Japanese model railroad magazine

[cteno4]

Densha,

 

We did have a big wiki set up to do an article archive like this, but unfortunately few of us did much content development for it so it was abandoned.

 

The key here is content creation, it's the hardest part and is usually 5-10x harder and lengthier to do than folks think. I know I've designed and produced this kind of work for education, informational websites, and exhibits for 30 years now and EVERYONE, including me, underestimates how much work creating and presenting content will be!

 

Jeff

[kvp]

So far i've seen successful train blogs, but only because the owner is making it instead of actual modelling, so anyone who likes model trains but doesn't or for some reason can't do it in real life is a good candidate. Some free time and lots of patience is required too. IRL modelling and blogging at the same time will result in a blog about the owner's trains and layout and not a comprehensive blog what would be interesting for the largest crowd.

[E6系]

Hello again,

 

I understand.  I simply asked the question because someone else asked if there is a magazine in English.

 

Edit: Mr Densha ... you are thinking of IP.Blog

Edited June 16, 2015 by E6系

[railsquid]

Densha,

 

We did have a big wiki set up to do an article archive like this, but unfortunately few of us did much content development for it so it was abandoned.

 

The key here is content creation, it's the hardest part and is usually 5-10x harder and lengthier to do than folks think. I know I've designed and produced this kind of work for education, informational websites, and exhibits for 30 years now and EVERYONE, including me, underestimates how much work creating and presenting content will be!

 

 

Living in Japan I could potentially contribute some interesting articles etc., but like Jeff says, it's a lot of work, and there are plenty of other demands on my time... Now, if I could at least part-finance my hobby by creating content things might be different, but realistically that ain't never going to happen unless I win some lottery and have lots of free creative time.

[cteno4]

Yes, it's something that usually is a luxury to find time for or a reap passion and I guess that's why the layout articles are easier to get written for the site.

 

Blogs have the problem that they are designed to exist in the moment and past content is rarely maintained in anything past a date index of postings. Also the format tends to funnel folks into stream of consciousness writing where they take off on a thought and then many times just wander. They rarely are written as a thought out article piece. Some are interesting sort of journals of progress, that if done in good intervals and each entry is nicely done on the work of the week it can be a very interesting way to follow the development of a project, but usually life quickly erodes folks being complete or frequent in the entries.

 

Blogs, forums and Mail lists are notoriously hard when it comes time to find something from the past for someone who knows what they are looking for. For the newbie or when researching a new aspect of the hobby it can be impossible! Even if you find it the content is broken up with all the discussion and can be really hard to follow. These systems were designed more for the in the moment conversation and that fine, it just means that w.o a lot of other work it's hard to repackage them long term archiving and easy retrevial or casual semi focused browsing.

 

Use to be things in industry and business called white papers. These were written by experienced folks in their fields on some aspect of it (usually near and dear to them) to summarize the history and latest and greatest thinking on a topic at hand. Companies use to let professionals spend some of their work time and in the old days even have an editor help clean them up well and they would many times share these white papers out to everyone as good will. It was a bit of status for companies to produce the best ones that were respected. Sadly these seem rarer these days and most have evolved into blogs that suffer from the above issues and quickly are lost in the noise.

 

This is why the wiki or web site help to archive and organize content over the long run and focus each piece to be written as a nice complete unit with good internal structure, content, supporting pieces, etc. But this then adds a whole Nother layer of work of signing that site, content structure, playing managing editor, laying out and formatting articles, housekeeping etc!

 

All this being said if any of you out there want to write up any little article on any aspect of our hobby like layouts, track planning, scenery techniques, model building, product reviews, electronics, prototype info, etc please send them on, would be glad to get them into the JRM site and of it grows enough it will push me to reorganize things some to help organize, archive and present the content even better!

 

Cheers,

 

Jeff

[dabsan]

There are plenty of Japanese published magazines, try and learn a bit of Japanese it's not that difficult. Anyway most of those magazine are so packed full of visually stunning photographs and artwork you will be in intoxicated train heaven. Also the paper and print smells nice! :laughing1:

[Densha]

On JNS I can really only find this topic for beginners (click), but quickly these kinda topics end up being a stream of very informative, but unorganized posts.

I was just reminded of Ken's website (http://sumidacrossing.org/) that has a lot of practical information on Japanese model trains. Very well organized as well.

Things like questions about couplers, lightning trains, etc. keep popping up very often and it would be nice to have such information organized.

 

I think that a wiki or something would work for organizing practical information, but if you're doing articles on layouts e.g. I think a magazine style would be better. Just my two cents.

 

Actually, what happened to the old JNS wiki articles?

 

I don't really know where we're heading with this whole discussion though... :P

[Kb4iuj]

Does anybody know if there maybe a Russian model trains magazine as I saw in TMS #879. A 2M62 and a ChME which they photographed the plastic shell body at a model train show in Germany. Whether if it was in N or HO, that's another story.