To all those who have posted, thank you.
Since August 2014, when I joined this forum, I’ve met some very nice people and some so-so…. lol. Those that did supply me with the help I needed, many thanks, and I’m still looking for help, but for the last year, I’ve been getting lots of help and ideas from the Facebook community and usually in the following hours of my posts.
Yesterday I celebrated my 60[SUP]th[/SUP] birthday and with family and friends, I was told that I’m always looking to better myself, always looking for newer and better stuff. This is mainly true in this hobby. As an example, it took friendly people with patience from social media to help me set up 10 cameras around my layout for live streaming and later to be used by a dispatcher (in 3-4 years). All was done with what they call Raspberry PI, at a very minimal cost. Now probably most of you wouldn’t care or don’t care about things like that, which would explain the lack of posting in my thread, but on Facebook, Google plus, YouTube, Yahoo groups and hangouts, there’s lots of conversations happening and I’m getting lots of posts (comments).
People can do, go where ever and say whatever they want. If you’re a DC person, you might not be interested in DCC. If you’re a steamer, you might not be interested in diesel. If you like to see your train go round and round, you might not be interested in operations. We all want answers to our questions, I personally like to see answers as soon as possible and fortunately, social media is the place. I get about 25-30 comments for every post with social media and here I get about 5 posts a month, so it is normal for me to spend more time there. Besides, I spend almost every night with train modelers live on hangouts, I’ve written three articles to date for a free magazine did two shows live on Youtube and participated on other live shows (almost every Thursday night).
This is the main reason I will no longer post updates here; social media is the place to be. Unfortunately, it seems that most of you are not on Facebook, which I can’t understand why not, but to each there own. It’s a place to learn, get ideas, make friends and see how this hobby is doing, instead of speculating that this hobby is dying. I’m still to young to hang out in a thread and have coffee and discuss about the temperature and my medical problems like my father would do at a shopping mall. I like to learn about this hobby
To answer your question Tony, when you say I have so many followers here, I probably count 10, well at least those that do post. Therefore, I have contact with about 10 regular members here while I have contact with well over 50k people all over the social media outlets (+625 followers). But since you think the hobby is dying, that the MNRA is terrible, the hobby is to expensive and the internet did not help this hobby, take a listen to this podcast.
http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/7/2/5/725...20807780&hwt=8cc6da2a8120c7a8c89019f8db9d08ba
For those that want to follow my progress, because I think I still have a good 3-4 years of building my layout if not more, you are all welcome to follow my dedicated Facebook for my layout. If you’re scared of Facebook, all you need is to create an account and add me to you friends list. No need for you to give any information what so ever, you don’t need to post on your account, just use it to access my page.
Thank you and hope to see you all on social media
PS. I'll still visit very silently all those that I've been following.