Re: Model magazines

On 21/03/2006 16:50, Jim Guthrie said,

I think I agree with Tim. I've got a large collection of magazines
dating back to 1957, when I started getting them in my teens.

You do have a bit of a head start on me there. In 1957 I was... well, actually I wasn't for another 9 years, and it was another 15 years before I was buying magazines!!!

Over the past ten or so years, I've bought a few magazines but none
of them came close to the standard of the earlier magazines in
content. Prototype drawings are few, and construction articles seem
to be based around specific kits. I took Model Rail on a regular
basis for a few years, but found its content occasionally
interesting, but seldom of use, either in the short term or in the
longer term.

I guess this really comes down to individual tastes. I will occasionally rifle though a magazine looking for a specific article, only to emerge hours or days later having scanned through the last decade's worth! I think this is true of RM, where I think the standards now are pretty much as they were 25 years ago when I started buying it (apart from that interminable series on how to cut up an N-gauge wagon to make it look exactly the same as the one in the previous issue!) I also had a massive stack of magazines on other interests (no, not that sort of interest!), and in looking back through I decided they simply weren't worth keeping. Doing the same exercise on my model railway magazines resulted in me buying binders (with the exception of BRM). I will admit though that it was an article in BRM years ago that rekindled my interest in actually doing something about my model railway interest - now that is a useful magazine, and I have kept it!

I suspect that part of the reason could well be costs. I had some
correspondence with the editorial team at Model Rail over some
locomotive drawings which appeared a year or so ago and which had a
few glaring errors.

I think you are right in saying that MR is produced to a cost over accuracy. Series also seem to have a habit of disappearing - did Chris ever get his "Lion" finished???

And a particular hobby horse of mine is that our magazines very rarely
reflect the 'modern' scene in their detailed articles, and by
'modern', I mean from the 1950s onwards.

That's fine by me!

--
Paul Boyd
http://www.paul-boyd.co.uk/
.

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