail and execution that modelers would likely have spent hundreds of hours (and indeed, hundreds of dollars in detail parts) trying to achieve only a few years earlier. Does this leave open the possibility that modelers can redirect their time and effort toward areas that need greater attention?
Thompson's books (I own several) are something of a conundrum to me. If nothing else, they're monuments to pedantry and a hypertrophied collector's impulse. While Thompson has a PhD, he's not a business historian, so that a comparison of his books to those of academic rail historians like Maury Klein or H.Roger Grant is instructive. While Thompson dwells almost exclusively on minute differences in mechanical features of freight cars, there is very little human context to this assiduously accumulated detail.
On the other hand, writers like Klein and Grant -- whose material sometimes overlaps Thompson's -- show the operations of the railroads as businesses and institutions, with the human qualities of the actors fully portrayed. The railroads in question typically looked the other way over issues like alcoholism, incompetence, nepotism, cronyism, and a bullying style of management. As a result, all but the strongest players easily fell to changes in the business environment. We get no such discussion in Thompson's books, even if Pacific Fruit Express in particular represents itself as a business history. We see slots on the organization chart, but we quickly return to the obsessive discussion of mechanical minutiae.
On the other hand, a prominent feature of conference sessions where Thompson is in attendance, as well as Yahoo groups where Thompson is a major participant, is his supercilious personal style. His shouts from the back of the room, or his angry postings, can't be ignored. Heaven help the clinician who commits the error of saying that the operating rods on a certain class of drop-bottom gondola were cylindrical, when they were actually square! (I saw this specific instance at a prototype modeler meet in 2006.) Thompson's tone in such cases strongly implies that not only is the speaker ignorant, but he's a deliberate fraud.
His reviews of models in the technical and historical press, as well as his Yahoo postings, frequently employ words like "bogus". Not only is a model inaccurate, it's dishonest! Unfortunately, this style sets a very bad example for the hobby. From the standpoint of historical accuracy, though, Thompson also does nobody any favors. He appears to feel that his pedantry on mechanical features allows him to make unsubstantiated pronouncements about matters outside his tunnel vision.
Once I heard him, making a presentation at a prototype modeler meet, denounce models of refrigerator car icing docks if the modeler placed wheelbarrows on the elevated deck. The problem was that he apparently hadn't looked closely at the next slide in his own presentation, which showed a prototype refrigerator car icing dock with wheelbarrows on the elevated upper deck. Following Thompson's excellent example, I called from the back of the darkened room, "Gee, I guess that modeler shouldn't have put those weelbarrows there, huh?" Thompson's response, of course, was to lose his temper and denounce whomever had criticized him.
This has also resulted in errors and unsubstantiated statements in his own books. In Pacific Fruit Express, he asserts that the Erie handled the greatest amount of perishable freight between Chicago and the East Coast. The Erie, of course, was a financially weak and badly-managed carrier, and the biggest city on its main line between Chicago and Jersey City was Akron, Ohio. I've queried Thompson on his source for this statement, without success. Tallies of freight cars interchanged in Chicago show, on at least an anecdotal basis, many more perishable and stock cars going to the New York Central and even the Grand Trunk Western and Nickel Plate (to eastern destinations via the Lehigh Valley) than the Erie.
Unfortunately, Thompson's authoritarianism and abusive style seem to fill a niche in this sector of the hobby. Questioning his assertions leads to unpleasantness. In an area as unimportant as model railroading, whether certain historical fallacies are perpetuated isn't a great matter. On the other hand, beauty is as beauty does. While I know nothing of metallurgy, if he's as slipshod intellectually in that field as his hobby books suggest, I would think skepticism of his work there might also be warranted. But American scholarship is, overall, nothing if not slipshod anyhow. No wonder Thompson has risen so far.
A model railroad club is a formal organization, often incorporated, of model railroad hobbyists who make use of membership dues income, in addition to other business or endowment income as may be available, to build and operate a model railroad layout that is owned by the joint venture and used for their mutual benefit. The New York Society of Model Engineers is apparently the oldest such organization in the US, having been incorporated in 1926, but its web site says that it existed as an informal organization since the 1910s, though it didn't focus on model railroading in its earliest years.
In talking about clubs, we have an advantage in that two well-established organizations come about as close as any real-world institution can to matching the rationalistic expectations we might have of what a model railroad club ought to be. The La Mesa, CA Model Railroad Club, part of the San Diego Model Railroad Museum, has been building a model representation of the railroad line over Tehachapi Pass. While the La Mesa club was founded in 1961, it lost its original building in 1978 and moved to San Diego's Balboa Park museum complex. This project opened to the public in 1982, though the overall layout is a work in progress. All features of the layout have been executed to a very high standard. As part of a public museum, the layout is required to be in operation on a near-daily basis, so that reliability and durability are key qualities. Rensselaer Model Railroad Society at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was founded in 1947, but work on the existing layout dates from 1972. Like the La Mesa club, the standard of execution is very high, with equipment, structures, and scenery based on careful historical research. It is also regularly open to the public as an educational exhibit, but not as frequently as the San Diego Model Railroad Museum.
One of the key objectives we've postulated for hobby institutions in this discussion is to raise the public perception of our activities. Both of these clubs clearly do about as much as can be done to meet this objective, since both operate in cooperation with local government entities to serve a public educational and recreational function beyond the simple mutual enjoyment of the membership. A casual visitor receives an overall sense of quality and purpose that answers by itself the question "why are you doing this?" Certainly the experience of seeing these layouts helps educate the general public in what the hobby is capable of doing, and helps discredit the stereotype of adults engaged in an immature or eccentric activity.
The clubs also serve to set a high standard for activity within the hobby. The club layouts have been repeatedly featured in the model railroad hobby press. In both cases, they draw a regular membership from distances ranging hundreds of miles from their location. The interaction of talented members creates a synergy effect, and current as well as former members of both clubs regularly publish worthwhile articles in the hobby press. The two clubs, in other words occuply the very high end of the bell-shaped curve that we would expect to show the distribution of quality in this type of enterprise.
What contributes to the success of these institutions? How does this success contrast with mediocrity or failure among other clubs? It might seem that the controlling factor before any other is the ability of a club to keep its venue for a long period. The history of all the clubs cited above, as well as most others, has involved the periodic need to vacate a rented or donated space. This usually puts all activity back to square one as the club attempts to find equivalent space and then rebuilds its layout. It appears that the current locations for both the La Mesa and Rensselaer clubs are relatively bullet-proof, but the plans of a university or a museum complex can always change. It is likely that a decline in the standard of the exhibits for either club in the eyes of the institution would hasten such a change in plans.
Another club that has a similar arrangement with a local government, however, The Model Railroad Club, Inc. of Union, NJ, isn't on the same tier of execution as the other two. The Pasadena Model Railroad Club of Los Angeles, CA, owns its building and has open houses that are well-publicized in local media, but its standard is also not as high, and its layout is in fact not well set up for public viewing.
So permanence or longevity of venue, while important, isn't the single determining factor. The Slim Gauge Guild, of Pasadena, CA, offers an example of a club that briefly appeared to be creating a layout at a standard of execution that matched the Rensselaer club (the La Mesa club's Tehachapi layout was not in existence at that time). However, the Slim Gauge Guild fell short of this standard after being in contention. I was a member of this club during the late 1970s, when it occupied its site on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, and while it was still receiving very favorable coverage in Railroad Model Craftsman and the Narrow Gauge and Short Line Gazette. As with both the Rensselaer and the La Mesa clubs, a large number of well-known figures in the hobby were members of the Slim Gauge Guild during this period, including several who have gone on to be well-known authors of railroad history books, a hobby magazine columnist, a supplier of highly accurate decals (since deceased), a well-known painter of railroad subjects (since deceased), major figures behind the restoration of the Santa Fe 3751 steam locomotive, and several key employees of hobby suppliers.
I've run into Slim Gauge Guild alumni in surprising locations all over the US. We're always happy to catch up with each other, but a frequent subject that comes up in such conversations is the fact that the experience of membership, while it had rewarding aspects, was essentially disappointing. The club lost its Colorado Boulevard space that contained its best-known layout about 1980, and it spent a number of years without a venue before finding its current, smaller space. Loss of venue has often been a driving factor for other clubs (like Rensselaer and La Mesa) to come back with a larger, better-executed layout, but this wasn't the case here. In fact, the club had lost much of its momentum even while it was on Colorado Boulevard.
A core group of hobbyists began the club in the late 1960s with the idea of creating historically and geologically accurate scenes of Colorado narrow-gauge railroading. The group's early work was prominently featured by Linn Westcott in Model Railroader at that time, an example of Westcott's ability to spot and foster worthwhile trends in the hobby. The group had a clearly focused objective, which was to create historically accurate scenes to a high standard. The model equipment of the time, especially in HO scale narrow gauge, was barely operable, and the group developed a number of innovative techniques, including replacement of the motors in the model locomotives with precision Swiss instrument motors, to bring operation to an acceptable level. In the early 1970s, this was almost unheard of.
Narrow gauge equipment often had unusual features, such as brake beams that hung from the carbody and were visible outside the trucks and wheels, and the members developed viable ways to reproduce such features. The result was small-scale narrow gauge equipment that was operationally, mechanically and electrically reliable, at a standard of detail that routinely won model contests, at a time when the quality of much model railroad equipment was only moderate.
The idea of modeling historically accurate scenes on a model railroad was also something that had essentially not been tried. In the first years of the club's work at the Colorado Boulevard location, it scenically reproduced the Palisades area near Alpine Tunnel on the South Park narrow gauge line, as well as the Ophir Loop area on the Rio Grande Southern. However, progress quickly slowed after the first burst of energy, and as sometimes happens, grandiose projections began to exceed execution. The planned benchwork to support the full track plan was never completed in the approximately 10 years the club occupied that location, and only a few areas had complete scenery. Photos of the completed areas, however, were spectacular, as might be expected, and frequently appeared in the model press.
A major reason for the dropoff in work was loss of interest by members of the early core group. It's possible that the actual day-to-day work required to bring such a large project to completion began to seem daunting to people after the initial excitement of the early publicity and the fun of making projections. But as the early core leadership drifted away, nobody was left who could effectively coordinate and focus the work of the members. Instead, a second tier of members, enthralled with the early publicity, concentrated on having items of clothing made that featured the club's emblem and dominated business meetings with discussion of the club's "image".
This second-tier group then became the leadership core, although they didn't have the modeling talent, or the motivational and coordinating abilities, of the first-tier group that was drifting away. Nevertheless, they were able to dominate activities by becoming the group that would approve work. Electrical wiring came to a halt because the wiring "expert" was developing a grandiose wiring scheme that never appeared -- but until it did, no work could be done. Scenery work moved at a crawl because the core group felt that only they had the competence to do it at a high standard -- but no program was started to bring newer members up to that standard.
Indeed, the second-tier core group began to display classic "in group" behavior, undertaking projects on its own initiative without securing consensus in business meetings. The best-known example was the core member who, not long before an open house, destroyed the existing Palisades scenery area (which had been a signature feature of the layout in published photos), saying that he would replace it with better-quality work before the open house. Given the time available and the work required, this simply wasn't a realistic assertion. It might be interpreted as a version of bullying, in fact, where the second-tier core group could assert its power to create unpleasantness without the ability of ordinary parliamentary or consensus processes to control it.
As a result, little happened in the weekly meetings. The essentially obstructionist activities of the second-tier core meant that trackage was removed in strategic areas to prevent operation while some projected "improvement" was in the works. Areas of scenery would be completed to the bare hardshell level (which didn't require particular skill), but would then be abandoned for lack of further interest by the core group, who wouldn't permit newer members to continue the work. Most members, as a result, simply gathered at particular areas in the club room and compared notes on their personal modeling work. This did in fact create a synergistic effect among those members, and I received an outstanding apprenticeship in basic and advanced modeling skills as a result. However, this had no effect on the joint club effort.
I left the group in frustration not long before it lost its venue. It was plain that no one had the leadership ability to control the essentially bullying activity of the second-tier core once the first-tier leaders drifted away, and the overall effort had become futile. It's significant, though, that during this "decadent" period, the hobby press continued to feature the Slim Gauge Guild as a top-tier effort. This was partly due to the self-promotional activities of the second-tier core. The in-group, for example, wrote, photographed, and submitted an article on the club to the Narrow Gauge and Short Line Gazette without consulting the club in general, and featuring only their particular activities and equipment. But it was important to the hobby press as well to "package" the club's activities in a favorable light, a basic type of inaccuracy that's perpetrated by many journalists. While nothing could likely have brought the club to a realistic assessment of its position by that point, the favorable publicity certainly made such an event much less likely.
The club reassembled itself with fewer people after finding a new location. I never rejoined, but I've both kept in touch and mended fences with many participants over the years. A big difference was that the earlier version had been HOn3 only; the new one was both Sn3 and HOn3. While some of the second-tier core returned to the new version of the club, the Sn3 constituency was entirely new, and in succeeding years made considerably more progress on their layout than the HOn3 group had on theirs. The same obstructionism by the core members resulted in the same behavior, such as unauthorized tearing out of completed areas for "improvements", and vetoes of projects on the ground that core members would later do a better job. In recent years all but one of the former Colorado Boulevard members has left the group, and the Sn3 members have been able to assert control over unauthorized changes to the HOn3 layout. I wish them well, but the group's moment is clearly a generation past.
Effective focus and leadership ability are clearly the most important ingredients to prevent the kind of feckless activity that frustrates the intent of those who join a club sincerely wishing to achieve a significant goal, and which damages the reputation of the hobby with the public at large. A major task facing the leadership of a club is to be sure the bar of individual achievement is kept high enough to keep the club at large from deteriorating to a mediocre standard of execution. This requires a combination of tact and forcefulness.
John Nehrich of the Rensselaer club described in an article in Railmodel Journal the long-standing efforts of the club leadership to get the members to remove the low-quality mass-produced equipment of the 1970s from the club layout. This effort represents a key conflict in a club environment between members of less ability and those who want to see an overall higher level of execution. If the lowest common denominator is too low, there's a risk of satisfying only the lowest-ability members. (In fact, the tendency to cater only to the least critical, least demanding participants is a major problem now facing the hobby.) The result in the Rensselaer club's case was apparently that a number of members went away mad, though these were the ones who took the low-quality equipment with them.
How the Rensselaer and La Mesa clubs have been able to satisfy demanding members, make clearly visible consistent progress, and maintain a high level of execution is a question worthy of further examination. It's the kind of story that ought to find its way into the hobby press, but hasn't. It seems likely that one component is leadership that is sometimes willing to be forceful for the common good if tact doesn't completely get the job done -- and clearly also leadership that is staying for the long term. All of these issues eventually probably boil down to questions of character, because although many club members may wish to avoid dealing with larger issues (saying, in effect, "I'm just here for the trains"), the larger issues will eventually affect the success of the group effort.
The National Model Railroad Association (NMRA) is the hobby's umbrella charitable, technical, and educational organization. It was founded in 1935; serious interest in modeling the technical and operational aspects of US railroads by means of small-scale electric models had begun in the 1920s. An excerpt from the NMRA's bylaws appears on the page cited above.
The bylaws quite naturally say that the NMRA's purpose is ". . . in part, to promote, stimulate, foster and encourage by all manner and means the art and craft of model railroading . . .", but as the list of more specific purposes farther down in the bylaws indicates, the NMRA's focus is largely internal to the hobby and the industry that supports it. The NMRA sees itself primarily as a standards-setting body, and over the years this has resulted in US manufacturers (and all others who want to supply the US market) adhering to electrical and dimensional standards for model railroad equipment.
In the face of a gradual but continued decline in membership in recent years, the NMRA has pointed out that the standards it developed have made interoperability possible for equipment made by different manufacturers. Whether this is the case is debatable, since in many other industries (such as the Windows-compatible PC industry), issues of compatibility and interoperability have worked themselves out without a standards-setting body.
Had the NMRA attempted to set standards in opposition to what existing manufacturers were willing to produce in the early years of the hobby, it likely wouldn't have succeeded. As evidence, we still have the dimension for "O" gauge track, 1-1/4 inches, which is about 6 percent larger than the scale dimension, a discrepancy that doesn't appear in most other scales, and something the NMRA apparently wasn't able to rectify. In many cases, the NMRA's "standards setting" function has simply been to ratify the wishes of the key market players, or approve practices that were generally accepted anyway.
In fact, while the NMRA has pointed to its adoption of a Digital Command Control (DCC) standard as a key accomplishment in fairly recent times, its main action in developing this standard was to adopt in full the already-established DCC product specifications of a German company, Lenz. The NMRA claims credit in these instances for things that could well have happened without its intervention, and indeed appears to have ratified practices (like "O" gauge) that have caused problems in interoperability and compatibility for many years.
An episode in the early 1960s illustrates the questionable value of the NMRA in setting and enforcing standards. During this period, several manufacturers determined that it was necessary to reduce costs by coarsening wheel standards, and approached the NMRA to increase the tolerance on its standards to allow this. The NMRA officials directly responsible for the move agreed, but dissident members more concerned about maintaining product quality for the good of the hobby took a campaign to retain the earlier, tighter standards to the hobby press. The proposal was quickly withdrawn. However, the manufacturers involved proceeded to coarsen the dimensions of their wheels without the blessing of the NMRA's revised standard.
The manufacturers' decision to cheapen their particular products eventually backfired, since the buying public perceived the decline in quality, and the manufacturers left the hobby business. However, the NMRA was powerless to affect their business decision, and was nearly persuaded to endorse it.
Although the NMRA in the 1950s attempted to propose a standard HO coupler, it was never able to approve a design. The proposed design somehow reached the hobby manufacturers, who used it and advertised if for many years as the "NMRA coupler" without objection from the NMRA. Its results in operation were so poor that the hobby press editorialized that it was a factor in beginners' frustration with the hobby; at that point, the NMRA distanced itself from the design. The actual HO standard coupler was developed by a manufacturer (Kadee) and achieved market acceptance as a de facto standard without any endorsement from the NMRA. When the Kadee patents expired, other manufacturers also developed Kadee-compatible couplers without the need for a standard. A standard N scale coupler was adopted by manufacturers early in the history of that scale, by the expedient of one manufacturer making a successful design available for license without charge by other manufacturers. This happened in Europe, with no intermediation by the NMRA. However, this non-NMRA standard has subsequently been replaced by another non-NMRA standard, an N scale Kadee (now Microtrains) coupler.
It's significant, I think, that the first graphic the user sees when opening the NMRA's national page is an organization chart. While the organization endorses on its web site the non-controversial "World's Greatest Hobby" program intended to improve the hobby's public image, discussed in the introduction to this essay, its own focus is primarily internal, especially following a financial crisis and dues increase, which has led the organization to reassess many of its activities in light of actual need. Other than statements like that in the meeting minutes cited above, "The [Board of Trustees] restated their support [for] the 'World’s Greatest Hobby' campaign", the organization has made no practical effort to further that campaign's goals.
The NMRA is, in fact, a highly bureaucratic, internally focused organization that exists largely to justify the need of its many local, regional, and national officers for important-seeming activities to keep themselves busy. In this it resembles fraternal organizations, as pointed out by one hobbyist, "where everybody has a high-falutin' title and wears a funny hat" (we should not ignore the fact that many enthusiastic NMRA participants do in fact wear traditional railroad headgear to NMRA functions). Indeed, since so much NMRA activity is busy work, it has been a serious challenge for the organization to identify justifiable costs versus unnecessary ones in the effort to clean its financial house.
Like many internally focused organizations (and indeed some cults), its communications are filled with organization-specific jargon and acronyms. The Board of Trustees is the BOT. The Achievement Program is the AP. Via the web site, you can easily identify your Regional AP Manager, and with his help, you can become a Master Model Railroader, or MMR.
This complacency and inward-directedness has been criticized for many years, and in fact was a factor in the "prototype modeler" movement, which specifically abjured many aspects of NMRA-style organization. Eventually there was an effort, apparently connected with some in the "prototype modeler" movement, to establish a new umbrella organization, the American Model Railroad Association. This appears to have gotten the NMRA's attention, and it undertook reforms.
One of the reforms, mentioned earlier, was to provide rooms at national conventions for "prototype modelers" to meet and display their models. This apparently defused one major focus of criticism, though it was a largely symbolic gesture. Another was to institute the Achievement Program, an innovation that allowed members to earn certificates of competence in various areas of the hobby (the organization had previously paid little attention to hands-on model railroad activities, as opposed to meetings, banquets, conventions, and the like).
I joined the NMRA in 1995, knowing about the group's poor reputation, but deciding to give it a chance in light of the upcoming Long Beach, CA national convention in 1996. My experiences were uniformly disappointing. The committee members I met in working to get my own layout (documented on this site) on the bus tours of local layouts turned out to be elderly, having some difficulty dealing with new members and preferring to continue with the long-established relationships in their own cliques. As a result, they offered numerous criticisms of my layout (which I took in good spirit and addressed prior to the layout tours). It wasn't until after the convention was over that I got to see the layouts of the committee members and their cronies, which were astonishing in the ineptitude of their execution.
While some of those who attended the Long Beach national convention were in fact the elite of the hobby -- established authors, noted craftsmen, and careful researchers -- many more were people with what seemed to be only a superficial interest in the hobby, having seemingly chosen the convention almost at random as a vacation activity. As the bus tours came to visit my layout, I was puzzled that families would elect to spend major time and money traveling to such a destination, when their comments and questions revealed such a limited interest in the hobby.
All conventioneers were required to be NMRA members. The total number of NMRA members nationally (2007) is something in the neighborhood of 19,500. The current circulation of Model Railroader magazine (MR) is 177,000. Both NMRA membership and MR's circulation have declined in recent years, but the relative numbers would suggest that members of the NMRA number roughly 10% of active participants in the hobby. They do not, however, appear to correspond in any definite way to an elite, or even a group with an informed interest in model railroading, based on my experience.
Local NMRA officers have self-described the group's purpose to me as "primarily a retirement-age social activity." Interest in the model railroad hobby, while a basic qualifier for membership in the group, seems to take a subordinate role to other social interactions among long-standing groups of friends, who do not actively work to recruit or welcome new members, either into the organization or into their social relationships. These were a particular group of local officers. The national organization has little control over the local organizations, who select their officers via nominating committees and single-candidate slates from the established groups of cronies (however, promotion to national-level officer results from service as a local officer and nomination from that pool). As a result, local organizations differ widely in their makeup and the level of local activity.
Interested in the Achievement Program, I worked to earn several certificates of competence, but found the process very frustrating. The applications for each certificate required extensive paperwork and supporting documentation. Each application had to be submitted to a local coordinator, who submitted the paperwork up through a regional and national chain of evaluation and approval. Given the complexity of the approval process and the caliber of volunteers in the program, my applications were lost at one point. Although the standards for the certificates appear to be quite clear, differences of interpretation took place at each level, and my awards were delayed as these differences had to be resolved. It seems likely that the actual purpose of the program is less to validate the skills of the participants than it is to reinforce the importance of the petty officials who run it.
These experiences led me to make an economically rational decision that the cost of NMRA membership wasn't justified. I wasn't meeting fellow hobbyists at my level of interest through the organization, an important failing from my point of view. Key local officers showed little interest in hands-on hobby activities, but perceived the organization as a way to gain prestige through important-sounding titles. In fact, I had a general sense that, even though the stated goals of the organization were support and enhancement of model railroad hobby activities, the actual goals were social interactions among established cliques, most of which could be accomplished without reference to the hobby. The steady decline of national membership in recent years suggests that a segment of informed membership continues to make this decision, and fewer new participants decide membership is worthwhile.
The fiscal crisis that came to a head in 2000, caused apparently by undisciplined spending at the national level, resulted in a dues increase. This increase covered continued operation at approximately the level that had caused the crisis, while the leadership undertook a lengthy and inconclusive analysis of what costs might be cut. While deciding to increase dues, the leadership recognized that this would cause an additional loss of membership (around 25% to date), but their priority was clearly the preservation of the core, inward-looking organization in its general current form, at the expense of narrowing its presence in the hobby. It appeared, for instance, that officers were charging the NMRA expenses for frequent organization-related travel, a practice that, while legitimate, is typically cut during corporate cost-saving efforts. Board of Directors meeting minutes available on the NMRA web site show that the organization routinely conducts a "mid year" Board meeting during the winter at various places around the country. The minutes suggest that not only the directors, but various invited guests and headquarters staff attend -- the minutes show only who was absent, not how many actually attended each meeting. But extrapolating from the discussions, I would estimate that 20 people travel on expenses to each such meeting.
Allowing for refundable air tickets, car rental, meals, hotel, mileage, parking, and incidentals, it wouldn't be surprising if each person were reimbursed for $2000 travel for the three-day weekend, or $40,000 per meeting, which represents the hard-earned annual dues (less Scale Rails) of over 1000 members. (For instance, refundable round trip air fare between Cincinnati and Seattle, the itinerary for the NMRA President at a recent meeting, is about $1500. Hotel could easily be $150 per night, rental car another $150 for the weekend.) However, the NMRA does not appear to have had enough sense of urgency to cut such junkets in the face of its financial shortfall. We'll see more on NMRA travel below. This also doesn't count equivalent travel that's presumably reimbursed for Board members and other invitees attending the annual convention in the summer. That Board members benefit from seemingly extravagant travel benefits must reinforce attitudes of exclusiveness and superiority that don't benefit the organization as a whole. The travel is also, of course, a powerful incentive to go along and not rock the boat.
Much of the day-to-day purposeful activity of the organization is centered on its national, regional, and local meetings and conventions. These, interestingly enough, extensively incorporate swap meets and train shows, whose unsupervised development, as we have seen, is not helpful to the interests of committed hobbyists, since a bubble psychology distorts market action, and the low quality of merchandise and exhibits results in an overpriced admission cost and in fact damages the public image of the hobby. Insofar as the NMRA sponsors and supports such train shows, it is contributing to what has become a community problem, and this conflict prevents it from recognizing or addressing the problem for the good of the hobby.
A message from the NMRA's president in the November, 2007 Scale Rails (the current name for the former NMRA Bulletin) illustrates the level of cynicism -- indeed, corruption -- among the organization's elite. "There are even divisions and regions that have elected as 'officers' persons who are not members of the NMRA. Some of these individuals have never been members, or have not been members for many years." The message goes on to say, on one hand, that the NMRA can't enforce its policy because, the "officers" not being on the mailing list, won't see the message in Scale Rails! This is peculiar -- the organization recently said it had 12 paid staff members at its headquarters. Apparently they're all too busy to take an hour from their schedules to check the names of regional and divisional officers (readily found on the web) against the membership list!
Instead, the president wants other NMRA members to turn in their non-complying regional and divisional officers! (But how would an ordinary member know? And the regional or divisional treasurer is probably on the boodle himself!)
Oddly, the only problem Brestel seems to see here is with insurance. That this should be an astonishingly bad leadership example seems not to have occurred to him. An
