I like trains! I only have one, but the hope is that one day My gf and I will have a collection. She likes trains too! Lets see pics! You should check out Jeremy at pinball mayhem on youtube. He also has another channel, too many hobbies. He loves pinball and trains.

I have trains but they are in a box. Mine worked last time I tried it. My little brother’s is probably five years newer with a much lighter locomotive does not work. I also have my dad’s from when he was a kid and that one kind of worked. Probably just a fuse.

I also have some pieces of my grandmother’s set. That one must be pushing a hundred years old by now.

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My dad's got his basement wall to wall full of toy trains that used to also house our two pins (one EM, one SS), and his club ran the local train show so I'd always be brought along as a kid.

Yea.. I kinda love them. My two Live Steam locomotives.

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That’s too funny! I was just looking into trains myself, last night.
Although I want to buy a full-sized locomotive. Turns out they’re actually very affordable.
Found one in the states that only costs 2 JJP CE’s!
Just gotta find a place for a 300 ton hunk of iron...

I was more into H.O. Slot cars from the late 60s and early 70s but I had a friend Bobby from NY that was into the trains.

Haven’t heard from him in awhile, hope he’s doing ok.

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Back in the 1970's I sold a large part of my Lionel train collection to basically pay cash for our first house when I got married. (I started collecting when I was about 13 years old building on my original train sets we had from my earlier childhood). Next thing you know two kids, a couple businesses, and life took over and I never looked back. Then this Summer as I was finishing up selling off my pinball parts business I tripped into a deal on some train stuff locally and now I am back into the hobby again in a 'big way"

This Corona Virus mess has me more or less "stuck at home" (not as much because I am afraid to travel but more because most of the things I would typically be doing when traveling are not happening (or open) right now because of Corona Virus restrictions). So I really needed something new in my life to keep me busy until this Covid mess is behind us. Now all of a sudden I am buying and selling trains like I did for about 15 years when I was younger. Not as much "collecting" right now as I was back then. More about buying "junk" and fixing it up and reselling it.

I am setting back a few items each week to add to my personal collection but I doubt I'll ever get involved with doing a layout again or anything. Hopefully before I get to that point we will be able to travel again and then the trains will hit the "back burner" again.

As with the pinball machines my favorite part of the model railroad hobby is taking something "nasty" & broken and bringing it back to life again. So to me both hobbies are really more about doing the repairs than enjoying the finished product. I grew up working with my hands so that is in my DNA and I have to constantly be fixing something or I feel like my days are wasted.

Sorry for another typical long post from Skip but nothing is ever "small or short" when I am involved! Maybe my new name should be too-many-trains?

On another note - please do all you can to help PHOF move on time. DONATE to: https://gofund.me/37f7e2b2
If you have not seen Tim's post here on Pinside he is in a bit of a bind right now. Donations are tax deductible since he is a registered non profit!

I had a massive collection of postwar Lionel trains. I had over 80% of everything Lionel made between 1949-1953. But I sold my entire collection just before I moved from Mass to NC. 12 years ago. But I loved them.

Hopefully you bought that stuff more recently or you likely took a pretty big beating selling it at today's prices. It really makes me sad to see how little some of the great old Post War Lionel stuff is selling for these days. 40 years ago I would have never believed we would see the day you could get more out of an HO or N gauge train car then you can get for a classic Lionel train car. Items I was selling in the later 1970's and early 1980's is bringing pennies on the dollar today. I picked up close to 100 Lionel and American Flyer Locomotives a few weeks ago for less then $25 each. A lot of them were the engines I was selling back in the early 1980's for $150 to $250 each.

Unlike the pinball hobby the model railroad hobby is slowly dying and has been for the past 20 plus years. Kids today don't care about toy trains and us old farts are dying off so without "young blood" no one wants our old "junk".

Wow a great thread jr. I was very involved as a teenager with model trains where all my spare cash went. Also a keen follower of railways generally and occasionally tune into rail live cam which focuses on many US railway systems. That freight yard at Belen NM is something else!

More recently I have set up a model train layout based on a vintage Marklin 3 rail system and a car layout using the vintage Minic motorway system. Unfortunately due to my pre-occupation with pinball, arcade, vending and trade stimulator restos they are both in a state of chaos so I would be too embarrassed to provide any pics.

However I did set up a Marklin layout for my grandsons last year and these are a couple of pics. One thing I learnt in setting up that layout was that the grandsons had no interest in any automation-they wanted to control the trains!

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No the black marklin tender is from 1945-46, did you have any relatives who served in Germany after the war? Marklin restarted production in 1945 and mainly sold to us soldiers to bring dollars to germany.

Yes i am heavily into em pins and trains.

Regards

Henrik Schütz
Sweden

There's a bit of truth to your statement but it's more nuanced than that. Someone else compared "Lionel" trains to "Woodrail / EM" pins and that's a better comparison.

There *is* a steady - maybe even surprising - amount of younger blood in the model railroad hobby. But as with all generations, that blood's affections mostly ties to what it sees. Today's 20- and 30-somethings have no idea what an F Unit is and likely have never seen one, say nothing of a random steam locomotive. Just as most older folks couldn't care less for a GEVO or SD70ACe - but guess what sells the most these days, versus the trains "you can't give away"?

IMO the biggest challenge to model railroading's appeal is the severely limited relevance railroads themselves have today. Tens of thousands of miles of rail have been removed in the last 30 years; mergers have consolidated once-proud regional institutions into alphabet soup; inspiring paint schemes and logos of the past are buried under rust and graffiti while new cars are monochrome with few markings at all. 9/11 turned formerly accommodating and friendly facilities into veritable police state. Railroading is not nearly as broadly inspiring as it once was. My kids do not and never could forge the same affection I once did. It is literally impossible.

Couple that to model railroading's own historic production glut: everything made in the last 50+ years will always be available. But more is always made. And much like today's pinball enthusiasts craving "deeper games with more mechs and/or flow", today's modelers want hyper-realistic detail that was literally infeasible 20 years ago, let alone 50. So the market for "Lionel" and similar has crashed and probably won't ever come back to previous levels. Vintage HO and N and other stuff will mostly suffer the same fate. Yet, truly high-end stuff tends to hold its value - just like high-end pinball machines.

Compared to pinball, model trains are a mass-market consumer commodity much cheaper to buy and easier to store. And the hobby fractures into so many sub-interests and attendant cultures that there's not really a cohesive "social whole", and the numbers participating in any sub-interest aren't always super viable on a regional basis. Whereas pinball is a bit more cohesive, socially. And more scarce. So supply / demand works more in its favor today.

Trains are not a hobby for the weak that's for sure. But they're a rewarding niche all the same for those who "get" its unique blend of tangible technical and artistic skill with creative reign and limitless objectives.

Heh, I gave Skip a break from "too many words" lol. I'll shaddap now.

Happy Rails!

I have been around toy trains forever (and am an engineer for a local railroad), but only recently gotten into the pinball hobby. It has been interesting to see all the parallels, but also the contrasts. Pinball folks are surprised when I comment on how young of a crowd it is compared to the folks I know through the trains, haha. My model trains are mostly old Marx tinplate, but also have some nice G gauge stuff, including a couple live steam engines.

The most fun are the ride-on 7.5" gauge trains like SteamVette posted above. I have been fortunate enough to operate some, but the ones I own of that size are electric or mechanical (hey, how about that for the EM topic!). I have had the little gray engine for about 7 years now, it was originally built in the 70's or early 80's and had a generator in it. Unfortunately, it had been neglected for years. It still has same drive motor, but is powered off a deep cycle battery. The Railbike was a recent purchase, built by another local club member, it has been a blast. I took these photos just a couple days ago, was fun to get out of the house on a quiet day when nobody else was at our local track.

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I think EMs go along perfectly with classic toy trains, in my case its American Flyer S-Gauge trains from the 40's through 60's

I became interested in both in the early 70's in my pre-teen years, starting with my Dad's Flyer set from the late 40's,
I built my first layout and started getting used AF trains for Christmas.
About the same time I discovered pinball locally, it was a couple of years before Solid State games appeared.
I asked my parents if I could get a real pinball machine, my Dad took me to a local shop and we picked out a used one.
It was a Gottlieb Scuba from 1970, it was about 4 or 5 years old at the time, I think we paid $400, I still have it.

For years I had both the Scuba & my trains in my parent's basement, even built an HO layout next to the AF board.
The trains and pinball remained in the basement all through college, then my sister took Scuba to her house, she and her husband had a gameroom.
The trains got packed away, though every few years I would get interested in them again and buy a few more pieces, but didn't have a layout.
A few years after getting married in the 90's we moved into my grandparent's old house, that was 21 years ago
Soon after I decided to set up my trains again, my Dad helped me put a building behind our garage where I could work from home and have trains.
Not long after setting up the building, I got my old Scuba pinball back from my sister, it was no longer working
It set in my building for years before I got the courage about 4 years ago to tinker with it, surprisingly I got it working
Naturally I then started looking for other machines, and am now up to 4 EMs, all I can squeeze in there

I was working on a train tunnel/mountain when I got my 2nd pinball, and the layout has pretty much been in limbo since.
I'll eventually get back to the tunnel & layout once I have all the machines working properly, 2 of them have "issues"

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I’ve always wanted an operating train around the top of my game room. Continuously looping, maybe a foot down. Saw one at a restaurant going in and out of rooms and it was really cool!

Mine is a Jim Beam train. Each car a full bottle of whiskey.(well some not so full) Probably doesn’t get me in this club tho! Lol

Did I mention she’s southbound?

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Article in the New York Times today about Marklin - their orders are up 70% during the pandemic.

(paywall, sorry)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/business/model-trains-pandemic.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20210322&instance_id=28319&nl=the-morning&regi_id=132335168&segment_id=53900&te=1&user_id=f19f405398ed7c39a2fa395a217c85e0

New products (in German):

Over the last couple weeks I rebuilt a rotten flatcar that was in worse condition than I realized. Previous owner had left it outside for a couple years...so had to replace almost all the wood components. We visited a track near the University where we met...and painted the car to match. Had a lot of fun!

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Our layout is a simple HO track along the edges of 48” square board. We put it on the floor each year, with our tree in the middle. The bottom branches of the tree are hung with white string lights, to light the train.

I just picked up this little toy (pic) so now I need a second track.

My controller only runs one track. Would it put too much drain on the controller to run both tracks for this one little "engine"? Or even to run two trains? The output is 15vdc. 18VA.

Is this a bad idea for a small circle layout?

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Can’t add much here, but that train around the tree idea is awesome.
My dad had bought me a nice layout before he passed, I was 13, and I remember playing with it for a few years before we sold it to a neighbor. He had young kids.
That track gave a lot of happiness.