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 hen you ask a model railroad enthusiast what their best childhood memories are, chances are they'll say playing with their Lionel trains at Christmas time. A lot of people, no matter what scale they are into now, started out with O Gauge. I remember being fairly young and asking my dad to put up his Lionel trains around the Christmas tree. We always ran the Lackawanna FM Trainmaster he'd had since he was a kid. Of course we had the operating milk car, stock car, and log car all set up as well. We'd spend hours watching that train fly around the traditional family fire hazard. What a great time!
I've branched out into other scales over the years since then. I have a small HO collection and more recently, aquired quite a collection of large scale trains. Despite my broadening interests, I still find myself asking Dad to pull out his old Lionel and American Flyer trains when I'm over at his place. There's just something about those trains that makes me want to run them.
Why did I start OGaugeTrains.com you ask? A little over 2 years ago, I was looking for information on the internet about my hobby. What I found, or rather didn't find amazed me. Of all my hobbies and interests, trains had a relatively small presence on the web. I saw the need for a web site where model railroad enthusiasts could meet each other online and share ideas, express opinions, and find more information about their hobby without having to go to a million different personal web sites and sort through all the irrelevant garbage. Sure there are a few train related sites out there, but information is unorganized, hard to find, and not necessarily the best quality. My goal was to change all that.
Since I already had a good audience from discussion groups I was in, I tackled the large scale community first. Our website, myLargescale.com has become wildly popular and sees over 2000 visitors a day. We've become known as the internet forum for large scale. Most other large scale discussion groups see relatively little traffic compared to myLargescale.com. We're still growing and I think will continue to grow.
Back then, I registered a couple domain names for other scales as well, planning on moving into those as time permitted. A few months ago, several members of myLargescale.com who also run O Gauge trains approached me about starting up a similar site for O gauge. Gary Lantz, owner of our main sponsor, Wholesaletrains.com, also encouraged me to take the leap into offering a site for O gauge. So after a few months of work, here it is in all it's glory. I hope you like it.
OGaugeTrains.com is by no means complete. We have a suggestion box, stuff it full. We're looking for ideas for articles, contests, and anything else you might want to see here. This is your web site and we want you to have a say in what you find here. We're also accepting article submissions and the site needs some photos to dress it up. If you'd like to contribute, let us know via the suggestion box.
Similar to our other web site, we're offering a Premium Membership. The membership includes access to Premium Members Only content, a name badge to wear to TCA meets and other events, discounts at participating dealers, unlimited classified ad posting in our classifieds section, 50 MB of disk space on the OGaugeTrains.com server for posting images in the forum, and an email address at 'OGaugeTrains.com', 'O-GaugeTrains.com', 'OScaleTrains.com', or 'LionelToyTrains.com'. Premium Membership costs $20 for a full year. That's less than a magazine subscription and you'll end up getting a lot more than your money's worth.
Premium membership is by no means required to participate in our forums or many of the other features we have on the site, but the funds raised from the Premium Memberships help pay our costs which can be high at times. Running a site like myLargescale.com and OGaugeTrains.com is expensive. In the past we have paid for it out of pocket, found free or low cost hosting, and made a little back with ad revenue. Since the .com bubble bursted, ad revenue across the board has plunged. Free or low cost hosting is of poor quality and limiting. If we are to continue to grow we need to pay the hosting expenses, buy new software and servers to keep this site and it's sister site kicking.
So welcome to OGaugeTrains.com. Check out our forums they're a great place to start! We hope you'll find it a friendly inviting place to visit and share your hobby with others from around the world.
Shad Pulley
OGaugeTrains.com Webmaster
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Meet Our Conductor, J.P.
He's here to assist you with any questions you may have regarding the web site. You can access J.P.'s FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) by going to the articles section of the web site.
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