<story><title>Enthusiasts struggle to keep model railway industry on track</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/14/an-aged-hobby-enthusiasts-struggle-to-keep-model-railway-industry-on-track</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lnrd</author><text>I think what drew people to model trains was the ability to create and automate your tracks. It&amp;#x27;s an interesting and fun thing to do, basically designing a system and going trough all the small things needed to make it work. I can see how today this itch can be scratched by many different videogames (Factorio, just to give one example), while decades ago it was either model train or nothing much else.&lt;p&gt;I think younger generations are drawn to cheaper and easier to access forms of entertainment that provide similar intellectual experience. It&amp;#x27;s a shame for the hobby, but I find it a very reasonable thing to happen.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dylan604</author><text>Seems to gloss over the physical space required to have a model train. A video game can come in many sizes from phones to consoles and is much more accessible and even portable.&lt;p&gt;Growing up, we had a 4&amp;#x27;x8&amp;#x27; sheet of plywood covered in the fake grass and then decked out with structures, trees, people, cars, and all sorts of stuff. It was a lot of fun setting it up, building the models, and deciding on a track layout. Took weeks building it. It took days to get bored with it. For some reason, we thought it a good idea to tack down the tracks for better stability, but it made it a nightmare to rearrange the tracks. However, it stayed like that for &lt;i&gt;years&lt;/i&gt; and from time to time as I got older would fire it up and quickly bore of it again.</text></comment>
<story><title>Enthusiasts struggle to keep model railway industry on track</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/14/an-aged-hobby-enthusiasts-struggle-to-keep-model-railway-industry-on-track</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lnrd</author><text>I think what drew people to model trains was the ability to create and automate your tracks. It&amp;#x27;s an interesting and fun thing to do, basically designing a system and going trough all the small things needed to make it work. I can see how today this itch can be scratched by many different videogames (Factorio, just to give one example), while decades ago it was either model train or nothing much else.&lt;p&gt;I think younger generations are drawn to cheaper and easier to access forms of entertainment that provide similar intellectual experience. It&amp;#x27;s a shame for the hobby, but I find it a very reasonable thing to happen.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shagie</author><text>&amp;gt; I think what drew people to model trains was the ability to create and automate your tracks.&lt;p&gt;The original home of many people who became hackers (old use of the word) was the TMRC at MIT.  Tech Model Railroad Club - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Tech_Model_Railroad_Club&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Tech_Model_Railroad_Club&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;As told in Steven Levy&amp;#x27;s Hackers book, there were two groups in the TMRC.  There was the group that went on train rides and did meticulous models on top of the track... and there was the systems and powers group that worked with wires and automation (from the telephone company) under the track.&lt;p&gt;From the Wikipedia article...&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The club was composed of several groups, including those who were interested in building and painting replicas of certain trains with historical and emotional values, those that wanted to do scenery and buildings, those that wanted to run trains on schedules, and those composing the &amp;quot;Signals and Power Subcommittee&amp;quot; who created the circuits that made the trains run. This last group would be among the ones who popularized the term &amp;quot;hacker&amp;quot; among many other slang terms, and who eventually moved on to computers and programming.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; ...&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; At the club itself, a semi-automatic control system based on telephone relays was installed by the mid-1950s. It was called the ARRC (Automatic Railroad Running Computer). It could run a train over the entire set of track, in both directions, without manual intervention, throwing switches and powering tracks ahead of the train. A mainframe program was used to compute the path, and all modifications to the layout had to be compatible with this ability.</text></comment>