(Note: Most model railroaders would never call their hobby a “toy,” and while I certainly agree, I’ve still filed this post under the Toys category, because it just wouldn’t fit in any of the other categories.)

I’ve been involved in the model railroad hobby for about six years now; I didn’t work on my trains or layout that much over the past few years, but I’ve recently jumped back in full throttle. While it’s certainly a enjoyable pastime, model railroading does have its drawbacks. A big one is the matter of space: it’s more fun to build bigger and bigger layouts, but if you live in an apartment (like me!) or other small space, this simply isn’t feasible.

The largest strike that model railroading has against it is the one I’ll be bitching about today: the price. Most hobbies aren’t cheap, but model railroading tends to skyrocket in price very quickly, even for small layouts. It’s obvious from the start that you need to buy a lot of supplies even to construct a small layout, and while most of the items needed are relatively inexpensive (ground foam, paint, adhesives, smaller buildings, et cetera), the two most important parts of the railroad are the real money-burners: the track and the locomotives.

Now, track pieces on average don’t cost a lot of money. But remember…you need a lot of track, even when just getting started! Plus, special pieces like turnouts and crossings ramp up the price considerably. I have a small layout that fits on a drafting table, and my track cost nearly $300!

On to locomotives. A quality diesel locomotive retails for around $100-150. I’ve gotten mine for a lot less on eBay and at model train shows, but even paying half of the manufacturer’s suggest retail price is a lot when you start to add things up. If you like steam engines (who doesn’t?), then your costs just doubled, at the very least. Oh, and if you want Digital Command Control (DCC) for your locomotives…well, that’s an added premium, ranging anywhere from $25 to $200 on top of the original price!

Now you understand why building my layout has taken many years. It’s still not done, and I imagine it’ll take me quite some time to finish it. Fortunately, I enjoy working on little pieces here and there, and my bank account thanks me for it.

I’ve spoken with many veteran modelers, and they’re just as frustrated by the high prices as are newcomers like mysel. Not only does it put a serious dent their wallets (and if they’re retirees, it’s even worse!), but it turns away a lot of people who might’ve otherwise been interested in the hobby!

It doesn’t look like costs are going to level out or drop any time soon, and that’s a damned shame. Plenty of hobbyists have made their frustrations known to the manufacturers, but it just doesn’t seem to have much of an effect.

While wandering through the local mall during my lunch break the other day, I happened to pass by a temporary store that was selling a wide variety of gifts. I noticed that many of them could be classified as “children’s toys of the past,” even though they were brand new, modern items. For example, there were electronic fire engines, monster trucks, tanks, helicopters, and so on.

Why do I call them toys of the past? Because I think that if most children got one of those light-up vehicles for their birthday or under the tree for Christmas, they’d be disappointed.

Personally, I loved that sort of thing growing up. Big electronic vehicles to play with made many a Saturday afternoon fly by in my younger days (though I never had a fire engine; I was more of a train guy).

Kids today are far too focused on video games, the Internet, and other interactive media to be satisfied by such “simple” toys. You might be able to get away with it with a preschooler, but after that, you’re risking whining, complaints, and derision. It’s almost too much to ask for a kid to have an imagination anymore.

My post about downscaling my gaming habit got me thinking about my other hobbies, some of the unfortunate side effects they cause, and what to do about them. (And holy shit, did I file this under enough categories, or what?)

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate any of my hobbies; I’m just not pleased that I have far too many of them. In my neverending quest to become a somewhat decent human being, I do understand that sometimes the most innocuous hobbies can cause problems with one’s life. The main issue is that a majority of my hobbies revolve around acquiring some kind of physical object, such as an action figure, building set, video game, book, et cetera. As such, this immediately creates two problems: price and space. You need money to buy said item, and a place in which to display or store it. Both of these are serious issues, and even worse, they sometimes compound one another! I’m not affluent (or even upper middle class) by any stretch of the imagination, so indulging in my hobbies tends to have financial ramifications down the line that I’m not always prepared for. So what’s a man to do?

Here’s a rundown of my various hobbies, and the problems I’m running into while keeping up with them. Aside from giving you an insight into my madness, it’ll help me keep track of this stuff later on. I should point out that this stuff was all acquired over the course of a decade or two; I certainly don’t have the cash to acquire massive quantities of stuff in a short period of time!

• LEGO®. This one gives no quarter; the entire premise of being a LEGO® fan is based on the building sets themselves. You need to own at least a few in order to get involved! The upshot is that once you’ve got a good amount of bricks, you can create just about anything you want. You can display an official model for a while, then if you get tired of it, rebuild it into something else. It’s not like a collectible game, where you’re absolutely required to spend money on a regular basis just to stay competitive! (That’s the exact reason why I gave up on playing Magic: The Gathering long ago, and Axis & Allies Miniatures more recently.) With my LEGO® addiction, space has become my biggest challenge. I’ve completely run out of room to display my sets (mainly Star Wars ships), so I’ve been forced to disassemble many of them.

• Star Trek. The beloved science fiction franchise spans over forty years of history, twenty-nine seasons of television, and eleven films, not to mention all of the countless merchandising and other goodies. The television shows and films are most important to me; I own all of the films (save the newest one, which isn’t available on disc yet, and Star Trek V, which is crap), but only five of the twenty-nine seasons. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do, and that’s not going to be cheap. Granted, Voyager and the first two seasons of Enterprise can wait until the very end, but I’ve still got a majority of the original series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine to pick up.
• Star Wars. The core of this franchise is the films, and there’s not many of those; that made collecting them quite easy. I also enjoy reading some of the novels, and collecting the artbooks and other reference tomes. However, when it comes to Star Wars action figures…therein lies the rub. Even casual fans of the franchise know how addicting that can be, and I’m no different. I used to display them in my office at work (gotta be the stereotypical IT department, and all), but since we moved to a new location, I now have a cubicle rather than an office. Thus, I no longer have a door that I can lock. I don’t think anyone would pilfer or otherwise screw with my collection, but why not err on the side of caution? Since I’ve got nowhere else to put them, though, they now sit in a box in my apartment complex storage space.
• Model railroads. While this is one of my most enjoyed hobbies, it’s sadly one of the most neglected, simply to due to the high cost. I’m “over the hump,” as it were; the most expensive pieces of my layout were the tracks, locomotives, and control system. However, I’ve still got landscaping materials to buy, plus model cars and tiny little people. Those aren’t cheap! If I don’t finish my layout this summer, I’ve got a feeling it will be indefinitely shelved.
• Video games. Ouch. This one’s definitely the 800-pound gorilla in the room, since I play a lot of games. They’ve never been cheap, and with more and more titles coming out all the time, with more platforms competing for market share, costs can add up insanely fast. Part of this can be alleviated by renting games, but that creates two more problems. One, renting from chains like Blockbuster is a complete ripoff; the rental price is too high, and you’ve only got about five days to play! Two, even if you use a much better system like GameFly, now you run into the subscription problem. Here, you’re paying a flat fee per month to rent a certain number of titles (GameFly wisely offers a tiered system), but what if there’s a few months where nothing’s coming out, or there isn’t anything you’re interested in playing? Now you’re literally spending money on nothing. As far as older titles are concerned, emulation’s a quick solution, but legal issues aside, that doesn’t compare to playing original games on original hardware. It just doesn’t! (I keep a 13″ CRT TV in my room specifically for retrogaming, fer crissake.) I’ve focused much of my attention on my NES collection, but those still take up space. Right now, I’m using the ol’ cardboard-boxes-in-the-closet method, save for a small stack of cartridges I’m actively playing. Those get a place of honor on my desk. Classy.
• Heavy metal. You’d think that simply enjoying listening to music wouldn’t cost too much, since you don’t have to pay to use your ears. And as far as acquiring music goes, that’s inexpensive, too, especially in this day and age of iTunes and BitTorrent. Too bad I’m one of those old-fashioned fuckers who enjoys owning actual physical copies of his media! The backlog of discs I still want to buy would probably equal the down payment on a small house. Eesh. My subscriptions to Decibel magazine and the Requiem Metal Podcast have exacerbated this addiction by getting me into many new bands.
• Books. Normally, this isn’t a problem, as we have libraries for all of our reading needs. However, some of the licensed series I enjoy (particularly Star Trek novels) have little to no library presence. Translation: if you want to read it, you’d better buy it, and I’ve bitched about the ridiculous cost of paperbacks before. Even though the recent Star Trek film has breathed new life into the franchise, the books are still a relatively niche commodity. The Star Trek section at my local bookstores just keeps shrinking over time, and when new novels come out, you really need to nab them within a week or so of release, else you run the risk of missing them. Then, of course, there’s the fact that eventually, my bookshelves at home start to get very crowded.
• Manga. Since the stories I enjoy only come out every few months, this one’s at the bottom of the problem pile. Prices are on the rise, though, and I read much of my manga well in advance via scanlations. I buy the official collected English editions later on. If the prices get more annoying, I may dump the printed versions, and just stick to reading them online. And before you bitch at me about the “illegality” of scanlations, they’re not technically illegal, and publishers often use them as a way to gauge interest in localizing new series! Eat me.

As you can see, the solution to many of these issues falls under the usual purview of “stop buying shit.” Which, as it turns out, is something I’m actively working on, especially in the video game realm. I know that sooner or later I’m going to have to no choice but to severely scale back or ditch a few hobbies, but them’s the breaks. It’s happened before (like when I ditched that filthy comic book collectin’ habit), and I’d like to think I’m a better person for it. Life is more than just random collections.

Seriously, fuck Toys R Us’ ridiculous LEGO® pricing.

If you dig around LEGO®’s official Shop at Home page, all of the items there are sold for the standard manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP). Stores like Target and Wal-Mart sell them for the same price (with Wal-Mart often knocking off a few cents, as per their modus operandi).

Toys R Us, on the other hand, raises the prices of their LEGO® sets by a few dollars. Even worse, the higher the MSRP, the more TRU adds to the price! Sets with an MSRP of $49.99 are regularly priced at $59.99 at TRU. I understand there’s nothing illegal about doing this, but it pisses off consumers. Adding insult to injury are the sets labeled “special edition.” These are usually exclusive to TRU for at least six months; in other words, if you want the set, you’ve got no choice but to pay the added premium!

This kind of behavior only drives fans away. Someone needs to send TRU management a hot steaming dump in a box.

One thing that myself and many other AFOLs (adult fans of LEGO®) are getting really tired of is the increasing amount of stickers in recent sets. Back in the day, just about any special brick had printing on it, be it a road sign, computer terminal, or logo. There were a few stickers here and there, but most special bricks were printed. Nowadays, however, it’s the complete opposite. Printed bricks are few and far between, and those blasted stickers are everywhere! Even pieces that used to be printed (like the 2×2 round tiles with the Imperial symbol from Star Wars) now use stickers instead! This is irritating for many reasons, the most obvious being that stickers aren’t as durable as the original printed bricks. Plus, even for skilled modelers, the slightest misapplication of a sticker can make the resulting piece stand out like a sore thumb.

So what’s the cause? Laziness? Cheaper production costs? Probably a bit of column A and column B. Either way, we’re shit outta luck.