This is a fascinating thread to me. I'm 33 years old - not the youngest guy here but near the shallow end of the bell curve - just like my brains...
My warm months hobby is sailing - I've lived aboard, cruised, raced, and sat on the board of directors of the organization that oversees sailboat racing in the Gulf of Maine. Go to most sailing forums (
www.sailinganarchy.com - not safe for kids or safe at work but great content) and you will read about how sailing is dying. And it is. I don't know if model railroading is dying, but I suspect that it is.
The biggest problem with model railroading is that its very passive at a time when most younger people are looking for exciting ways to pass the time. I don't buy that its the cost - in the sailing world cost was chalked up as one of the reasons fewer boats make it to the starting line but a real cost analysis demonstrates that the real cost hasn't risen much and in some ways has fallen. I suspect the same is true of model railroading. There have always been people with the money to partake in an activity and those without it. That isn't new. As far as space goes, the reality is that the average American (my apologies to our oversees friends; I don't know enough about the housing market elsewhere to comment) has more space available to him than ever before.
I think there are three problems:
1. Building a model railroad is slow, contemplative work. When the sailing industry did studies about why kids weren't into sailing, they described it as too boring. This is a sport where you are active, outside, moving around, competitive, etc - if sailing is too passive for kids, model railroading is doomed.
2. The geezer factor. I may alienate all of you here but Mtrpls is right: when your average young person walks into a train oriented hobby shop or show he's struck first and foremost by how uncool and old everyone is. I'm not advocating for coolness. I couldn't do cool if you stapled it to my forehead. But as our teens and even tweens are totally into image, which in this case means Brittany Spears and her ilk, we don't stand a change.
3. The geezer factor, redux: Most people in the hobby have been in the hobby a while. They have great, big, fancy, period correct, operating layouts that run so realistically that CSX ought to be taking lessons about keeping their trains running - Which makes building a layout seem unnecessarily difficult and threatening to the newbie. As I went through what seems to be the newbie progression: buy loop of track and train off e-bay; decide I want more; pick Atlas Spaghetti layout; come here and ask for help about how to build it; get good natured advice that Atlas only wants to sell track, 4x8 sucks, operations must be realistic, if you have the wrong dynamic brake grills on your locomotive you are not fit to breath the air John Armstrong did, etc... I learned the following things: my model railroad must be complicated; it must be accurate in all ways; I must not settle for the way things come out of the box, but must be prepared to spend $$$ and time (which for those of us not retired IS money) to build, and modify, and weather, and...
Guys: you're shooting yourselves in the foot. If you came to me and said I'd really like to go sailing, what do you think of this temperate little boat, and I said, no, you'll grow right out of that, what you need is this sixty foot boat! You race it all by yourself, non-stop, around the world every four years, buy that instead - I'm guessing you buy neither. When I came to this forum I also sought out my local clubs and was very excited to build my layout. I had a step by step plan to build a nice 4x6 walk around table, and space for it. I had a plan to lay track and be operating trains by mid-December so that I could play trains with my mother's beau, who is also a Railfan and was coming to visit.
What do I have now: nothing!
I got talked out of my newbie plan, talked into planning something more appropriate and made to see that at this point in time building a layout isn't in my cards.
Be careful of this - the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Just as a person who wants to learn to race a sailboat should be taken sailing on a nice warm non-race day, you need to remove the apparent barriers to entry in this game.
All of this last is aimed at the guy who gets past the first two problems - as I did. The hobby may not compete with the Playstation for kid time but you need not to drive off those who come willingly.
As for me, my model railroading will happen on other people's layouts for now. I found a nice N scale layout locally to run trains on and a local railroad museum is building a great layout I'll contribute to. Otherwise, I'm going to be racing radio controlled cars with my step-son. Couldn't engage him on the trains...
Your mileage may vary,
Justin