Essay - Give Away Those Back Issues of Modeling Magazines Gathering Dust



Essay


What single step can give bring joy to your spouse, your local fire marshal, model railroad advertisers, and others? The answer is clearing out that multi-decade stash of model railroading magazines you have in your basement or elsewhere.

Admit it, you will never get to build all the possible ideas contained in these issues. And now that MR is available digitized you have no excuse to keep those back issues. If buying into the digitized route is not your cup of tea, then you can simply save a few back issues that you simply must keep for modeling reference. Another alternative is to clip out a few articles that you absolutely cannot part with.

Give model railroading a shot in the arm by getting your back issues of MR into the hands of the young or the merely curious. If you don’t have the energy to do so yourself, ask some of the younger members of your club or round robin group to lend you their muscle. Once you get them out of your basement, then what? You can take them to your club, share with members of your house of worship, your fraternal or service organizations, your local library, or your local consignment shop that supports a local charity. By doing so, we all can help introduce another generation to this wonderful hobby of ours. Remember, with the demise of both the local hobby shop and the traditional newsstand, fewer folks can get their introduction to the hobby by those routes. How many articles have we read about a model railroad in which the owner attributes his introduction to the hobby by his buying a model railroading magazine at a newsstand? We cannot turn back the clock, but we can make an effort to see that our back issues do good.
 [In my some-30 years as an active model railroader, I cannot count how many home layouts I have visited in which I could see decades of model railroading magazines whose clutter just gathers dust and creates a fire hazard. Those magazines were doing no one any good.

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