Okay - X2011 has come up with a great idea. If you've ever been to a National Model Railroad Association Convention, you've gotten a 3x11 (or so) wire bound book that contains all the information about the convention - including the schedule of clinics. It gets unwieldy, you've got to come up with a system of marking what clinics you want, it definitely doesn't have any alarms to remind you... and right when you need it, you've left it in the hotel room.

Authors edit: One of the nice things about being an admin is that I can change thread titles.... and someone made a good suggestion that I do just that. So I did.

There's another one of the "death of the hobby" discussions going on on another forum that I hang out on, and as it also discussed the dying Hobby/Train shop phenomenon and it's effect on people joining the hobby, it got me thinking a bit.

How does Model Railroading market itself? How should it be marketing itself - or how should we, as model railroaders, be marketing it?

Okay, last month I ordered a little "keychain" video camera from an outfit in Hong Kong. I figured for <$12 it was a reasonable gamble. It finally got here on Saturday (and I got it when I checked the mail on Sunday...). Charge it up, put it an Micro-SD (they call it TF) card that I had sitting around, and it's off to the railroad...

... you turn on the power and they move!

You might have noticed that some of the MRH staff hasn't  been around quite as much  as normal the past couple of days.

Here is one of those times I wish I'd had more time... I did have the opportunity to go into the Historical Display room as well as the contest room, I just didn't get to spend as much time in either as I would have wanted to.

My photos from both are at:

http://www.shultzinfosystems.com/gallery159/view_album.php?set_albumName...

A video of the Milwaukee Layout:

Note: all the photos in their full size (8 & 10MP) versions along with many others (I shot 150 on Sunday alone) are located at http://www.shultzinfosystems.com/gallery159/view_album.php?set_albumName=NMRA2010

Sunday... as I write this, the National Train Show has been over for about an hour, although I had to leave around 3pm.

The days all start blending into each other - and I'm a little surprised to realize that tomorrow is my last day here.

Today got really busy - I started by thinking that we just be videotaping interviews with a few select companies - I'd personally targeted BLMA, which is practically a tradition now, ExactRail, since Chris Clune was here with Blaine (rhymes with "train") Hadfield and I definitely wanted to talk to them, and Tangent, pretty much just because - they do a good interview and had a couple of new products that I think will be of interest to many modelers.

Okay, let's start with the photos that were inappropriate last night (because Athearn hadn't actually shown this stuff publically yet), but are fine now that the show is well and underway. I apologize for the poor photos - these are from a cell phone.

Incidentally, other than the green locomotive, we borrowed the other four temporarily and gave them the "Click 'n Spin" photo treatment. It may be sometime next week before they are up.

...and now, the news...

(Note: Some of you might have seen a version of this post go up briefly last night. After reflection, I decided that some of the items were inappropriate too be posted at that time and I took it back down. Here it is again, without the inappropriate elements, which will instead be in my Friday report, for which they are entirely appropriate!)