I got an actual acknowledgement from Trainsmagazine.info about the possible Trojan infection on their site:

"Thank you for contacting Trains Magazine. We appreciate the feedback you have provided and will be forwarding this information to the appropriate department for further review. If you have any further questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to let us know."

I expected this since Customer Service was the website in the print magazine. They wlould need to refer it to Kalmbach IT.

And yes, I get daily ads asking me to subscribe to magazines where I am either already a subscriber or am not interested. Funny, I didn't get any today.

Phil Mulligan

THIS.

Model Railroader was in many ways my first introduction to the railfan hobby's printed word. They, Trains and Classic Trains are distributed to plenty of grocery store magazine racks so I was able to easily find copies of them as a teenager. So they became a go to favorite for many years, I eventually subscribed to them; but it was the subscription that killed the magic.

The subscription revealed all the flaws in the magazine set up, you can almost play a game of BINGO with each issue "Is there a Pelle layout?" "Is Tony talking about operations again?" "Is the cover layout a massive basement filling set up that is either transition era Appalachia or DRGW narrow gauge?" "Is all the technical information about installing DCC decoders again?" Basically it became very clear over time that Model Railroader was overly reliant on the same schtick issue after issue, and while there were a few nice random things that broke the monotony (like an OO scale layout featured once or Bernard Kempinski's Civil War layout) for the most part Model Railroader quickly became bland and dull. It is clear it exists to serve what I can honestly only describe as the Boomer nostalgia market, a tried and true formula of transition era focused railroads that are meant to capture the childhood's of today's 70-somethings by reminiscing "you remember when the Pennsylvania Railroad still existed? You do! Look Rod Stewart does too! (never mind that he is British...)" Yes there were attempts to bring in a more modern audience, Pelle Soeborg is a great modeler and author but when he is the lone voice for that in MR even that becomes dull because he is used as the token "modern guy" month in and month out. David Popp one of my early favorite MR authors eventually got kicked from the magazine and thrown over to Model Railroader Plus, a reminder of Kalmbach further narrowing their field of talent on their flagship magazines by sending other writers in their stable to spend time on their company's frivolous digital pursuits.

Yes Model Railroader does sometimes surprise me, but one diamond in the rough per year a reason to renew my subscription does not make...

Then add on top of that Kalmbach's reprinting strategy. Articles are compiled and brought together into $20 paperback tomes to form short books focused on hobby subjects. Then articles and features pulled off Model Railroader Plus are compiled in $15 special issues that are sold in magazine form. So what is a better value, a subscription for 12 magazines of fluff and ads or one $20 paperback and a special issue that sums up the greatest hits of the last few years? I can honestly say, their own marketing strategy is undercutting the value of the magazine since the paperbacks allow me to cut the middleman and go straight to the good stuff without wasting money on a subscription.

Railroad Model Craftsman first really started to stick out to me as the antithesis of my woes with Model Railroader in 2019, when I picked up a few issues. The technical info was no longer just "DCC decoder installations" and "how to run ops sessions" but instead drawings on freight cars and breakdowns of detailed modeling projects. The layouts featured on the cover felt more diverse, more unique than just Model Railroader's limited obsession's. In general, I can't explain it but RMC gradually began to show me it did everything I felt Model Railroader lacked; and after talking to my friends about it we all came to agree that RMC was the better magazine between the two. Likewise, the same about Trains and Railfan and Railroad was noted by me around this time too; that R&R was just doing a better job at reporting things in a timely factual manner, their social media was not some self serving clickbait nonsense but factual news, and R&R just felt more friendly than Trains.

It didn't help either in 2019 was when Trains tried to basically hijack the whole UP 150 celebrations for their own purposes. Yes, I did buy almost every piece of "special issues" on Big Boy that Kalmbach put out that year, but other than one Classic Trains article by Gil Bennet the rest felt oddly self serving in a way that was off putting. I am honestly a little surprised Trains didn't outright claim they were responsible for restoring UP 4014 themselves with how much self aggrandizing they were doing elsewhere in their coverage of the restoration. If they didn't claim it with Big Boy, they certainly are doing it with WM 1309 using the Trains brand wherever possible to fundraise for that engine, and while I appreciate that the money is going to restoration it feels like on Trains' part they are doing it to lay some weird sense of ownership over 1309.

Add on top of this Trains has been misreporting things a lot lately and has poor fact checking. I know via the grapevine of people in the railroad industry who have instructed their employers to lock Trains out from their company, since the speculative crap Trains has published has already damaged other railroad projects due to sloppy journalism. Trains has a national platform, and they need to be using their reporting more responsibly if they want to regain some modicum of respect. Until then though, R&R just continues to chew through more and more of Trains' old market via being a more respectable news source. Yes Trains can put out a decent magazine issue from time to time, and I certainly understand they are struggling with Mr. Wrin's cancer diagnoses and can only wish him the best recovery. But, Trains needs to clean up their act.

Oh don't get me started on the spam mail either. I have dropped my MR subscription for a year but I still get spam letters from Kalmbach offering me a chance to "come back to MR and subscribe to Classic Trains and Trains Magazine or Toy Trains Magazine or...!!!" Its annoying, its off-putting and does not make me second guess my choice to drop MR at all.

Really the only Kalmbach production I can't complain about is Classic Trains, that has to be my favorite one currently of the Kalmbach railroad line, even if its just a quarterly I can always count on Classic Trains for being better quality than Trains or Model Railroader, and being a fun historical reference.