I don't know why anyone who needs instant gradification would be in model railroading. I helped build some layouts over the years that are now basically finished, and I know for myself as well as the layout owner, that the building process was way more fun. For instance, I helped someone build a Lionel 4X8 layout. And even though something's always going wrong on that layout and we need to fix things constantly, we always remember the days of going to the hobby shops and train shows to get the materials we needed, creating towns and scenes, and now sadly those days are over. My layout is a completely different type of layout, and will never be finished and that's a good thing!
Actually, a return to the hobby's activities and dimensions in the 1980's would change absolutely nothing relative to the existing circumstances today. Back then it was still the Baby Boomers that comprised the majority of hobbyists and if one takes the magazine circulation figures as a barometer of the hobby's size and health, the hobby was in fact LARGER than it is today by a significant margin. The progression and influence of the Boomers through the hobby's history since the 1950's can be very distinctly traced and it is of premier importance in all of the past four decades. One must go all the way back to the 1940's to see the model railroading hobby as it would/will be without the Boomer element and during that period hobbyists numbered less than 50,000 , or about a quarter of today's numbers. Remove the Boomers from the equation and there isn't much left of the hobby, nor is it sustainable on anything like the commercial basis we've seen evolve over the last several decades. NYW&B
