I’d hate to see it go away too, but the trend is moving quickly away from print media. With the loss of big manufacturers there is significant loss in advertising revenue. I hate to say it, but they will be very lucky to make it to 40.
I’m pretty sure they will continue on in an e-format for along while, its just I’m getting dam sick and tired of everything printed becoming reliant on some dam piece of electronic gizmo.
I still prefer printed books and magazines because they last for decades, and are not only as good as your last upgrade or backup, which can still go poof and disappear in a cloud of electrons. and the only virus they are susceptible to is mold if you let them get wet, even them they can sometimes be salvaged. Viral compromised e-files are are electronic toast.
I may be starting to show my age but I can’t help but think we are putting way too many of our valuable eggs into one e-basket.
I agree with you Vic. At my work they love to store files on Google Drive and use GMail exclusively, and do all of their property management accounting in the cloud. When I warn against Google’s blatant data mining clauses in their user agreements I get back “who would want to steal our data - it’s worthless to anyone else”. Right. And if the company that runs the cloud based software goes belly up, where are your customer records and accounting data? Just so many electrons that disappear when the lights go out!
Vic Im only 37 and I agree with you. Nothing beats a hard copy. After a while my contacts dry out when using a computer.
Bruce also hit the nail on the head. We get everything we need here. I wait 2 months to get my next GR issue only to be disappointed because not much interests me. Im personally not into the electronics and it seems we are seeing more and more of it. I wish we could see more of the old school ways. Don’t get me wrong I would hate to see GR go away. I do still enjoy looking at the photos.
Well, one advantage GR has over internet fora is it doesn’t have everybody complaining about… (http://www.outsidetrains.com/smile/66.gif)
(Ok, I’ll be good and not finish that sentance.)
Well in keeping with the OP’s statements, I too offer congratulations to Garden Railways for 30 years of service to the outdoor/garden railroaders around the globe.
At one time I thought the magazine was the greatest thing since sliced bread, I have every issue starting in 1990 up until about 6 months ago when I let my last subscription run out.
Yes the magazine has changed through those years but so have the readers. In looking back through these posts I notice that the newer guys think the mag is pretty darn good but the older guys (as relates to time in the hobby) have become pretty dissatisfied with it. This situation just can’t be all the magazines fault.
In my opinion, we, the old timers in the hobby have grown beyond the scope and intent of the magazine. It’s aim is to bring new blood into the hobby and show them how to get started and where to go for supplies. This situation leaves us old timers grumbling because a source that we really liked and counted on for years (when we were beginners) now is letting us down in our more mature position in the hobby.
Could Klambach and Garden Railways magazine change this situation? Of course they could! Try Including more technically in depth information, advanced scratch building projects, and objective reviews to name a few ideas. One of their problems, as I understand it, is that very few people submit those kinds of articles. Even if they received these types of articles will/would they change their format? Probably not!
The subscriptions will dwindle and one of these days in the near future we will be reading a posting that the magazine is going all digital. For us old dinosaurs that love the printed page we will sit around and grumble that it is just one more nail in the coffin of the printed magazine business.
Because of my personal interest in the logging railroads and the logging industry my first choice of magazines have always been TimberTimes and the Gazette. I have in my library every issue of TimberTimes starting with #1, 1993 and Gazette’s back to 1985. But, I find that even the Gazette does not hold my interest with each new issue like it once did. Although I think that Bob is doing a much better job of trying to diversify his magazine to catch the interest of a broader range of hobbiest than is the GR mag.
On a very sad note; Tall Timber and Short Lines is gone!! Fine Scale Railroader is Gone!! The last print issue of the Fine Scale Annual’s is coming this December!! That’s all folks. They are gone!!
A glimmer of good news there is some rumor of the Annuals continuing as a digital mag, let’s hope so.
So enjoy them while you can.
Rick
Oh Yea, one last thought on this subject.
It is not the digital magazines that are killing the printed mags it is forums like this one. Instant gratification, instant response, instant publication of your material, instant interaction with like minded people, or not so like minded in some cases 
Rick I agree about GR being more oriented to newbies. I still enjoy looking at the layouts but for modeling I go to the Gazette. Granted its not LS but the models usually translate too LS pretty easily.
Yeah I miss “Tall Timber” as well, that was a great rag.
Good or bad I will still subscribe to GR. Although I may not find everything in the article interesting I usually can find something.
Besides what else am I gonna read when I am in “deep meditation” 
I get it, So I can read the articles from Todd and Bruce!
Don’t forget Kevin Strong.
Sean McGillicuddy said:
I get it, So I can read the articles from Todd and Bruce!
You’ll have to get it for the other guys (and there are more than a few others!) They said they had enough of me.
As I see it, two of the biggest problems with Garden Railways are:
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It’s oriented mainly towards newbies, so they don’t run many articles of interest to established modelers.
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It has to cover far too many different subjects, thus guaranteeing that there will always be a lot of articles that don’t interest each individual reader. They’re trying to please gardeners, narrow gauge fans, steam fans, modern diesel fans, people who have lots of space, people who don’t have lots of space, people who like modeling, people who never build anything, people who like realism, people who like whimsical stuff, people who like operation, people who just want cute trains running through a garden, etc, etc. Even if they printed one article on each topic of interest in every issue, you’d be getting a magazine that’s mostly stuff you’re not interested in.
"I’m pretty sure they will continue on in an e-format for along while, its just I’m getting dam sick and tired of everything printed becoming reliant on some dam piece of electronic gizmo. "
I recently paid for a copy of Uncle Russ’ “Narrow Gauge Annual” (finescalerr.com) as I needed Geoff’s caboose article. It downloads as a PDF, and I was quite surprised how easy it is to read. The bonus is that I can increase it to 300% without losing picture focus, so I can really inspect those photos!
I don’t have a tablet yet, and I prefer two screens on my new laptop - one is 1080p for recording live TV (free DVR) and the other is for blowing up drawings, photos, etc.
Yes Pete the e-world has its value, I have my schmartphone of course, but lugging a tablet or laptop around is not always a viable option, on the other hand I can toss a magazine in the car, read it at lunch at my leisure, and not worry about the battery going flat or it walking away with some nimble-fingered thief. I never have this issue with my printed magazine or books.
Short battery life has always been the achilles heel of most of these devices, that plus they dont react very well to suddenly stopping on the concrete floor.
Yes, Garden Railways is oriented toward newbies. However, as a magazine editor for most of my working life, i can say that what Ric analyzed as GR’s wide-ranging mix of article topics is the precise sort of mix of article topics that has made Organic Gardening magazine such a long-standing success in its field – and what made The Comics Buyers Guide ultimately a sudden failure after years of success.
At OG, where i was once a staff editor, the editors sorted the subject matter into a number of categories – seasonal articles, regional / USDA zone topics, home garden layouts, infrastructure and tool reviews and builds, trouble-shooting for newbies, interviews with pioneering or particularly proficient hobbyists, news of big annual events, and crowd sourced “list” topics. No one reader could possibly be interested in all of those topics, but the continual variety of articles, the upbeat and cheerful “can do” editorial tone, and the consistently beautiful photography have kept OG in business since 1948.
CBG, where i was a columnist for many years, featured a far less structured editorial mix. There were regular columns, news articles, and occasional retrospectives, but the emphasis was on advertisers (hence the word “Buyers” in the title) and on new products and fannishness. Feuds broke out, loyalties were tested and broken. The graphic design was ugly – very unexpected in a magazine supporting the graphic arts hobbies – and the paper was newsprint. Only a few people saved back issues, and no digital library of articles was ever made available. CBG abruptly ceased publication recently. It’s GONE and t-t-t-that’s all, folks!
Garden Railways magazine may not please everyone all the time, but, like OG, it is pleasing a lot of people much of the time. Like OG it features beautiful photography and cheerfulness. Unlike CBG it does not support feuding or devote too much space to one point of view.
Hobbies come and go: Home gardening in the USA was something only weirdos did in the 1950s, became HUGE in the 1970s - 1990s, and declined rapidly in the 2000s with the importation of cheap out-of-season fruits and vegetables from the southern hemisphere. Comic book fandom began to grow large in the 1960s, peaked in the 1990s and early 2000s, and would have plunged into obscurity with the digital publishing revolution, but has kept afloat and thriving by being incorporated wholesale into the co-existing movie fandom that follows films adapted from comics, science, fiction, and fantasy literature.
The real problem that both GR and OG magazines are facing – and that CBG failed over – is not changing demographics of readership, or the ups and downs of a given hobby’s popularity. It is, rather, the digital revolution.
The hobbyist magazines MISSED THAT TRAIN ten years ago.
They didn’t start hosting templetized sub-sites for regular contributors – they let the contributors build their own sites. Any authority and ego satisfaction that the contributors once obtained by working with the hobbyist magazines paled before the fun of scratch-building their own web sites!
With the coming of the internet, high-level hobbyists, people who once felt their lives had been made complete by having had ONE article about their works accepted for publication in a national magazine, can now host HUNDREDS of articles about their projects on thir own sites and link to them through forums like this one. They can host web counters on their sites and see the hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of hits they have received from their own personal fans and followers. They do not need an authoritarian top-down structure to validate them. They are now free and self-validating members of the digital society!
Furthermore, wiith the coming of the internet, the newbie reader in search of answers can get them for free through a forum like this, and can be led to the free web sites and tutorial videos posted and hosted on personal web sites, and can also be led to the online sales catalogues of merchants who need not pay for anything more than banner ads at the forums, if they wish.
The hobbyist magazines MISSED THAT TRAIN TOO – and i can prove it, using myself as an example.
I am a 100% NEWBIE, and an elderly female newbie to boot. I decided to have a garden railway for real, not just in my dreams, on October 6th of this year – less than 20 days ago. I started my quest for train information and immediately subscribed to forums, where i have gotten TONS of free information. I have spent about four hours per day of free time watching garden train videos, getting to know folks on the forums, and buying train-related goods online. I have spent about $1,000.00 on trains and figures and buildings so far – and have not had to subscribe to a single print magazine yet. Everything has been accomplished via the forums and online searches at google and youtube.
Where hoobyist magazines are derailing is right there: They did not start HUGE FORUMS for themselves in 1995. (Some of the manufacturers have gotten the forum idea – Bachmann’s forum is an example, but the emphsis is on the brand, not the hobby in general.)
The hobbyist magazines hid their heads in the sand like proverbial striches and let hobbyists – non-commercial hobbyists – lead the way into forums, self-uploaded videos, personal web sites, and social media. They only belatedly developed “sites” – but the sites are administered top-down, for the most part, and will never capture the attention of the free-ranging forum model of group interaction.
If GR and OG are to survive, they need to break out of print, digitize their entire historical content, sell cheap banner ads to every manufacturer they can lure into their site, monetize every page (that is, offer something for sale on every one of their tens of thousands of pages) and open a value-added “membership” area for subscribers. They can also seriously consider collecting their good stuff into speciality-oriented books with limited print runs.
I say this as a person who loves print and has worked in book and magazine publishing and sales since i was a child helping in my parents’ book store 55 years ago. I have a HUGE collection of lovely old books and magazines – but i am a realist as well: Print magazines have no future. Books do have a future – for a while.
Leadership and vision are needed to get legacy historical magazine articles digitized and their hosting pages monetized. It’s a huge task. If you love your hobby, you should encourage and support those publishers who are making the painful transition to digital media … or be prepared to see hobbyist publishing go the way of narrow gauge steam railrods, i kid you not.
As readers, you can look at what is happening to GR and grouse about it, but my heart goes out to the folks at Kalmbach – and to all hobbyist publishers everywhere. It’s tough right now!
Sorry to ride my own personal hobby-horse, but this topic is one that i am living with every day. My ex-husband and i went from publishing 15 magazines per month to none by the 1990s. At 66 years of age, i am not yet ready to retire, and i am still riding the tiger of print publishing. My current husband and i operate an empire of ten thousand monetized web pages now – but we only publish 4-6 books per year … and no magazines at all.
Well, as one of my old heroes used to end every article he wrote – 'Nuff said!
Catherine, GR has a forum and has had it for a very long time, at least since the mid to late 1990’s.
I know this because that is where I first got active in the hobby online. Before I found MLS and later here at LSC I lurked on GR and MR forums then joined about 2000 and became very active on it.
It was great, lots of activity, lots of members, lots of discussion, it was great. but then there eventually was alot of moderation, read “deletion” of topics, alot of 'trolls" back when literally ANYONE could sign up and then proceed to immediately vomit all over the forum with multiple IDs, and alot of folks drifted off or moved over to MLS or LSC and activity eventually dropped off, but what killed it wasn’t the advent of digital, it was the death of LGB, and the hard-line taken by Kalmbach regarding online discussions thereof in the period leading up to the final Hindenburg flameout.
(http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2012/001/0/1/1937_hindenburg_accident_by_apolonis-d4ky9vt.gif)
IMO almost no one at the time knew for certain what the ultimate outcome of their survival would be and Kalmbach were VERY afraid of losing advertising dollars from what was arguably one of their largest advertisers, so it got to the point where any attempt to discuss the issue got locked then deleted from the forum. In the end for Kalmbach it was all for naught. EPL/LGB exploded crashed and burned in a spectacular fireball over the Lakehurst skyline, and Kalmbach did lose EPLs and LGBoA’s advertising as a result, but the most damage was to the forum itself, because it was handled so heavily handedly, most long time users left frustrated and angry, today its a sad shell of its former self. It really makes me feel sad because I have alot of great memories of past times and folks long gone from there.
It sure doesn’t sound like it was overlooked.
Anyway, I think that you are right, Catherine. I’m not sure what is holding GR back…
It would be interesting to do a detailed analysis of MR against GR. MR manages to keep everyone intested. Even the NMRA monthly mag has stuff for newbie to experienced alike.
I take it, Bob, that you refer to Model Railroader. I always look at their Forum, particularly the thread entitled Prototype information for the modeler. There is always something of interest there no matter what your modeling scale is.
Bob McCown said:
It would be interesting to do a detailed analysis of MR against GR. MR manages to keep everyone interested. Even the NMRA monthly mag has stuff for newbie to experienced alike.
Observation…MR caters primarily to the scale aficionados. Indoors, detailed, scaled.
We, on the other hand, have 5 major scales on one gauge, plus some minor scales, and some various gauges for the specific scales.
We are primarily outdoors.
We deal with 1:1 scenery that is somewhat difficult to scale down.
The MR folks have been through the initiation process, speak the proper words, can recite the mantra, only buy stuff the nmra tells them meets the nmra standards.
As they get older, and realize what a bunch of BS that all is, they flee.
I have some run here, some visit…they say they left Half Zero to get away from the nmra.
This stuff is fun…or was.
Once the scalies infiltrated, it’s becoming more difficult. Someone wants to run a mix of whatever…hey, I let them run USA diseasemals on my NG steam line…but some folks get sideways.
Plus, there are so many indoor Half Zero folks…and because of the size, storage, cost (and ever increasingly so), some folks just cannot do LS anymore.
I mean, the nmra mandated and enforced limiting of scales per gauge many decades ago.
Had they not thumbed their noses at LS in the late 60’s and early 70’s, maybe we’d be different now…but it’s far too late.
What are they gonna do?
Mandate 5 different “standards” for the scales?
Do like they did in 0, and have MR review items and state “this unit is scaled at 17/64ths, not 1/4”, and does not meet nmra standards" and the initiates would stop buying it.
Imagine if they tried that now with any of the scales we currently use.
I know a guy…life nmra member…got tired of it all, laid his LS yard in the garage on TOP of his full H0 railroad.
Pulled the buildings, just laid plywood right on top.
Why do you think Kadee couplers hold the position they do?
DeFacto nmra standard coupler.
Heck, MR articles always mention them.
I recall the MR article on an indoor LS pike you can build.
I think it was a USA 44-tonner. Street trackage mostly, up in your neck of the woods.
Had a photo of an Aristo coupler, called it a USA coupler, and stated they were converting to Kadees for their MORE PROTOTYPICAL…
I’ve threatened for decades to go to a junk yard, get the front coil spring out of a 1959 Cadillac, paint it gold, go to the local freight yard with an armful of coat hangers and camera…tie it up on a prototype coupler and take a photo of a Kadee Prototype Coupler.
They do what they’re told (again, opinion).
I see folks selling new in the box Athearn diseasemals…never run…Kadees installed.
If I want to buy it and run it, Kadees gotta come off anyway.
Then there’s the big changes over the years in H0 rail size.
Then there’s the abandonment of RP-25 as “the standard”.
They don’t really seem to be able to think on their own over there.
I recall one specific review they did.
I knew it wasn’t right. I called up the reviewer and had a talk.
So, did you plug all those things you mentioned into the loco?
No. We don’t have any of that stuff to plug in.
So, you just radioed the press release and didn’t check?
Basically.
Arrrgggghhhh.