I thought TCA was concerned about a dropping membership....
lower attendance at York, etc.??
They are concerned about declining membership. Same goes for all of the other national train organizations.
But they all made the same mistake in not paying close attention, back about 20-or-so years ago, to the changing demographics of our society and the hobby, so now they find themselves in a bit of a pickle. The push for recruiting should have taken place back then, and the large numbers who were already members should have been tasked with more responsibility for assuring the group's financial future.
The simple fact is that the core of the hobby is made up of a group that is progressively aging, and there's really not a whole lot that can be done, by any means, to change that inevitable trend. Trains--toy or otherwise--don't mean all that much to today's younger generations, and even though there will always be a strong interest developed by some, it's virtually impossible to ever again achieve the number of devotees so evident back in the late 1970s through the late 1990s. We older guys grew up with trains and developed a somewhat natural attraction for them. That doesn't happen all that much today with all the electronic gizmos competing for a young (and not so young) person's attention.
