Many of us are creatures of habit and will do "same old, same old" most of the time. While visiting in this layout design forum, why not take some time to visit other forums here at trainboard. Don't have a railimage account, then why not get one - its free, donations appreciated. Why not begin to frequent your prototypes forum here, and there are no extra fees for hanging out in the UP forum... Thinking about DCC, then hang out in the DCC forum to learn more about it? Fried that decoder and need a shoulder to cry on, then you are DCC forum bound. Not to sure why your photo's aren't as sharp as others when photographying your layout, then head to the photo forum here. Happy Hunting!!
Hey Rick, I did a lot of wandering around on here looking for activity when I first got here. I just like to kill time talking about trains and maybe helping people design their layouts etc. I tried asking questions and posting comments on specific railroad forums here, but often the people who posted originally do not check back to see whats going on. So comments get ignored. The trainboard site has so many subgroups that are not very active that one wonders if they should be grouped together. It's exciting to see the possibilities of the internet and explore all the different ways things can be organized, but perhaps some of the subgroups do not reflect the activity of the users of this site. I recall that someone built a college campus once and didn't put in sidewalks till the students had trudged paths through the turf revealing the true patterns of traffic as opposed to the planned patterns of traffic. Perhaps the moderators could examine how active different area's are and create one giant forum for those less active area's so that people with a more general commonality could share data instead of making posting there a waste of time. I have found that N scale is the most active area on here, as is layout design. I tend to go to just those two places because they reflect my interests as well. By the same token, when I'm on the Atlas site I avoid the N scale sections because they just seem too fiesty, and go to the O scale sections to see what the O scalers are up to.
Actually a while back we did combine several forums together and lost several people (and Moderators) because topics were too mixed up together and people didn't like the mixture. Yes, some forums are more active than others but do you really want to have to search 10,000 Fallen Flags topics just to find those about the D&H given the "topic" doesn't list which roadname it is about in most cases. This is why the Today's Railroads forums are those of RR's that exist today and the Fallen Flags are a "collapsed" set of about 30 forums. Those are still groups of several more Fallen Flags of the various mergers, etc. of even older RR's long lost to time. It's a tough balancing act of have the forums that will get people to use them and having to many that they set idle. I have challenged the other Fallen Flags moderators to a "Dual" on keeping their forums alive and some have risen to the challenge and others haven't. Check out the Delaware & Hudson Railroad where you will find a ton of useful "Era" topics even though there is little Q&A topics like you see in the Modeling forums. You being from Denver (like me) and wanted to look up and/or post topics on the old D&RGW that would be a Fallen Flag forum area. You can get some great Modeling ideas from these topics even if you don't post there which is common.
Well I don't want anyone to leave just because I made a suggestion. No biggie, I will continue to hang out in my pre-designated boxes.
