Misc. old model railroad mags

I'm finally beginning to clean up my basement so that I can get my layout back up again.

So far it's been more work than I thought due to loads and loads of old stuff I need to go through. On the top of the list are hundreds of magazines.

It will take me about a day to go through each one to decide if there are any interesting articles to save. So, if you had the following magazines from the 90s to the present (with a few older ones sprinkled in):

Model Railroaders
Railmodel Journals
Railroad Model Craftsmans
Trains
C&O Historical Society newsletters
B&O Historical Society newsletters
NMRA monthly magazine (I forget what its called)

Would you save them?

I hate throwing things away, but has anyone found keeping old magazines to be worthwhile?

 

Absolutely, Save them. There is a wealth of information in there. There are online indexes now that allow easy searching of articles in older magazines. I've thrown away a lot of magazines but never my old model railroad magazines. I still go back and look up stuff in them.

If you don't have the room to keep them, donate them to a model railroad club for their library. If you don't have one in the area, you might consider giving them to a local kid who has shown an interest in trains.

 

I agree with Dee Das, keep them......you'll be glad you did. I actually bought stacks of old Model Railroaders and RMC's, and I can not tell you how valuable they have been to me for reference and ideas.

 

In many ways, the older magazines are more useful to me than the newer editions, so yes, I'd keep them.

 

I keep all my older Model Railroad magazines. Put MODEL RAILROADER, RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN, N SCALE, and NMRA's SCALE RAILS into binders. Have MR & RMC in binders since the mid-1970's. Have N-SCALE & N SCALE RAILROADING since the first issue.

Have bought binders for MR & RMC but the price for new binders is really getting expensive. Have bought binders on eBay whenever available. Keep other magazine in plastic magazine holders, that hold about 12 months worth, that are available at office supply stores, and can be picked up for cheap at the neighborhood yard sale.

I pull the yearly index out and keep it in a separate index binder so that I can look up articles from the magazines without having to go to each individual years magazine binder.

Have just sold part of my N-SCALE magazine collection,1989-1994, because I was able to get a CD with all the N-SCALE magazines on it. Very nice, can look up articles, print them out and use plan for building items. No need to scan, copy, and print from the magazine. CD takes up a lot less storage space also. Hope N-SCALE will do this for the 1995-2005 issues soon.

QUESTION: Where is this index for all model railroading magazines? What's the website?


Next time you have your train club over to your house or you go to the local meeting, get out a early/old MR, RMC or N-SCALE Magazine and take it with you. It can be fun to check out what available, prices, what company is still available etc. etc. and compare with today's market availability.

 

I picked up a whole bunch of old mags, like two big boxes outside of a hobby shop about 5 years ago. They were throwing them out. Let me tell you, I'm set for life. Everytime I want a MR mag to read, I just go to my stash and pull out issues I've never even seen before. They just keep appearing! I don't know where they keep coming from.

 

I say find a system to get rid of them, sooner the better. I had this problem and moved the tons of associated paper many times. Step one was to clip only interesting articles and toss the ads or stuff I knew I would never care about. Now I am going to be scanning these to PDF's so I can access them electronically when needed. Actually, first step should be scanning all new mags so you don't keep contributing to the mess. Recycle the magazines once you have them scanned. (I will keep new mags around for a short while after scanning articles, just for grins)

Space is too precious to keep the piles of "how to spread ballast" articles around. Just think about how often you actually refer to the magazines stuffed away in your closet. Yes, they're fun to look at from time to time, but compared to the cost of space, there are plenty of other fun things to do in model railroading.

 

I don't think they're worth ANYTHING, so only keep them if you enjoy reading them. I like taking out old issues and just looking through them. If you really want to get rid of them, it shouldn't be hard. They're are tons of model railroaders out there who I'm sure would love to have them.

 

I agree, Scan what you want and toss the rest.

Of course, that's easier said than done. I still have a couple hundred photos in need of scanning and that's just me, not my parent's photo collection. Scanning magazines would blow my mind.

If you have a club you belong to, it might be best to give them to the club. At the very least then you can share the scanning load.

 

It's not easy tossing out old issues of magazines. But as one write said, "go through and keep what you need and dump the rest". One of the things I did was send a batch with my wife (who is a social worker) and her clients snap them up as fast as she can bring them. Also, sometimes I'll meet children who like trains and I'll make sure he or she gets a few mags to pour over. When I was a child in the fifties, an adult gave me my first tattered copies of magazines about trains and I read and re read them time and again. Keep what you need for a project or information pertaining to rolling stock or structures and move the rest out. It wasn't easy but I learned how.

 

Every couple of years I go through and cut out the articles that are of interest to me then toss the rest. I don't need to save outdated advertisements that are in the magazines. Only rarely have I regretted tossing out an article, then wanting it years later. I say, keep doing what you are doing.

 

I have hundreds of MRR and RMC issues dating back to the late 1940s, "inherited" from the uncle who turned me on to model railroading. A year or two ago I went through every issue, to cull those that had no articles that would ever be of use to me. Surprisingly, probably 80% of the issues made the cut (were worth saving). And I still haven't disposed of the ones deemed unworthy ...

It's always a lot of fun to pull out an original issue with the writings of Frank Ellison, John Armstrong, John Allen and the rest of that crew that first brought model railroading to life.

If you have space, keep 'em. But I also liked the notion posted above about handing out free copies to kids who might be interested. Sounds like the best use for those issues you no longer want.

 

Giving them out to kids (and others interested in trains) is a great idea. The local ham radio club was doing that at this year's town festival (well, ham radio magazines, anyway) and it seemed to be generating some good interest.

 

I had the same delemna. It took a while but I went through them and decided which ones had articles that I wanted to keep. These I separated from the rest. The ones I did not want I gave to kids in the neighborhood or to the local church or school. Reading books is almost a lost art these days for boys especially and getting boys to put down their video games and read anything is difficult. The RR mags work.

The ones I want I carefully cut out what I want from them and discard the rest in the paper recycling dumpster.

 

Without the online indexes, they are next to useless. If you have a Kalmbach subscription then the online trains index is included with that. That got reset and is now incredibly useful.

I culled a lot of my stuff years ago and it has accumulated even worse since.

One thing I have noticed is that you don't find drawings in articles anymore. Nobody does that. When you're scratchbuilding and developing other concepts, the challenge is finding drawings of what you want. Next to impossible today, so those old drawings (and the 1940's-50's MR's were full of them) are certainly worth saving for some of us.

 

If the magazines are causing a storage problem, it may be time to get rid of them.

I had large collections of MR and RMC and smaller collections of other magazines. Some I was able to sell on that auction site but it was a pain to take the pictures, write descriptions and list them. Often, they didn't sell the first time or two. Additionally, I listed at 99 cents and charged shipping. I never made any money at it, but then I wasn't trying to get rich, only to get rid of the magazines.

More recently, I've cleared of several shelves worth of magazines by simply dumping a bunch in a big box and listing the whole box for one price and FREE shipping. The price listed was slightly more than the cost of postage, so I was still basically GIVING the magazines away. The boxes weighed up to 50 pounds! I sold off hundreds of pounds of magazines this way.

I've reduced my collection drastically but now I have another problem: all of the magazines were stored in plastic magazine holders. I have dozens of empty holders and no way to effectively get rid of them! Not many fit in a box, even a fairly large box and the postage would probably be more than the holders are worth. I'm planning on laying some out to determine a box size, then I'll calculate some postage costs and go ahead and list them at auction. The holders are great for magazine storage but not much else. They cost me under $2.00 when new so they aren't worth much especially considering postage costs.

I also checked with my local library and they are willing to take some magazines but they don't want to be overloaded by them. If I decide to reduce my collections further, I'll probably pack up a box and donate it to the library.

My nearest LHS will take some from time to time. They give them out for free to visitors at their monthly open houses.

As I said, if you don't have a use for them, it's time for them to go. There is SOOOOO much available online, it just doesn't make sense to keep them around.

Now if I can just figure out how to dispose of the holders.............. Maybe just dump them in a recylce bid.

Darrell, quiet...for now

 

Why not just purchase the DVDs?