Do Model RR Club Members Try Hard To Help Beginners?

October 23, 2008

I had an interesting email from a reader who wanted to remain anonymous (I’ll call him Jim). He said he was a beginner to model railroading and found a lot of the terms and words used in the hobby were unnecessarily complicated. He wondered if veterans in the hobby liked to keep it that way to stop too many newbies coming into the hobby. Jim admitted to me he was only speculating on this, but he found many simple things were explained in highly technical ways using long-winded explanations.

Jim also mentioned he had joined a local model RR club. Jim found 3 members were really helpful and two were really secretive and didn’t want to share many ideas.

I suggested to Jim that most people I had met in model RR clubs were more than helpful and that maybe some of it comes down to individual personalities. What do you think?

Without mentioning names or clubs, do you think model RR club members are generally helpful to each other… particularly to newbies?

Do you think some model railroading terms are unnecessarily complicated? Can you give readers some examples?

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