A wrap of the year

well its that time of the year to look back on what has been and what is to come.
I'll split this into 2 posts. Today its bouquets and brickbats for 2009.

To single out anyone is hard but I'll give it a shot. This year the awards would go to:

-Trackgang; For rescuing Pats legacy and making it available to modelers once again, with a web ordering service and fast mail. Its been a pleasure to deal with and I've had no problems (and I see we are up to 157 orders). I'd also like to thank Russell for taking the punt purchasing the molds. No one is going to get rich out of this scale any time soon so it was a huge leap of faith. thanks for doing it.

-My fellow writers; Amateur fetler and Kiwibonds (Darryl, you just aren't cool on the net unless you have a nickname!). Having 3 different voices instead of one has really helped. We all have different ideas and styles but its helped a lot at times when I've been burnt out at work to be able to take a break, and I think we all brought something different to the table.

-Wes; For suggesting the Nz120.org site and doing all the donkey work for it. its given all the modelers in the scale somewhere to discuss stuff, and swap ideas, no matter how daft they are. it may not seem much, but it is the only such site for any scale modeling New Zealand railways which means we are in the forefront on the web, even if we are 30 years behind in other places.

-Cabbage and Amateur fetler (and Kingi) for making a bold step into laser cutting, which from the few results to hand so far shows great potential for future developments.

The brickbats section is quite hard, as I'm hardly in a position to tell anyone that they are crap. Maybe a things to improve on section would be a better name.

- I think we as a scale need to start working on catching up with the rest of the world in our modeling. By this I mean making do with commercially available mechanisms as a basis for locomotives (something that S scale guys stopped doing 30 years ago). We should no longer have to accept 'close enough' for our modeling. Wee duggie has moved in this direction with an etched Ds shunter and the possibility of an etched correct Dsc. In the steam loco area the field is wide open for anyone to exploit, and the technology is all there for some great strides to be made.

-Not any one scale related, but I'd like to see the guild move into the 21st century with its Internet presence. Some of the 'why is this published' sections in the journal would be the local group reports. These are to all intents and purposes completely useless unless you were actually at the meetings. There's no extra pictures of anything that's described, and these sections would be far more suited to a blog/forum style presentation.

There, that wasn't too hard, and more positives than negatives. next post will be what the coming year holds.