Hacker News

Oh no, Hattons are closing!!

I’ve always loved model railways, but the hobby has got increasingly expensive over the last 20 years or so. The high end has eaten the middle, and much as the details and fidelity of the models are now wonderful, the prices are absurd and the target demographic is retired boomers on final salary pensions. Combine that with the space constraints - 00 is the only gauge anywhere near being affordable and it requires 6’x4’ for a simple oval - and it’s a recipe for disaster.

Hornby are right to push TT, and personally I’d steer the industry heavily away from DCC and other expensive digital add-ons as defaults, as cool as they are. The right angle to push is that of unplugged creativity, not connected consumerism. Not good for profits in the short term, perhaps, but the hobby needs a new generation who dream of joining the local club and building their own large-scale layouts in retirement. If there’s no generationality then it’s over.

Me? My dream is simple now. Two-track garden railway loop along the fence with a few sidings and passing loops. I have neither the time nor the space to fully model anything, but I want to sit back and watch the trains go by anyway.

I've known and met exactly one person into model trains. Their entire basement was dedicated to their model train setup and wished for even more space. It was pretty awesome to watch the trains go but not awesome enough to ever want to get into the hobby.

People can afford hobbies???

I wanted a model train setup when I was younger, had a Bachmann N-scale set. There was a model railway store and toy museum in Virginia when I was a kid called "Mike's Trainland", and I used to go there and look at their setups.

I just don't have the space or time for it now. But there are a couple of video games that let me scratch the itch.

Don’t do it. The train store is where they whacked Bobby.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

“You have to have a lot of space for railway modelling and these days folk do not typically have a spare bedroom or loft kicking around unless they’re a retired boomer,” he said.

The phenomenal success over the last decade of hobby manufacturers including Lego and Games Workshop has demonstrated that the appetite for assembling scale models from large boxes of plastic parts is considerably deeper than many might have guessed.

In 2022, Hornby – still Britain’s leader in the space, and the owner of Airfix, Corgi and Scalextric – announced a search for a new chief executive, appointing the former head of Paperchase a year later.

“TT:120 was conceived to both create additional growth from existing enthusiasts and to open up the hobby to a new customer group, for whom the space required for the current 00 gauge was perhaps too much of a barrier to entry,” it said.

The bottomless world of the internet may be providing model railways with stiff competition for the interests of today’s youth, but it’s also opened up new possibilities.

Armed with a 3D printer, Google translate and historically cheap international shipping, the model railway community has become a global one.

The original article contains 666 words, the summary contains 198 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!