I can fondly remember many a day in the early 80s when Mark Smith would come walking in through the restoration shop door. He would hang out with those of us that were there talking about railway and trolley preservation. We had a New Orleans street car on one track and a 1910 climax Steam Locomotive sitting on another track. We would adjorn at the end of the day to a local diner and we would talk about a little magazine that he was thinking about starting. It was interesting to talk about how the magazine should look and what it should cover. Once he started the process to get the first issue out we all felt his concern to making it right. I was very impressed when he showed up and proudly showed us the very first issue.

Can a new magazine come along? I think so. What it will take is another person with the passion for what we are all doing. He or she will need to have the strength and fortitude to stick with it as much as we have to have to complete a restoration. I do think someone will someday decide to do it.

Okay, folks, here's some painful reality:

The market for technical rail preservation documentation and broad coverage of the North American rail scene is NOT an economically sustainable one. There is not a market that will sustain even a shoe-string, lives-in-his-mother's-basement economic model, or L&RP would still be in the hands of a successor to Mark Smith.

The field itself is not an economically sustainable one. With the exception of anomalies like Disney World, Strasburg, and the Durango & Silverton, nobody gets into this field for profit or a means of living. It's therefore not going to exist as a trade magazine.

We have publishers and editors completely sympathetic to the cause--practically in bed with us--at Kalmbach, Carstens, and elsewhere. They haven't found a way to bring back L&RP.

The magazine industry itself is in drastic turmoil thanks to the very electrons and screens upon which you're reading these words. We're watching major magazines and newspapers fold or remain on untenable life support for too long; even Playboy is in serious jeopardy right now.

Collecting back issues of magazines appealed to fans when there were twenty or forty years' worth of magazines to be collected, with things they could still relate to in earlier issues. Now, back issues of magazines are being routinely discarded, as youngsters say "when does it come out on CD/DVD?" Raise your hands: How many of us have complete 69-year runs of Trains, 34-year runs of R&R, etc.? I've been formally told by dealers to discard any L&RPs, as they command NO resale value.

No.

The answer is to appeal--by charisma, marketing, brute force, or even hostile takeover--to the sympathetic partners out there to expand preservation coverage in existing publications and other media outlets. There is no reason why there shouldn't be a regular preservation section in Classic Trains; there already IS one in Railfan & Railroad. The latter was intended to cover what got missed in regular preservation coverage, but I would make the case that there ISN'T any regular coverage of preservation in Trains and R&R anymore, relative to the days of "Steam! Photo Section" in Trains in the 1960s and 1970s. Why is there scant coverage of preservation in the NRHS Bulletin? How is it in the R&LHS Railroad History? Why is that?

Let me reiterate what a financial planner emphasized to me: " 'Non-profit' is a tax status, not a business plan."

> I've been formally told by dealers to discard any L&RPs,
> as they command NO resale value.

You might want to get a second opinion. From what research I've done, L&RP is one of the few that does have any resale value. You can find quite a few on ebay in the 5 to 10 dollar range for "buy it now". Then again, some are for bid with no bids, so maybe they're dropping value too.

However, magazines in general have virtually no value. I recently got rid of about 30 years worth of model railroad magazines. It cost me about $75 worth of plastic bins for the guy to haul them off in... He's hoping to start a small railroad museum in a local depot, and will have a library.

Other local railroad preservation organizations had no interest in any of the common railroad and model RR magazines, most said they already had duplicates of most of them.

Well, since we're talking about railroad preservation magazines...

Do any of you read Trainline, the official publication of the Tourist Railway Association? It would certainly seem like a good place for railroad preservation topics.

Say you've never seen a copy? I can fix that...

You can download the last two years or so of issues here:
http://traininc.org/trainline/trainline.html

They're in pdf format, and in fact unlike the print editions, they're in color. Yes, it's perfectly OK for people who aren't members of TRAIN to download them, they're available to anyone, in fact that's why we post them on the website.

You can also subscribe to the print edition without being a member of TRAIN for a nominal fee.

I suspect that the folks offering those sets are smoking the same "Hopium" as seems to be present among five academics in Norway last week. Right now, for all indications, I could, if I wanted, buy a complete set of L&RP and pay basically as much or more for shipping as for the magazines themselves, even in bulk. I've also seen lots of the magazine (and others, to be fair) attract no bids in recent railroadiana auctions.

I'm amused by what else the eBay search pulled up: a seller that has "Historic Maps of Railway -- ca. 1500 A.D. to 1800s"........

Well, since they're being disposed of for next to nothing, guess it's time to go through my collection and figure out which issues I'm missing and fill in the gaps... I think there are two or three I don't have.

Generally speaking, magazine back issues are "not worth selling". The biggest problem, I think, is connecting buyers to sellers. The internet could help, but nobody's really targeted that market because the average magazine might fetch 25 cents.

L&RP does better than most, and I see TODAY there's a good selection on eBay, but I've also seen slim pickins'. In fact, the last batch of eBay L&RP's I've bought, the seller didn't mention that he loved to combine his L&RP reading with chain-smoking really bad stogies. Bleyech!

I wouldn't expect to see the NRHS bulletin cover preservation not done by NRHS chapters.

L&RP's trick was to make their magazine something not just for us, but for the general railfan market as well. As a result, they never really went too deep into preservation or railway museum business; you'd never see an article about drug testing as you saw in last month's TrainLine.

And I gotta say, TrainLine could use some good writers. A lot of stuff they print is fairly raw and in need of interpretation. They also repeat a mistake I see in many newsletters, printing on paper something of interest to few, which is better off on the Web, such as law text and meeting minutes.

As for the future of L&RP, the central problem is NOT a population willing to read the articles; but of a means to distribute those articles to them in a way that'll get all parties paid to their satisfaction*. That's harder than hell to do when 90% of your costs are the overhead of sending dead trees through postal mail.

* AdSense notwithstanding.