It’s Not Supposed To Be Easy

An overstatement for sure, but is model railroading in any scale supposed to be dead easy? It’s not that I want model railroading to be unnecessarily difficult or complex for the sake of it but there’s an old saying that goes, you get out of something what you put into it. I realize if we’re looking to bring new and possibly younger users into model railroading, this might not be the opening pitch we use but I don’t think it should be completely avoided either.

We’ve had lots of folks write in to us here at Ztrains when they were just getting started in Z scale and overwhelmingly, the people who have stayed and grown in the hobby are the ones who have challenged themselves, who tackled things out of their comfort zones. I love to see this!

It’s relative of course, what’s challenging to one person will be easy to another and that’s fine, great actually. We’re all different and that’s what adds variety to the hobby. The one common theme I really enjoy seeing is the effort, the pushing ourselves and constantly raising our standards, not to impress anyone else but to give a real feeling of pride and ownership in the time spent. It’s an amazing personal investment and as a bonus, happy hobbyists sleep better at night too!

Now much of this depends of course on what you’re looking to get out of model railroading. If you just want to casually run trains on sectional track around the kitchen table every couple of months, maybe you won’t want to spend days or weeks building a brass or laser cut building kit. You can still add to the pleasure of the kitchen table layout though, take a bit of time to learn how to properly clean your track and locomotive. Even this simple act of maintenance will draw you in, get you more involved with your hobby and ultimately let you take more pleasure from the time spent with your trains.

It may not always be easy, few worthwhile things are, but it’s definitely worth the effort.

Category: Blog