As Time Goes By

Measurement and perception

Time, measured in seconds, minutes, hours and so on moves at a constant speed, or so they tell us. Time as we perceive it is variable. The closing seconds of a close basketball game can seem like an eternity. So too with growing up. Yet as we get older things seem to speed up. By the time you're my age you're wondering where the day went, especially when you can't remember having done much of anything (ah, the joys of retirement).

The speed of time seems to change with each generation as well. Fifty miles an hour when I was young was a lot faster than it is today, thanks largely to our quiet, smooth riding cars. Technologies like TV have also speeded up our perceptions of time. Just watch how fast the images change during the commercials. The supporting text flashes by faster than I can read it. Does this affect our perception of time? You bet it does!

Changing times

Thus it should come as no surprise that increasingly young people have little tolerance for the painstakingly slow work involved in model building from scratch. I remember as a young teenager being enormously impressed by an article in Model Railroader (back in the '50s) describing the building of an HO-scale ore car. The author cut hundreds of pieces of brass and soldered them all together. It took him 400 hours, which he wore like a badge of honor. I set out to duplicate his effort, but soon gave up.

As I think back on it, I never really had as much patience as I liked to think I did. I could gear up for and start many projects, but unless they were relatively simple kits, I never fully finished them. Part of the problem was my wide ranging, all-inclusive interest in everything related to transportation vehicles, vessels and systems. That makes it hard to finish large projects like model railroad layouts, which are thematic and focused (unless huge). The bottom line is I can dream up layouts and design them and move on to something else a lot faster than I can build them.

Through the years I've started a lot of model railroad layouts and only finished one - a small demo layout for a trolley museum. I never finished anything for myself because my ambitions and imaginations far outstripped the duration of my interest. Today's kids - it seems to me - have an even shorter attention span than I do. (I didn't get to watch TV until I was 11; at 13 I was sent away to school where there was no TV, and I didn't own a TV until I was 30 or watch regularly till I was 40.)

Virtual layouts

When it comes to virtual railroad layouts it's another matter. As you may have observed from the Downloads page at my Virtual Railroader website, I have finished lots of layouts. The key is that with Trainz, for example, I can build a layout in a week - actually get all the essentials in place in a few days - and spend another week or two perfecting things like track work, scenery and operation. I can easily indulge all my interests, including layouts based on trolley lines, narrow gauge lines and even bus lines. I can design and build layouts that focus on open running or switching or servicing industries or any combination and in any size. I can even model entire systems with sims like Bahn and Rail3D. If I really want a lot of action and have a finished looking operational layout at every moment practically from the start, I can use an empire building sim like Locomotion or Transport Tycoon Deluxe.

Is it any wonder that readership of model railroading magazines has been in decline, as has attendance at train shows? Kids today are not only bombarded by an ongoing plethora of organized sports - which I never had - and are constantly attracted to all manner of technological goodies (train sims included); they simply don't have the time or the attention span.

Suggestion

I have a suggestion to the hobby industry: embrace virtual railroading while you can. If you don't, time will pass you by and you will be superceded by more in-touch upstarts from a younger generation.

Cheers,
-- Al