Hi,
I am looking for three issues Model Trains Magazines - December 1961, January 1962, and March 1962.
Thanks.
Doug vV

Are you looking to buy them or just get copies for archival use? I think the Md. Rail Heritage Library has a complete set, and I could copy the contents on a photocopier.

Are you aware that you're looking for the last couple issues printed? Kalmbach acquired "HO Model Trains" in March 1954, and changed the title to "Model Trains". No issue was published for February 1954. The last regular issue was March, 1962. A layout construction series begun in this magazine was completed in Model Railroader.

See http://index.mrmag.com/tm.exe?opt=M&proc=HOMT

usual disclaimer...no vested interest, just another satisfied customer--I completed my collection of the original L&RP (RIP) through them.

Try this vendor, they list all three issues at $3.00 each
http://www.railpub.com/Catalogs/us_rr_model_magazines.pdf

Hope to have been of help.

sc 'doc' lewis

I noticed the Portage Hill and Communipaw layout started in Model Trains and completed in MR. I did not know the history of Model Trains.

I am starting a Railroad Museum here and I have someone who saw the PH&C in my older issues of MR. I was thinking about purchasing them. I plan to leave my magazine collection to the Museum if we ever get a permanent place to stay.

I could not recall the name Railpubs. I've dealt with them before in trying to locate plans for PRR electric motors.

Thanks.

Doug

Good luck with that... I've got 25 years of MR, RMC and others, and I literally cannot give them away. I've contacted several museums in the Pacific NW, nobody wants them....

The success of magazines (or for that matter books or any other similar materials) is often determined by whether the museum in question has a library, and/or some means for resale (such as a book store).

If you're not able to find a good home within the museum community, I would recommend donation to any local retirement communities. I have done this a couple of times over the past years and these types of magazines were always gratefully
appreciated.

For some reason or another we have tons of model RR magazines sitting in storage.

I've literally been saving these since I was a kid, there are hundreds, if not thousands of them. The local retirement community won't be happy when I show up with about 10 totes full of them.

They used to be something that was worth saving. Recently I realized that they've lost most, if not all, of their value. There are two main reasons for that.

The first is that "interweb" thing everyone's talking about. Apparently you can post messages "online" or something? ;) Why dig through huge piles of dusty magazines when a few clicks on Google will find the answer.

The second, and more important factor is that model railroading has had a quantum shift in how it works. DCC has made the old DC wiring info obsolete. The "centerfolds" they used to run, with detailed locomotive plans, are fascinating to look at, but when's the last time you ran into anyone who says "Yeah, I scratchbuilt that from plans in MR..."

So I'm sorry to admit it, but I think they may be worthless...

Branford Electric Railway Association's Shore Line Trolley Museum has a Gift Shop that is able to sell used magazines relatively cheap for the Museum's benefit.

I follow auction prices for rail magazine sets, in part to help establish value for donations to the Md. Rail Heritage Library. The valuations for back issue sets of various magazines has dropped almost precipitously from 25 or even ten years ago. A complete set of Rails Northeast, which used to bring ca. $200, brought only $10 in a March auction, while a complete set of small-format (1940-1947) Trains brought $180. Book prices are down a bit, and two GG1 builders plates sold for under $500 each:

http://www.maurerail.com/asp/prices.asp (See "railroadiana" auctions; "trains" are model or toy trains.)

In a more recent auction, a complete set of Trains in binders from 1960-1990 failed to attract a single bid.

My own interpretation: a complete set of Trains, Railfan & Railroad, Rail News, Railpace, etc. really does take up a heck of a lot of room nowadays, and having to paw through such vast amounts of printed words and photos for, as an example, information on O. Winston Link photos or when Strasburg ran "7002" and 1223 just gets to push the laws of diminishing returns, even with an index available online. Model railroad magazines are even worse in this regard, bloated with advertising pages and taking up far more bulk for the rare useful article/plans documenting the operations/etc. of a branch line, rolling stock type, or the like amidst all the articles about wiring switches, programming your DCC chips, or applying lighting to your model coaches.

One collector I talked to recently sadly came to me asking for the best way to dispose of his rail collection as part of a massive cull--apparently the weight of his bookshelves was actually buckling the floor of his apartment!

Similarly, I could curse the attention spans of the current bunch of young people, who seem to have as much interest in reading older copies of Trains (the ones in which color was a rarity) as we would in dredging through reams of 1880s/1890s newspapers in the library in hopes of finding a few column inches about the opening or closing of some line. But then I'd sound like an old fogey chasing kids off my (non-existent) lawn.

Computers and the internet have really made paper records a liability. There is so much current information to be found online, the labor and storage cost of paper issues is prohibitive. Not to mention, we are more mobile, and the cost of packing and moving this stuff every few years is significant. We all might be interested in browsing these old issues once, but as a research source or archive, they are not cost effective.

For example, in academia, we almost never handle paper journals anymore. Everything is available as pdf files through the library website. My hard drive is filled with pdf files of published papers I cite in research.

We just finished organizing the basement yesterday, and I have shelves of magazines that I am holding more for emotional and nostalgic reasons than any practical purpose. Many of them have not been viewed in decades. I know most of them can be obtained through interlibrary loan through my university if I really needed them. The key problem is knowing what to request. Most of these are not indexed (with abstracts) and interlibrary load rarely supports general browsing of periodical issues.

One more advance in home scanners, and I will just slice the bindings of all of these and scan them to disk. The main obstacle is finding a page feeder robust enough to avoid jamming with the wrinkled and torn pages, as well as double sided scanning.

If Trains, Model Railroader, etc. ever made the effort to scan and distribute their archives as pdf, the old paper issues would immediately be worthless.

There's a precedent for this. Some hobby and technical publications, such as the PRRT&HS Keystone and amateur radio publications such as CQ, have already been reissued as PDF CD anthologies. This has successfully rendered the back-issue value of CQ, etc. as zero, but as of the latest auctions, Keystones are still seemingly holding at least some value. The critical difference is that between information content versus collectible value. The unruly passion of collecting obsessively may be abating somewhat, but at the moment, if I want the information on Baltimore's waterfront rail operations, I still have to hunt down three different issues of the B&OHS's Sentinel and one issue of Railfan from 1978--provided I know about these articles in the first place.

The problem lies in whether the magazine publishers hold absolute rights to the contents of said issues, or are willing to chance anyone complaining about republication rights. In the case of most magazines and content, it's irrelevant from a practical standpoint, but it only takes the estate of one O. Winston Link, one Malcolm Furlow, or the like to put the kibosh on such a republication proposal.

Hi,

First, I asked Trains Magazine if they would reprint an article titled "Into the Darkness" which was about one person's trip on a D&RGW narrow gauge freight over Cumbres in the snow and dark. The reply was that the copyright they had to print the article had expired and they did not know who currently owned the rights. As I learned when I published an article in Live Steam magazine. the publisher has exclusive copyright for the material for 60 days after the date on the magazine. After that they own the copyright to the information's layout but no the information itself (photos, text, and drawings are the author's).

Second, The US copyright office tells me that anything over 75 years old is considered public domain - anyone can use. So scanning them to CD usually has no copyright issues. Apparently, some estates can modify the contents to renew the copyright (or something like that) - that has to be checked out by each individual item.

Third, when I wrote my book on the Gainesville Midland Railway, I had several official guides that crumbled in my hands. I scanned mine to CD and then thought that maybe someone else would like copies. I have been selling them since 2005. I checked with National Railway Publishing Company who published these. Apparently in about 2001, they ended up being sold and/or merged with another company. Since then, they went through several owner/publishers. After about 18 months, I found the current owner/publisher and asked one of their salesmen about rights to scan and there was no issue with that. It was just getting to the current publisher.

Forth, although I strongly suspect that the market for for paper items will shrink, I doubt it will ever go away. I (at 53) will always enjoy the pleasure of holding the actual book in my hands while reading. My neice (19) enjoys reading paper books and does purchase out-of-print books. I myself have several (30+) books both on the computer and in paper form for whatever mood I am in - sometimes I like to have the computer read a book to me.

Just my views and experience on the issue (pun intended).

Doug vV

Im a teenager and I enjoy reading the older issues of Trains and MR. (Maybe becuase I have a hobby shop right by me that sells them for half of the cover price, so thats 25 cents for most of them.) I have about 200-300 MR's from 1947 untill now and about 100 Trains from 1953 untill now and I think that its interesting to look at how it was back then, like when the FM trainmaster came out and the Big Boys stopped running.

Looking into the old Portage Hill and Communipaw series and looking for a track plan, I saw in one issue how to build a spoked driver for a steam locomotive.

One of my other projects has been to build an HO scale model of many of the PRR electrics and have not been able to find anything close except for making new axles for some O-scale drivers and turning them down to HO (width and profile).

This article has a great approach for the drivers that I had not thought of. Like one magazine advertised for a while - Every issue is new until you've read it.

Never can tell where the next nugget comes from.

Doug vV