Bob McCown said:
The thing is, the NMRA *COULD* get buy-in from the LS community if they'd 1) listen to them, and 2) get some noted LSers on the NMRA board. But, its a chicken-and-egg thing. They have to make do with who they have as members, and, it seems, the LSers in the NMRA have their own ideas.
I’m thinking that the NMRA needs to say to the LS community as a whole “Sorry we were jerks, how about us all sitting down and hammering this out?”, but that’ll never happen. The biggest issue is that we, as LSers, look at our 45mm track, then decide we want to run NG/SG/2foot trains on it, then say “Oh, so thats 1:20.3”, or whatever…the rest of the scales say “I like O scale, but I want to model narrow gauge, so thats On30, on HO track”…we sort of have an oblong view of it.
“…I’m thinking that the NMRA needs to say to the LS community as a whole “Sorry we were jerks, how about us all sitting down and hammering this out?”, but that’ll never happen…”
Bob the trouble with this is that the NMRA thinks that WE are the jerks for not cowtowing to them a few years ago when they tried to unilaterally impose scale designations and standards without any real consultation or co-ordination within the large scale community and got a collective “yeah, right” responce from the large scale community.
If they had the forsight (which they never have had) to see where the large scale market was going back in the early nineties, and approached the companies to propose working with them to set standards that each could live with (this is PRECISLY what they did in HO and N years and years ago) and coax the manufacturers towards a more universal set of standards, we might be living in a very different large scale universe.
The biggest problem that the NMRA has had in the last 20 years is that they are SO focused on HO and N that they ended up being very dismissive of almost every other scale. They were dismissive of large scale from the very beginning, Early stuff’s toylike appearence didnt help with the dismissive attitude, but in general the attitude from the core members has been best described as sneering derision. There are fans in the org but they are a minority.
So now here we are, 2007, with at least 7 active scales using 45mm track, we generally set our own standards when we build, and just live with what standards we get from the manufacturers. Not the best of worlds I agree, but the NMRA has lost its chance to have an impact in LS and unless there is a quantum shift at their HQs, the NMRA is going to have to wait for the core HO-centric members to either die off or age to the point where they shift to LS, and maybe then we’ll get a better relationship with them.
Personally I doubt it, they are having enough trouble keeping up ranks as it is. New members end up leaving disenchanted with the “old boy” administration of the org. Newbies feel like they are just “cash resources” and feel ignored by the head honchos.
I read this all the time on HO forums whenever the subject comes up.