Text of an e-mail sent today to Firecrown (formerly Kalmbach) subscribers:



More:
https://www.trains.com/ctr/railroads/cl ... mper-post/

With how they're treating subscribers, they won't be around for much longer. They stopped sending me my issues aged ago even though I'm a subscriber into next year and they have flatly refused to change course, And I'm not alone.

I've now gone the Better Business Bureau route even though I'm not hopeful.

Similar experience, except it happened to me during the Kalmbach era - I got a great offer to renew early, then started getting two issues each month that stopped once my original subscription ended. Multiple calls to "customer service" brought no help.

I was picking up issues of Classic Trains every so often while browsing at Barnes & Noble. I will say that CT was still worth reading - I have to go get that last issue. Trains has left me cold for years now. I have been buying one or two issues a year and they have been consistently uninspired.

Sadly, I saw the same. Recently they pestered me to renew my subscription to Classic Trains as it was expiring? I laughed and said "Expiring? You haven't sent me an issue in at least a year, why would I renew?"

I think the issues (groan) started back in the Kalmbach era, when they outsourced customer service. Things started getting weird then, and only got worse.

They seemed determined to push everyone to digital and made it expensive to get the print issues. When I said that I should get a discount for my Model Railroader subscription, since I was already paying for the digital stuff with my Trains subscription, the reply was essentially "No, it doesn't work that way...."

Trains has always been my favorite and for the vast majority of that time I felt they were the best. Lately the issues have become much thinner and content seems weak. Meanwhile, Railfan & Railroad has quietly been getting bigger and better. Always my second favorite, I think I'd rank them as best now, and by a fairly large margin. I've always enjoyed Railfan, but Trains was a sentimental favorite. I think that era has ended.

Ages ago, when the generational shift from print media to online news feeds started to become quite apparent, Kalmbach business heads made a conscientious decision to steer Trains Magazine to being more of an industry/trade publication (in part to replace hobby advertisers that had increasingly disappeared with industry advertisers) and steer historical coverage to Classic Trains. More recently, a "TrainsPRO" section of the website has emerged, even more pointedly industry-focused. The problem with this, which became rather apparent in more recent years, was that this meant they largely abandoned pure "railfan-style" coverage and news, which left competitor Railfan & Railroad (and for the Northeast Railpace Newsmagazine) to pick up that slack. (Remember that competitors such as Pacific Rail News/Rail News, Vintage Rails, etc. have folded, leaving a scant few other minor periodicals such as Passenger Train Journal, Diesel Era, and TRP.) The announcement of yesterday states that the coverage of CT will be folded back into the monthly Trains, basically restoring the "old world order" of an all-encompassing Trains from the 1940s to the 1990s.

I'm curious to know what this means for future "special issues" of Trains. If you've looked at any magazine rack in stores recently, "special issues" of any magazine type now drive sales as much as, or more than, regular issues. Newsstand profits used to be largely driven by the high-margin "adult" magazines, just as soda mark-ups keep fast-food joints alive, and with the near-disappearance of those magazines as well as the increasing disappearance of bookstores with in-depth magazine racks and the mainstream magazines themselves, the periodical distribution industry, long carried in part by newspapers, is in crisis. The "hobby shops" that used to carry the model RR and RR magazines have largely disappeared to online sales and chains like Hobby Lobby, and most tourist railroads and museums are seasonal and can't really stock a year-round magazine.

Like other publishers, Firecrown (and before that Kalmbach) have heavily pushed the model of low-cost subscription online distribution and access, with "All Access" and "Trains Unlimited" allowing access to an online complete archive of back issues/content, online video streaming/webcams, book content, etc. My understanding is that this hasn't been as successful as hoped, with a couple thousand subscribers as opposed to tens of thousands of hard-copy subscribers.

Some of the same dynamics play out overseas, with Britain having two competing magazines for contemporary rail coverage (Railway Magazine and Rail) and at least two others competing for the history, nostalgia, and preservation sectors (Heritage Railway and Steam Railway), as well as occasional special issues.

I know some of my friends in the industry would usually jokingly refer to Trains Magazine as the "tabloid rag" and if you were serious about staying up to date on the industry you subscribe to Progressive Railroading.

I still subscribe to Progressive Railroading and Railway Track and Structures.

They're both more informercials than hard news for the most part. This month's issue of Progressive railroad contains the following: 3 pages of news and opinion. 4 page article on CN capacity investments (good solid industry news). 6 page directory of finance companies. 4 pages on technology for railroads. 4 pages on ballast cars and regulators etc.
Those last two are useful info that you won't find anywhere else, but they're also pretty much ads for the various companies.

Most of the actual day to day news I get comes from Progressive Railroading's daily updates rather than the print magazine.

In September, over on the cesspool formerly known as twitter, Craig Fuller posted "Last April, we acquired a portfolio of railroad hobby magazines.....It is our best transaction to date and has generated a 70% annual return."
https://x.com/FreightAlley/status/1970997730118947178