Has anybody done a poll to see what people model on this forum ?

[brian777999]

I am not sure how to set it up but it would be interesting to conduct a poll as follows :

 

1. Which scale/gauge do you model ? N, OO, HO, O or other

 

2. What do you model ? Pregrouping, GWR, LMS LNER, Southern, BR, European, American, other

 

I have seen somebody set up a poll of average user age on this forum using a "button" type arrangement so all you had to do was click on it and it kept a tally of the total numbers.

 

Has anybody done this before and who knows how to set it up ?

[Miss Prism]

Has anybody done this before and who knows how to set it up ?

Every incarnation of RMweb has had a number of such polls. They usually tell us what we knew already, i.e. that nobody has ever set up a poll that satisfies everyone's idea of how it should be structured or answered.

[ClikC]

Definite can of worms here.

 

BR alone could probably match in number all of the other options put together, even in vague terms like; Steam, Transition, Post Steam Green, BR Blue, Sectorization all multiplied by region of choice. Some periods of BR history last as little as one or two years, depending how specific you want to be...

[Bob Reid]

Every incarnation of RMweb has had a number of such polls. They usually tell us what we knew already, i.e. that nobody has ever set up a poll that satisfies everyone's idea of how it should be structured or answered.

 

:icon_clap:

 

Bob

[brian777999]

okay...sorry I brought it up then.

[Bernard Lamb]

okay...sorry I brought it up then.

 

 

No need to say sorry.

The only way to find out about any thing is to ask questions.

One of the problems is that a lot of people have various interests and model different periods, different scales and even different countries. How they answer a poll might well depend on how they felt on that particular day.

Bernard

[Caledonian]

It also depends on how the question is phrased. If you ask me what I model I'd answer that I primarily model early 1950s steam, which so far as I can gather puts me into the most popular pre-modern image group, but probe a little deeper and it gets far more complicated.

 

Although theoretically old enough, original steam passed me by, yet I find it more interesting than British Railways blue which I do remember and everything that's come after - just more interesting mark you - and the point of that is that I model steam simply because its more interesting, not because I'm trying to recreate happy childhood memories of watching them go by.

 

Now that in turn comes to the real point. The likes of Hornby keep asking us what we're interested in for obvious commercial reasons and there are frequent dire predictions that once the former short trouser brigade who are supposedly demanding all these vividly remembered locos from their youth have shuffled off (no offence intended) B) steam modelling will die with them.

 

I beg to differ, cos having declared my interest in steam, I'll also declare that the 1950s are chosen simply because at the present time its the most practical era to model a Scottish layout with RTR locos and stock in LMS and LNER liveries still running alongside British Railways ones, while the Caledonian, Highland, GNSR and North British stuff which I'd rather use simply isn't available RTR (albeit a predatory eye is being cast on a T9) to run an earlier one.

 

All of which is rather a long way around to saying that if you ask me what I model, you'll get very a different answer than if you ask me what I'd like to model and that I reckon a few years down the line, when the nostalgics supporting the 1950s and 1960s have gone, there could turn out to be a lot more interest in modelling earlier steam. After all if you are, to quote the late David Jenkinson, modelling "Historical Railways", why should everybody stick at a particular decade?