esngblog

For part 3 of this mini-epic, here’s Chris Mears’ take on the previous articles, posted on his own blog.  Apologies, Chris, as I’ve just lifted your comments from your re-blog.  (I am never quite sure where copyright starts on a blog – I assume a long attributed quote is OK, even if any permission is retrospective!)

I enjoy the way in which Mike Cougill thinks about the hobby. I envy his willingness to ask not only good but seemingly new questions and I completely agree so many of his viewpoints. As rich as his questions were it was Simon’s really terrific blog post, which I’m sharing here, that I found really focused my attention on the original twenty questions and my response to them.

We spend a lot of time trying to justify our involvement in model railways to those outside the hobby. These models we build are amazing works of engineering and of art. They are something to be proud of and the time invested in them was wisely spent not just for the satisfaction of a model’s completion but for the growth we triggered in ourselves as we honed the craft of the hobby and our mastery of its skills. It disappoints me when we reduce all of this work down to something as flippant as “Model railroading is fun” or quip that we don’t really take it seriously. What’s so wrong with discussing the hobby maturely? The trains are only the muse, it’s our reactions that inspire these great discussions and those are great intellectual pursuits.

It’s not that model railroading isn’t fun but we’re really selling ourselves short by always returning to that point. Further, we’re promoting the idea of how trivial this all is but not sharing the true depth of satisfaction one can derive.

Chris highlights the essential point here – yes model railroading is ‘fun’ but the word ‘fun’ doesn’t go deep enough in describing our hobby.  ‘Deeply satisfying’ would seem to be one possible phrase to do the job – but this isn’t much of a catch phrase!  (And I can add a number of rather negative activities that might be described as ‘deeply satisfying’ – but won’t in case of offending my more sensitive readers – perhaps one might start with ‘ethnic cleansing is deeply satisfying’.)

I’ve been thinking in recent weeks about ‘why’ I actually model railways.  What do I really enjoy about model railways?  And conversely, what frustrates me when I don’t seem to find the time to get anything done (as at present).  But as I was getting to put ‘keyboard to screen’ this week, I came across an post and a couple of responses to said post that put it all down better than I could.  (Not that I agreed with all of it, but it made me think).

So the next four posts will be re-blogs of the original article and two responses, plus my rather derivative thoughts.  I might sneak in a cheerful post somewhere along the line about a couple of recent train crashes, provided by Allan.

I’ll start with Mike Cougill’s OST Blog.  I know I’ve mentioned Mike before, as his small O-fine layout and modelling is inspirational, and his ideas often helpful and challenging (as characterised by the Missing Conversation series of e-books).  Here’s his article, reproduced in full I’m afraid, as it’s difficult just to quote from it.  (But slightly reformatted – sorry, the report writer in me took over).  For the full post and comments, go to here.

Premise: Model Railroading is not fun.

Questions.

1. Is model railroading frustrating?
2. Why do people find aspects of it so frustrating?
3. Why is fun a prerequisite for a hobby?
4. What constitutes fun?
5. When is model railroading fun?
6. Is model railroading always fun (that is, people automatically have fun when doing it), or is it fun because people find meaningful ways to pursue it?
7. Are there assumptions about fun and this hobby?
8. What assumptions?
9. What assumptions do we bring?
10. Why do we bring any assumptions to it?
11. Where or how do such assumptions begin?
12. Are assumptions hurting the hobby?
13. Why don’t we challenge assumptions about the hobby?
14. Are people afraid to challenge their assumptions about model railroading?
15. What would happen if more people did?
16. Would people still be having fun?
17. Would that result in a better hobby?

Boiling it down to three questions:

1. Are decades old assumptions hurting or helping model railroading?
2. Why are people adverse to talking about all this?
3. What would happen if we did?

The answers dear reader, should you choose to pursue them, are entirely up to you.

Regards,
Mike

If all that’s a bit heavy for you, just go and run a train or hack some plastic or brass about!  But it struck a few chords with me and next time I’ll genuinely repost a response from another blog.  Happy modelling – even if it’s not much fun!