Model Train Journal

Please let me know if this has been posted elsewhere in MTJ.

Changing times at CTT
While the excellence of our published articles has remained consistent in the pages of CTT since its inception, inevitable changes in the publishing industry have caused us to shift our footing once again. As of this Winter 2023 issue, CTT will begin new life as a quarterly publication.
--David Popp
Director, Trains.com

The new princess... Summer Fall Winter Spring: https://youtu.be/NVOgXiFAfGI?si=fkKtAuB4FjY-XD40

So is this a measure of decline in the vintage toy train hobby, or just a symptom of changes in media, specifically print?

It’s both, I think.

Mostly the changes in print media. Folks don't want to pay for subscriptions or are not interested in print media, preferring on-line subscriptions and electronic storage. Paper is expensive and shipping magazines is expensive. Any number of medical and scientific journals are moving to on-line publishing only. No hard copies. Some newspapers have disappeared or become heavily on-line in their presence. So changes in both the production and consumption ends of the product.

Might also be the exit of major advertisers from print. Online ads must be proving far more effective. The business model for most magazines depends heavily on ad revenue, likely far more than paid subscriptions.

One of the major problems with print, especially when they do reviews, is they are so outdated it's not worth reading. By the time print reviews an item there have been YouTube "influencers" reviewing them, sort of, the average Joe YouTuber actual reviewing them as well as the on-line forum users giving their $0.02. The item has either been discussed to death or out of stock for months.

Even articles about the hobby are often 4 months too late as it's been discussed to death on the forums. I can follow along layout build and see layout photos all on the forums as well. I think eventually magazines, especially in our small niche' hobby, will be a thing of the past. The forums owned my magazine publishers may have accelerated their own demise.

I subscribed a year ago and was disappointed. There just weren't any articles of any more than the most trivial interest.

Besides the dramatic and obvious changes in media from print to online, the segment of the hobby mostly devoted to collecting and to running vintage trains has for many years been declining relative to the segment mostly devoted to operating new trains with a high level of detail and technological features. The older generations that comprised most of those interested in collecting/running vintage trains have been dying out. The somewhat younger folks in the hobby--and the young people entering the hobby--are mostly interested in the new trains. Classic Toy Trains magazine has from its beginning been slanted more to the collecting/vintage/nostalgia folks (hence "Classic" in its name), and that segment of the hobby has contracted dramatically.

Collecting in any form seems to be ebbing in popularity. You see that in toy trains, ceramic village stuff, books, furniture, stamps and coins, pretty much everything. The generations after the Boomers have little interest in filling their houses/apartments with stuff. I can empathize with those feelings as I look around at this mess . I've tried giving away vintage sets to young families and have found few takers; just a polite "No thank you, we haven't the space."

One of the only things that seems to be holding folks' interest collecting-wise is guns. A couple of my friends have massive collections, as do their sons (yet the hunting sport seems to have peaked years ago, at least around here).

Anyway, CTT was at its best for me when it featured one or two prewar or postwar layouts in an issue. I learned a lot from seeing what other folks were up to. Running the stuff has always been my primary interest; collecting per se, not so much. With fewer and fewer of these type layouts around, CTT became largely irrelevant to me, which is unfortunate.

Before the internet started Model Railroader magazine had an occasional article about 3 rail O gage and that was it, I mean nothing else at all. So I was overjoyed when CTT came out. But It never was what I wanted.
I have every issue up to a few years ago when I let my subscription lapse. I got it one more year recently and didn't like it enough to continue.

healey36 wrote:Might also be the exit of major advertisers from print. Online ads must be proving far more effective. The business model for most magazines depends heavily on ad revenue, likely far more than paid subscriptions.

Oct of 2023. I Helped with the move and reopening of a museum (VAMPA). Check us out online.Then use tik tok to check us out. Two goth girls made short videos of their visit. I think they are called "reels" anyway #vampa. Their videos received 300,000plus views. all free to us. Then more people came and made videos. still no charge to us. We can't supply enough toilet paper for the customers. Septic tank guy comes every three days to drain our tank. We have cut trees down to ad parking. our place is a madhouse. The only advertising cost to us is business cards. 6 weeks in we had already been featured on the morning news twice ( they caught wind of us from tik tok) Still not a cost to us. For months leading up to our opening we talked about advertising, A budget and where to do it.$4,000 was set aside for adds in local papers along with money for some posters. to be placed in our others stores.hardly touched any of that budget. We are 5 guys with no idea about Tic Tok. How to do it or edit. But guess what every weekend 30 or more people post their videos on tic Tok and they get a quarter of a million views and we get 500 customers at $15 a clip. F&*k print media. it would have never done that for us! Magazines are dead. f they don't go digital they are done.

For how long have you guys had a vampire infestation in Doylestown?

With MTH being gone, the magazine is now free of useless filler material. Being thinner is not such a bad thing.

Interesting news:
Kalmbach rail magazines, Trains.com sold to Firecrown Media
and

Kalmbach Media sells Model Railroader, other magazines, to Tennessee publisher

I used to read the Coffee Pot daily in CTT, it is where people talked about what they're doing and you sort of started to feel like you knew the guys till Ott banned me. No way to treat your readers.I just checked it and it was way down in participation.