----- Original Message -----
From: "Anthony Thompson" <thompson@signaturepress.com>
To: <STMFC@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 03, 2007 1:25 AM
Subject: Re: [STMFC] Kits? Yep...they're still with us


> Another point worth making is that there really wasn't all that
> much scratch building 50 years ago or so. You just made do with what
> you could get. Layouts were full of Athearn and Ulrich metal cars,
> Varney plastic, and some paper-side cars. You could visit layouts all
> over the country and see the exact same freight cars (and structures
> and passenger cars and . . . ) because anything else was far too much
> trouble. Sure, some talented and energetic people were building great
> models, but I'd guess there were no more of them then than now. And
> what they built wouldn't be that impressive today. Just go back and
> look at the magazine photos.
> Layouts like Jack Burgess's YV were really inconceivable then.
> Jack has had to scratch build an awful lot, but 50 years ago you
> couldn't even get sheet styrene (nor would you have known what to do
> with it), and the very first brass engines were just coming into view.
> People thought Ambroid kits were "too hard," and hey, those Bowser
> locomotives didn't look THAT odd with Belpaire boilers on your
> free-lanced short line. And there was hardly any serious prototype
> information being published; practically no modelers had discovered the
> Cyc and other resources.
> The progress to today is really qualitative, not just
> quantitative. Richard Hendrickson is right when he says "THIS is the
> golden age." When we have one of these discussion about where the hobby
> is and where it's going, let's not forget where it's come from.
>
> Tony Thompson Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA
> 2906 Forest Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705 www.signaturepress.com
> (510) 540-6538; fax, (510) 540-1937; e-mail, thompson@signaturepress.com
> Publishers of books on railroad history
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