Does anyone have any history on the former RYPN magazine? Was there a reason why it stopped being published? Was wondering how many people are on this board that use to write for it?

SMH

Do you mean the former Locomotive and Railway Preservation magazine?

I know the publisher as a personal friend. Costs, information, versus revenues and subscription renewals.

I thought there was a Railway Preservation News Magazine at one time and thus after it got shut down this site was born out of that being canceled.

SMH

Well the home page for the website clearly states "Railway Preservation News, Online MAGAZINE of railway history and preservation".

Now there are some articles on different things here: http://www.rypn.org/articles/ but the last one seems to be from 2008.

I don't know if the original RYPN staff still check in here very often; but if they do, the following is subject their corrections/clarifications.

Yes, there was at one time a Locomotive and Railway Preservation magazine. It was a printed magazine; I think someone offered a complete set of back issues here awhile back if interested.

As Richard said, costs, information, versus revenues and subscription renewals made the printed magazine no longer a viable operation. So, publication of the L&RP came to end.

Enter the Internet and world wide web. Many of the original editors saw the web as presenting an opportunity to do what L&RP did without the printing costs, or worrying about advertising. So, they formed the RYPN website; the exact timeframe escapes me now, but it was around the year 2000.

This website rocked along nicely for a few years. But then, the same old bugabo about coming up with quality articles and information reared it's ugly head again. Furthermore, the original RYPN board was not happy with the direction this forum, the Interchange, was taking. Bob Yarger was sadly hounded off for posting too many links to historical photographs, and too many times the forum conversations took a ugly turn, with the worst being a threatened lawsuit against the RYPN board.

After the lawsuit threat, the RYPN board decided to disband the organization, and RYPN as an "online magazine" also came to an end. We still have the website and this forum thanks to it's webmaster. But RYPN as an organization is no more; another sad loss for the preservation community.

I was one of the ones here from the beginning, along with many of the participants in this thread. It's been a great ride; I am just sad for the original founders it turned out like it did.

Steve,

There never was an RYPN magazine. The current RYPN website was the brainchild of Bob Yarger, who wrote the Railway Preservation News (RYPN) column in the now-defunct Locomotive & Railway Preservation magazine that was originally published by Mark Smith. For various reasons already mentioned, Mark sold L&RP to Pentrax Video's publishing arm but it did not survive in print much longer after that. Don't know the exact date. L&RP was one heck of a high class publication that Mark poured his heart and soul into. I've got a dozen, maybe two dozen issues from it that you're welcome to borrow the next time you visit.

It's startling to realize that most people on this forum today are probably one generation removed from the original RYPN column and L&RP the magazine but are continuing to live out the original mission of L&RP.

Rob Gardner

Yes, and this sort of problem is exactly why it is a MISTAKE - MISTAKE - MISTAKE - for any railway museum to have an online forum or email list for volunteers. MISTAKE. DO NOT DO THIS. What will happen everytime is, your hard working volunteers who get along great face to face. But people have very different personalities on the Internet, and those Internet e-peen's will tangle, get pissed off and stop showing up in the real world. It is the surest way to demolish a volunteer base.

Unfortunately it's very hard to convince a large group of volunteers that a forum is against their best interest. I'm not against free discussion or collaboration; I just think forums (or mail lists) are highly prone to this, and other collaboration methods (blogs, wikis) are far less so.

The #1 thing that monkeywrenches forums like this is the fallacy of free speech. There is no free speech on a privately owned forum. None. Give it up. Nonetheless, the crowd naturally probes the limits of forum rules, as surely as water probes every place it can flow. Moderators need to place cofferdams around allowed behavior, and when they lack the courage, they often call it "free speech". Hence the fallacy.

When a forum has trouble in this area, ultimately, it falls back to leadership. The RyPN Board owned the forum, and if it went sideways, they and they alone stand responsible.



That's one view. Here is another. Bob Yarger was hounded off by forum management. They were prideful and ignored their user base (in fact: blamed their user base: "how dare you criticize HIM, he is a preservation superstar who can do no wrong!") What they failed to realize is that NOBODY was criticizing Bob Yarger, they were criticizing the mess created by mixing two wildly different types of content in one forum. The correct answer has always been separate forums (i.e. the Classifieds forum); it would have made everyone happy and encouraged more of the same, which would have been awesome. Instead management left the problem to fester until it went septic and killed the content.

In both cases, the crowd got blamed for what was really a leadership issue.

Ah, yes, the memories of "Eleanor P." Sweet lady who died too young. . .

As I see it, the problem with articles--coming up with them--is that they take time to write. This time comes from the time spent working on equipment, for which most of the people here who are engaged in such activities do not get paid. This means the time spent working on equipment is limited because of the other work that must be performed to bring in a check.

In short, making a living interferes with living, something Maynard G. Krebs would understand. (For you young whippersnappers, this was a beatnik character played by the late Bob Denver in the 1950s TV series, "Dobie Gillis.")

For those of us who do not share Maynard Krebs's legendary allergy to work, there are still the responsibilities of family, church, Little League, home repair, car repair, and perhaps even a Masonic, Eagles, or Elks lodge.

(I have a weird brain. Something gets mentioned, and I think of something else. In this case, the something else is a sign I saw in an Elks lodge that said, "One of the most amazing sights to see is an Elk drinking water.")

In this respect, I think the old-timers who wrote articles for the likes of "Railway Age" and "Railroad" (and before that, "Railroad Man's Magazine") had an advantage. They got paid to "collect" the background material that became the basis of their writings. Even at that, much of what was written for "Railroad" was recollections by old-timers who were enjoying retirement; most of them were not actively in the preservation field as many potential writers here are today. Other articles, the technical or semi-technical stuff, would be written by either journalists or similar writers who specialized in this field (Edward Hungerford comes immediately to mind), or were written by people involved in sharing information about what they did, again often as a trade press item (articles by a Mathias Baldwin or Will Woodard or Dick Dilworth).

As is often the case, we have a problem of too few hours, compounded by the usual problem of too few dollars. How many readers are there today who are interested in the techniques of boiler tube replacement, which, by the way, was one of the articles in L&RP? How many people are there today who are in a paying trade of replacing boiler tubes in locomotives?

I have to disagree on this one.

As moderator of the WW&F discussion forum, I know that it has lead directly to the expansion of our volunteer base. We also have very little problems with e-personalities. Part of this is solved by the fact that we require all posters to display their full names - no handles, or anonymous posts.

Check us out at http://forum.wwfry.org

-Ed Lecuyer
WW&F Forum Moderator

Without reading through every post in this thread, as a recent, professionally progressive-minded college graduate with the misfortune of choosing a career in journalism (for now), I propose this model: digital publication with the print option for those who want it.

It's not as hard, or as expensive, as one might expect. Get a good CMS like Wordpress with a clean, customized template design and integrated Twitter feed for posting the most timely information, and couple with an aggressive multi-platform social media campaign (there's a lot more to it than simple Facebook posting). Set up an AdSense account to subset your costs and start fundraising on Kickstarter to get a revenue stream going. In due time, and with enough advertisers, you might be lucky enough to find yourself in the position to throw down a few "k" on an iPad app and an art director for real layouts—simultaneously putting the paper option back on the table. Print-on-demand services like MagCloud aren't cheap, but if the publishing party chooses to view it more as a propagation than profit and accepts the print segment having a nearly nonexistent profit margin in their business model, it gets the job done without the distraction of dealing with it. Some old friends are trying this approach by placing the print edition of their upstart rag in select indie bookstores, getting the word out more than anything else. If the reader really wants pulp, they'll cough it up—and even if they don't, nothing is really lost by orders that aren't made (and in the unlikely scenario print miraculously becomes the breadwinner, moving to a higher-volume house is an easy affair).

Mind you there's several sub-nuances needed here to be successful, but it can be done. Perhaps the most important aspect is stating your goals and being up front from the start to ensure a seamless transition through mediums. There's a reason 9 out of 10 new magazines fail, and suddenly asking readers to pay for what they've previously gotten for free is a good way to become one of them. At the culinary magazine I worked for, we posted online content either exclusive to the web or to tease the premium (print/iPad) content—never to overlap. The result was, for obvious reasons, mutually beneficial.

Just a few thoughts to consider. While the Western-watching boomer generation inches towards Florida mass migration and early bird specials, the median railfan age seems to be moving progressively younger from center, thanks to [what we who worked its Day Outs called] "the blue dumpster" and social media/eclectic online communities like YouTube providing a place for like-minded hobbyists to connect. Plus, it seems countless retirees—I know many personally—are using their new found free time to play with gadgets and discover these great technological things. My own father, a onetime exec at the nation's 3rd largest publishing house who can barely use the internet outside AOL, is now virtually (no pun intended) paperless and about to buy an iPad to retire the household magazine basket. If we're set on sticking around for another generation, this is the one place preservation can't be stuck in the past.

Rant over :)

Done properly, the magazine will NOT convert to print very well...

Why not? Well, you're looking at this the same way they looked at early TV. "We'll have a guy read the newspaper in the studio and show a picture of him reading it..."

The iPad is more than a "green" version of paper. Very soon, if they haven't already, most magazines will come with videos in the online version. Would you rather see a still photo of double-heading Q's or watch a video of it? Explaining thigs would be a lot easier in some cases if you could just show a movie.

You know that "Map of the Month" they publish in Classic Trains. Well, when Clambake gets around to an iPad version, I hope I'll be able to click on each railroad and have that line's routes highlighted on screen. "Show me PRR lines". "OK, now NYC". "OK, now both, so I can compare..."

Stop thinking steam era dead tree publishing and get on board the electron liner...

That's an interesting interpretation. I'll ask Bob someday if I hounded him off. :-)

I truly miss this magazine. It was a good read for me when I was involved in the 1522 restoration. Their series on boilers was very good.
I don't see the algorenet as the do-all, be-all and end-all. It's a great tool, but I like to read magazines.
I also greatly miss Mainline Modeler.
Of course, I miss my hair and being able to see my feet and doubt that will get any better either.

My family was having a conversation the other night how much fun we had browsing in bookstores; especially the ones that had a wooden railway set up in the children's section. Alas, you don't know what you have sometimes until it is gone.