Having lived in the USA now for three years i am constantly amazed and disappointed that there is not one single monthly or bi-monthly magazine dedicated to preservation and restoration ? In the UK we had a plethora of modern traction preservation and staem preservation magazines to choose from.
What happened to Locomotive and Railroad preservation magazine, did it really not have enough readers to sustain its publication. I love reading about other peoples great efforts to preserve the past, its inspiring to us who are trying to do the same and to others who wish they could.

Any thoughts anyone ??

Mike Pannell
Cheyenne Wy

Publications in the US and GB are quite different by the size of the country and the buying nature of the market. I think that people in England read more, and also go down to the little store down the street and buy a bundle of magazines more often. Magazines in the us survive by subscription, and I would be certain a fairly large portion of revenues go into shipping and marketing. I have noticed that some larger bookstores are reducing the size of the magazine racks.

We are quite glad here that the railfan publications have increased their coverage of historic preservation, I think. L&RP is a loss we all lament - search the archives here to find out what happened. For a broad coverage of news from museums in a glossy publication, I suggest joining the Association of Railway Museums. They have a good one going there.

Frankly, RYPN is a fantastic preservation news source, although I always hope for more articles. Maybe we need to offer authors some kind of incentive?

And I have a question back to you, is there something like RYPN in the UK? I joined a preservation oriented yahoo group called ukhrail-workshop but it is almost as dead as a doornail. If there is a forum where the restoration people talk, I would like to see it and learn about on-the-ground experiences on the other side of the muddy pond.

Brother Anderson's remarks are pretty much spot on.

I could make the case that an entirely different mindset towards preservation applies to the States as opposed to other countries. I have heard some prominent authorities within our own field make excellent arguments that, relative to the scenes in other countries, we don't actually HAVE a "rail preservation movement" in the United States. Almost every rail preservation project, with a scant few exceptions, operates effectively in isolation from one another. I can cite an example of three utterly identical steamers within 100 miles of one another, and a fourth example a few hundred more miles from that trio, all under restoration simultaneously, yet there was NO coordinated effort to all together to bulk-order flues, parts, etc.

Some of this can be explained by "different" missions. For example, if the Santa Fe Historical Society wants to restore and operate a Santa Fe streamlined consist, there is still good reason to think long and hard about partnering with the Grand Canyon RR, the Verde Canyon RR, or the Santa Fe Southern--all have different mission statements.

Another aspect of this is the provincial nature of American railfans, much more so than British/other fans. Look at the legions of fans who basically won't care an iota about [insert project here] unless it's PRR/AT&SF/SP/N&W/NP/whatever. Or ignore diesels unless they're Alcos.

Could we see another L&RP? Hard to say. I think White River Publications is having its struggles just keeping the resurrected Passenger Train Journal alive and keeping Railroads Illustrated (the reformatted national version of CTC Board) going. I doubt there would be enough potential subscribers to a new L&RP in 2009 no matter how excellent the content may be--and I would love to eat crow about this.

(EDIT: Corrected the predecessor history of RI magazine....)

You can't even get US fans and US publications interested in Alco and Baldwin and EMD locomotives built for export. If it has even a few foreign looking fixtures, forget it.

PC

I agree with the responses, the view of preservation over here is so different. When i went after our 1887 Pullman car i expected a queue of people to be trying to snag it, but no-one was even the slightest bit interested. In the UK you would have had a number of railways after this car to use in vintage trains. The UK scene can be covered quite easily with news in one magazine because of the small size of the Island, whereas here it would be more complicated. I dont know about online forums for preservation news, i just trawl through my favourite railways and catch with the news.
I would be quite happy to do an article on our project for RPN.

Mike Pannell
Cheyenne

Don't forget the simple publishing mechanics: cost of paper, cost of postage over a larger geographic area (lower population density spread out), and volume of advertising revenue. Also, the volume of writing available (and the fees expected by the authors).

Another factor that inhibits preservation magazine production is the absence of a dedicated advertising sales force. The railfan and rail preservation market is quite narrow so a publisher will have difficulty obtaining working capital to hire staff or support independent media reps who will aggressively pursue advertisers. Consequently, the publisher has to wear the hat of advertising sales rep in addition to the management functions. Since the publisher is parceling out his/her time, advertising solicitation gets short shrift......until the bookkeeper looks at cashflow projections. OMG! We need money. Hurry up and sell a few ads!

I do think a re-birth of L&RPN is possible. The key is having a subscriber database of decision-makers (museum leadership and independent rolling stock collectors) that advertisers would find attractive. With database in place, then a dedicated advertising salesperson can hustle for business. IMHO, good advertising prospects could include ( in random order): paint & coating companies, lumber & millwork, tubing & gaskets, casting & stamping, electrical shops, glass & glazers, rope & cable, steel service centers, right-of-way maintenance equipment/new & used, insurance, legal, hotels & restaurants near rail museums etc.

Of course well-written articles and well-composed photos will attract and retain subscribers.

Sloan

On a similar topic, possibly explained by the same reasons above: with the rabid following of Railpace Newsmagazine in the Northeastern US, I often wonder why that idea hasn't caught on with other areas of the nation? Very few ads make it to this magazine, which means they rely mostly on sales to stay afloat.

You might say that there are no interesting rail operations in other parts of the country, and be totally wrong. There are enough colorful locomotives, interesting locations, shortlines and preservation groups located throughout the nation that it could be divided five or six ways for the local railfans. The quality of photo reproduction in Railpace is second to none, but that doesn't mean others couldn't give it a go.

I guess the publishers just took a "damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead" attitude, and 25+ years later, they are still at it.

Railpace has a very strong following among the "modern diesel" enthusiasts, a group who are increasingly doing their own thing, independent of the NRHS, the "fallen flag" railroad historical societies, and the museum and preservation movement. Many of them view the traditional railroad historical groups as failing to represent their interests. Just look at the current list of discussion topics on the RYPN interchange front page and you can see why many of those folks aren't very interested in what is happening here.

As far as availability of articles to support print magazines is concerned, it is mainly a matter of the people with the information and the ability to present it understandably, having the time and the necessary motivation to do so. And it seems that increasingly nowadays most people have less and less spare time available to put into hobby projects.

Once your project gets to the publisher, how soon it gets into print is also influenced by how good a job you do packaging and presenting it to them. If you furnish it on a disk in Microsoft Word with the suggested photo selection already scanned and captioned, and send along a mock-up of how you would like to see it presented, it may be used very soon. If you sent it as an "article kit" that requires a lot of the magazine staff's effort to assemble, and additional searches for supporting materials, it may be a long time before anybody sees it.

There is also the matter of getting the best result for the time and effort expended. It takes just as much preparation work to write a feature article for a railroad historical society that will put it in front of less than 1000 readers as it does to do the same article for publication in a national magazine that will put it in front of 50,000 or more. Some projects deserve the larger audience, from a standpoint of their historical value, unique scope, or amount of time and research that went into them.

PC

Brother Cook truly hits the proverbial nail on the head.

The fact remains that active discussion of rail preservation--of archival techniques, preservation philosophy, the hows and whys of injectors or wooden-car siding, etc.--amounts to a geeky sub-set of an already geeky hobby.

The absolutely delicious account of a fireman running a SAR 25C on the Kimberly-De Aar line we saw elsewhere is an incredible tale that I would LOVE to see enshrined in the likes of Trains or Steam Railway, but the hard reality is that the vast majority of American railfans won't pay one iota of attention to it because it's "foreign"--it isn't Sherman Hill, Tehachapi, or Horse Shoe Curve. And that's their loss. (Well, I have no use whatsoever for the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards.)

Probably the best thing we could hope to see in the pages of Trains or R&R is a hard-hitting examination of either "why aren't we seeing 614 running?" or "what went wrong with PRR 1361?" Both cases should be fundamental lessons in what went right, if only for a while, and what went wrong--the latter possibly with no real blame to assign. The 1361 debacle, probably more than any other, puts a bad publicity spin on the rail preservation field, especially with the political angles involved. (Note: I am aware of the private ownership issue of 614, and I am not making a personal attack. I am only selecting what, from frequency of the subjects randomly appearing on internet forums, would likely be two of the most FAQ's in the preservation field today.)

Unfortunately, it's all too easy to pontificate on "how to save Amtrak" (which Trains seems to do about once a decade or better)--we all have a stake and say in it, whether we want to or not. I'm wagering that cracking the likes of the 1361 case or why the Grand Canyon ceased steam operation or the pros and cons of Steamtown NHS is just too delicate or complex an issue for any but the hard-nosed cynics here to address, and regrettably would garner a collective yawn from the readers of the NRHS Bulletin, Classic Trains, or the like.

Ironically, Britain's Railway Magazine is definitely not coy about controversy. In recent months, it has addressed, in major op-ed-articles, the issues of digital-versus-film in rail photography preservation, the fact that Britain's oldest railway club has folded for reasons of old age (and that the three oldest survivors are discussion a merger), and other "hot-potato" topics.

I was under the impression that the print media business was a 'loser'-locked into a death spiral of decreasing subscriber bases and diminishing ad revenues.

This link is a newer take on delivering editorial (and ad) content:
http://playback.avguide.com/issue/17?src=Playback

DPK

Sitting before me is a copy of the now defunct Railway Mechanical Engineer. Hard not to notice that most of the advertisers are also defunct.

A very good point. This was the subject of a recent conversation with a gentleman in the publishing industry. I understand that the railroad enthusiast publications and particularly the model railroading publications tend to be winners in a recession, as people tend to stay at home, spend more time reading magazines, and put a lot more work into their model railroads.

Or building cutaway locomotive models for museums?

PC

Print publishers are trapped in a wobbly see-saw of opposing forces: First the steady decline of print-media publishing (and the national loss of attention span that comes with social adoption of the alternatives)... and second, the markedly improving technologies of publishing which make life on "the long tail" of publishing easier than ever.

Companies now can do "print on demand" of single copies of your book for prices (with your markup) comparable to bookstore prices. I'm not sure magazines can do that yet, but they can certainly publish in .pdf for free. Would you pay $12/year for 6 issues of L&RP issued on .PDF?

But even more than that, you have a fundamental problem in the USA: So few people care about trains. Where's your market?

YES!

If you want to see where this sort of niche publication is headed, check out the RAILWAY HERALD, a weekly web-only magazine published in the UK. While it's not all about preservation, a good portion is. Thus far anyhow, it's being distributed free. I doubt there is enough related advertising revenue to support a similar free publication in the US, but the cost to subscribers could certainly be less than the printed and mailed page. These things work in the UK because the percentage of railfans per capita there is probably 10X what it is here. And there is a national interest in and pride for historic preservation, vastly stronger than any counterpart here.