What is really sad is that 40 years from now the youngsters of today will look back on "now" and and recall it as "the good old days".
Seriously guys, I'm a fairly critical person, and I don't rellly have much problem with the magazine the way it's written. It often seems a little thin, and I think that steam belongs in Classic Trains...those are about the only two criticisms that I have.
Sure, I miss Don Philips, and Larry Kauffmann's wit, but ya can't have everything.
Sometimes I think this magazine suffers a similar peril to other "enthusiast" magazines that I read.....and what that is....we come into the hobby pretty green, so everything we read is new information to us...we are spellbound. But, as we acquire knowledge, we gain a level of expertise, and suddenly the magazine's "entry level" articles no longer fascinate us.
So really it is more ~us~ that is changing....as we become more sophisticated, we become harder to please.
I do miss the way Hemphill used to push back-issues here in the forum...where some reader would ask a specific question about railroad operations, and Mark would begin his response with "that subect was expertly explained in the jun 1966 issue of trains magazine, but following is a brief explanation...."
I thought that showed marketing savvy .......I don't know how many back issues that actually sold, but I thought that the effort was commendable.
I think that Kalmbach's back catalog is an underutilized asset. What I would like to see is the creation of an on-line table of contents for every back issue, with at least a short phrase describing the content of each individual article in eash issue.
Then, sell online .iso files of either each issue or entire years for a set fee, maybe $2.50 per issue with a discounted $25 for an entire calandar year.
Then we could burn our own discs and save Kalmbach the costly production/distribution.
Sure, that could introduce some piracy issues where readers could possibly team up and buy strategically, then share with one another....but at least people would be buying them, which I guess isn't happening a whole lot right now.
I'm betting their net proceeds from a plan such as this would exceed what they net out of the DVD collection, and the compatibility issue with "Mac vs PC" goes away entirely.
My own local public library has a complete collections of Trains back issues, hardbound, going all the way back to the forties. And what I find is, going into a particular back issue looking for the original story that was cited in a research paper I am following, I really get pulled into other stories also available in the issues I'm searching for. An "OH, I didn't know they had that" type moment.
I believe the method I outlined above would harness that type of appeal, and put it to work selling back catalog items cost effectively, whereas I don't see that they have much going on otherwise to exploit that asset.
