As someone else posted, not exactly a new thread, and much of the same things being made. First of all, of course people have hobbies, using O gauge 3 rail as an indicator of the health of hobbies is simplistic. For example, as there was in my day and in prior days, there are young people into cars, it amazes me how many young people for example I see at a local car show labor day weekend that has classic cars as its focus, and a lot of them for some reason are into the whole 1950's thing, which is before my time (music/cars/clothing, etc). You look on pinterest, and there are young people into 'old people's' things like needlepoint and crochet and knitting , there are people into a wide variety of things, and new hobbies have overtaken the old, in other cases old hobbies have become new. I don't think young people aren't into hobbies, I think simply they are different than we were...and in some ways aren't so much different. Someone said they live near a college, and none of the kids are into hobbies.....I hate to tell you, but in my time, back in the early 80's, college kids weren't into hobbies either, most of them were busy with school, and important things like dating, drinking, more drinking, dating, they had neither the time, money or inclination for hobbies (okay, maybe exotic beer caps, many a big argument that Yuengling was not an exotic Chinese beer *lol*). Seriously, you can't use that to judge anyone, and even kids not going to college and working/doing a trade/etc aren't going to be big on hobbies.
As far as if we have hit "rock bottom", I think that depends on what you are talking about. In 3 rail trains, I don't think we are near a bottom nor likely to get there, in the 1970's all we had was a limited offering of Lionel MPC and post war based trains, it very different today, we have track systems like Ross Track that didn't exist, we have command control, a lot of new offerings instead of mostly regurgitated post war equipment, and yes, a lot more people into it (sorry, but back then, a lot of us were not into 3 rail either, and the numbers of 'hobbyists' was pretty low). Do I think this is going to become a mass hobby? No. Do I think it is going to change? Sure, because the number of people in prime hobby age is going to change, there is a huge boom behind GenX, but they are 20-30 years away from hobby times, and even then how many of them were likely to enter the hobby? Not likely as large as the baby boomer generation, but still likely to have enough to keep it going. Given that new offerings, leaving out Menards, is mostly tending towards more expensive, BTO scale equipment, we already are well beyond the mass production age.
I also wish people would stop denigrating people who are younger, comments like "instant gratification", "all they want to do is use their cell phone", "they have no attention span", is nothing more than griping because kids today are different than 'we were'.....sorry, I could give you a ton of those things said about "US" by "The Greatest Generation", we were all addicted to the boob tube, didn't think, didn't read, didn't do anything creative, 'why, when we were growing up, we had to make our own phone, a broomstick and a spaldeen could be used for so many things'...and a lot of hobbies back in the day today look a bit silly, like collecting matchbooks, or people creating giant rolls of string, or aluminum foil balls and other 'silly' hobbies,heck, how many of that generation thought 'grown men' 'playing with trains' was 'a waste of time'?
For all the kids looking for 'instant satisfaction', as people our age and younger were accused of, many kids spend a lot of time working on things, we don't see it in the glare of 'those darn kids and their phones and video games'. There are young kids with a passion who are creating new companies, there are kids who see problems in the world and spend years trying to correct them, rather than pursuing wealth, there are kids who love music who spend many thousands of hours dedicating themselves to it, often committing at a very, very young age, into something that is tenuous at best, there are kids out there restoring old junk into beautiful things......and that is just what I have seen. There are kids out there planting trees, out there trying to save animal species, you name it, and they go at it with a passion.
Before someone hits the panic button to get this deleted, as being 'not on topic',think about it, it is, because if we want the hobby or hobbies in general to thrive, blaming younger people or people not into it as lazy, wanting instant gratification, no focus, etc, isn't going to make them want to do this. I have seen plenty of train clubs where they complain about not having enough members, people eager to do the work, yet the the websites of the group (if they have one), and the way they treat potential newbies, especially younger people, is off putting to anyone new. If we want hobbies to thrive, if we care about them, denigrating people is no way to do this, people seeing these kind of comments aren't going to say "oh, gee, wow, my generation is viewed like this, I better take up a hobby to show them I am not like that", they are going to look at it, shake their head and say "who the heck would want to do that, what a bunch of sourpusses".
I have no way of knowing where 3 rail O is going, any more than I can predict what the weather will be in 6 months in Spokane, Washington, my guess is it will exist, that the tension between online and local retailers is going to go through all kinds of flux, and that in this existence it likely will in some ways be the same, in others different. People in the past built more kits because that was what was out there, and a lot of RTR trains required a lot of work to make them look and run better, I wonder had we had the kind of rtr products we have today if people back then would have built as many kits or scratchbuilt, if people had the money to get someone to design and/or build a layout, many of them might have gone that route, hobbies change, model planes went from free flight gasoline flight or control line to RC, and these days electric propulsion has made big inroads. Working on a car in the old days required a pair of pliers, a set of wrenches and a hammer, to work on modern cars requires a lot more knowledge and tools to debug the systems on board, the young kids today along with different wheels and slamming the suspension reprogram the ECU on the car and various systems, it is different but still basically the same hobby. The one thing I do know is that blaming the next generation cause they aren't us, or don't have the same interests, is a sure way to help the decline of the hobby we like, that much I am sure of.
