RailPro User Group
General => General Discussion => Topic started by: G8B4Life on July 16, 2017, 10:19:08 AM
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Long post, a bit of rambling, title says it all. You have been warned :P
I was a bit bored today, too cold to do any modelling or much else so I decided to sit down and crunch some stats for our group. I didn't get to crunch the stats I was originally after (that would take too much time, it'd be better to write a script that Bill could run against the member list) but I did come up with a few figures.
There are 176 members here (not including the "Archive" member) of which:
- 80 have never posted.
- 96 have posted at least once.
Some of these 80 members have never logged in to RPUG after signing up or not logged in for considerable time (part of the stats I was originally after).
Of the 96 who have posted
- 19 who have only posted once
- 33 who have posted between 2 and 5 times
- 15 who have posted between 6 and 10 times
- 9 who have posted between 11 and 20 times
- 5 who have posted between 21 and 30 times
- 2 who have posted between 31 and 40 times
- 3 who have posted between 41 and 50 times
- 1 who has posted between 51 and 60 times
- 0 who have posted between 61 and 70 times
- 0 who have posted between 71 and 80 times
- 1 who has posted between 81 and 90 times
- 0 who have posted between 91 and 100 times
- 3 who have posted between 101 and 200 times
- 3 who have posted between 201 and 300 times
- 1 who has posted between 301 and 400 times
- 1 who has posted between 401 and 500 times (guess who)
Taken from the above, a staggering 69 percent of posts have come from just 8 members, or just as staggering 57 percent of posts have come from just 5 members. Even if you took a few percent off because sometimes a couple of members end up having a conversation of sorts about a topic that no one else posts to it's still a large number. On the flip side just shy of 70 percent of members have 10 or less posts.
This got me to thinking about something that has been asked here before. How do we grow our group and presence? Does anyone have any great ideas? A few I have thought of include:
- A magazine article or video on a "large" Railpro running session (not so much about the ops but more showing how easy it was and how well it worked) with a link back to RPUG. This would get RailPro awareness out there and also awareness for the group.
- May not be acceptable by some places but members putting a link back to RPUG in forum signatures etc. May be taken the wrong way by members of those forums so caution would be advised.
- Getting Ring Engineering to link to us. This one would be very hard. I know Bill has tried several times to have Ring do this to no avail. It may take all of us at once to make this happen if we truly want it; and then it may not happen anyway.
- Active promotion. If someone is running RailPro at an event (like a train show) make sure that anyone who notices your using something different gets to know about the product and that the user group exists. If someone says "hey, you use RailPro too" make sure they know the group exists.
That's as far as I have gotten. While it's nice to have a forum for just a few people that's not what we want. There has to be a large number of RailPro users out there that don't know about this user community (discounting that we probably see quite a few as simply guests) so how do we find them and get them onboard; and posting? or is this a quest that can only be lost?
- Tim
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Tim
I thoroughly agree with your goal of promoting RailPro, both for the benefit of the modeling community who are unaware, as well as for the benefit that increased use will serve to keep this innovative control system available for those of us already committed.
JimW
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Very interesting facts and thoughts.
I have mentioned RailPro quite a number times at our club gatherings without any one asking one question at all. Most are interested in DCC but that is as far as it goes at least for now. When we get the club's new layout built, soon, I'll make another stand with my goodies to see if any interest will happen. Maybe when they see it at work ?
At my previous club in Oregon, 60 members, it was dang near impossible to get people motivated with DCC let alone RP !!!
I know the lack of advertising does not help at all. Word of mouth is a very slow process as seen by the number of RP users.
If RP should die, hopefully not, most of us have enough to tide us by, well I do, but most likely purchase a few more modules with sound just in case.
Now your take is requested ###########
Old fardt in Yuma
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The Railpro op at Lee's place in September would be a perfect opportunity to document RP working on a large layout. I was hoping we'd get a few more guys there, take some video, snap some pictures, and turn it into a magazine article, Youtube video, or both. I think those two avenues reach different crowds of people. Likely many of the Railpro users out there now are users because of the videos seen on Youtube. The others may have been word of mouth or magazine advertising. I think it's important to target both groups in order to get maximum exposure and steer interested parties into our community.
Those of use with operating layouts, and any sort of skill with a video camera, really ought to make some simple videos of Railpro operating and share/post them up. It's not difficult to do and the more media (videos, pictures, articles, posts, etc) that is out there showing Railpro in action, the more interest there will be in it.
I talk about Railpro quite a bit when the opportunity arises and give people a turn on the throttle. I've discussed it quite a bit with various prototype modelers that I associate with as well. Currently a friend and I are discussing full dead rail, and I gave Railpro as one of the options to consider for control. I may send him one of my controllers and a couple of modules to run some tests with and see if it's the route he wants to take.
Talking about Railpro and then demonstrating it is what will help people get interested. Video, pictures, posts on other forums, talking with friends. I'm glad that Ring advertises in the various magazines, but as a business owner I can tell you that advertising in publications or on paper is one of the least useful ways to advertise. It's good to use it for name and brand recognition but that's about it. Actual production or sales comes best from word of mouth and hands-on demonstrations.
-Kevin
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Other than forums and YouTube, one of the best ways to get the product out in front of the people is at train shows. A lot of folks pass through those aisles. You will almost always see Digitrax and NCE at those shows. I have offered to set up a booth at the giant Springfield, MA show more than once, but Tim has steadfastly declined. I attend that show annually anyway, so the only cost to Ring would be the PoP stuff and maybe some brochures plus the cost of the table. Add other shows all around the country and you get a lot of product awareness. Perhaps a business card for RPUG could also be handed out at these events.
If you belong to a club, make sure everyone knows that you are using RP and let them try it. Then, tell them they can get all the info they will ever need on this forum. I have converted three fellow club members to RP. The rest are just die hard DCC guys.
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Thanks for the words of encouragement guys, it shows that the spirit of our community to promote the product we use and our community here is alive and well and we haven't just given up because we are in a hard place with the mentality against RP out there; and frankly I wasn't expecting any replies anyway given the rambling I did ::)
Everything discussed is really good. I hope something can come out of Lee's weekend (I really wish I could be there for it). I think it would be a great article and or video given Lee's wholesale change to RailPro as well. That fact could be a head turner in itself.
I agree with Kevin's sentiments on videos and their effect on gaining users. If you have a layout and feel like making some "promotional footage" by all means please give it a shot. If you run on a modular layout, like Free-mo and can shoot some promotional footage that would be great too, especially showing it working independently on DCC tracks.
Al, I can understand why Tim Ring declines you exhibiting RailPro at Springfield - or anywhere else but it still leaves me shaking my head none the less that he doesn't take the opportunity to have his product out there in one of the best ways possible.
On that, I know you are all scattered around the countryside and I'm not sure how train shows work over there but I wonder if we cannot exhibit RailPro as RailPro aka Ring Engineering then could we exhibit RailPro as RailPro users? perhaps with a small but interesting layout to run and demonstrate on. This way not being commercial should not invoke the ire of Tim Ring and any costs should be greatly reduced. Food for thought anyway.
Another thought I previously had, which mirrors what Al said but is probably difficult to implement (Tim Ring wouldn't like it I bet) is perhaps we could approach sellers of RailPro to include a RPUG card with any HC or RPK they sell. I think I've gone of the deep end with that one.
- Tim
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I just added the RPUG address to my signature at Railroad Line Forums but it shows Hello TomO when I lick the link. What am I doing wrong, all I added was:
https://rpug.pdc.ca
TomO
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You are logged into RPUG. Your browser session is still active. Other users won't see the same. They will be presented with the guest view. In short, you didn't do anything wrong.
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Let's face it. How many people, even if they are aware of RP, have the option of test driving RP on a layout? How many people actually have the option of test driving any of the DCC systems on a layout? Maybe Digitrax. Maybe NCE. And even if they do, their experience is influenced by the club or layout owner's implementation and opinion. I postulate a large percentage of people do their best to research on the Internet and then simply make a purchase decision with fingers crossed. I did.
A comprehensive, let the chips fall where they may, side-by-side functionality comparison would be very helpful. RP, Digitrax, NCE, MRC, Lenz, BlueRail, and all the others in columns, functionality in rows. Ideally, the comparison would be free of subjective information.
Personally, I had only 1960-70's DC operation experience when I reentered the hobby. Within 20 minutes Google showed me the current control system market. Armed with the brand names I set off to compare functionality using manufacturer supplied data. That's when the challenge began. DCC documentation is absolutely horrible in its form - organization, completeness, and presentation. Blatantly obvious it is a product of a small cottage industry. Sadly, RP is no better, actually worse. Perhaps I am spoiled from my experience in the electronics hobby where data is abundant and highly organized. Spec sheets exist for everything and the information is presented in near standardized form making comparison a straightforward task. It took me seemingly forever to dig, search, read and re-read trying to determine any one control system's superiority in a particular functionality I was interested in. A good comparison chart would have turned that research into a 10 minute task.
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I followed this forum for almost a year ( while starting my layout) before I purchased my starter kit. I would wonder just how many units have been sold (a stat that most likely only Ring would have and would not want to divulge). That would separate the actual users vs those who follow but do not"yet" have a system. I also have a subscription to Model Railroader magazine and there has never been an advertisement or a mention of Railpro. All the featured layout articles are DCC operated and there are full page adds for the two most popular systems. When I look at the Railpro map and see the many miles that separate us.
If this forum were to cease I would be lost.
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Mr. Fugate of Model Railroad Hobbyist seems to be RailPro 'friendly'. Perhaps that's our avenue.
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I have ben a RP user since 2016. I don't post very much but I check this site out everyday to see if anything has come up. It has served me well but I am not very good in electronics like some of you are so I can't contribute in that manner... but you all have helped me in all of the threads posted in this matter.
I check it out often
The post at the top of this page list the people who have signed in to RPUG and make no post.
Some post very little..
And some post quite often... Guess who!!
My guess is that those people that are menbers have not purchased.
How could you own this system without help from poeple in this forum.
Ring doesn't want to have mass advertisement. Why? Can't understand why he wouldn't want to grow his business. But that is another discussion...
Anyway....
In my opinion ... Anyone who has railpro has reseached and most likely found this site. The others are seekers.. not yet committed.
Don't get discourged because some of us don't post. We READ... WE GLEAN
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I have just been thinking about another aspect of the limited RP product awareness. Even the manufacturers have never heard of it. I have talked to major locomotive manufacturers tech support people and their representatives at train shows and have never had even one tell me they had heard of RP. I understand that the money is in the market, and right now, the market is DCC. If even one manufacturer started equipping their engines with RP like they do with DCC, the word would get out. Some guys don't relish the idea of taking apart a locomotive, milling weights and rewiring the thing just to be able to run it. The LM circuit boards could be factory installed without the case, which would free up some space for a speaker, similar to current DCC equipped locomotives. It wouldn't take much, if any modification for them to supply RP instead of DCC. Yes, it would probably be a bit of a gamble for them, but if it took off, they would do very well with it, and so would Ring Engineering. I wonder if Tim has approached any of them?
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I have just been thinking about another aspect of the limited RP product awareness. Even the manufacturers have never heard of it. I have talked to major locomotive manufacturers tech support people and their representatives at train shows and have never had even one tell me they had heard of RP. I understand that the money is in the market, and right now, the market is DCC. If even one manufacturer started equipping their engines with RP like they do with DCC, the word would get out. Some guys don't relish the idea of taking apart a locomotive, milling weights and rewiring the thing just to be able to run it. The LM circuit boards could be factory installed without the case, which would free up some space for a speaker, similar to current DCC equipped locomotives. It wouldn't take much, if any modification for them to supply RP instead of DCC. Yes, it would probably be a bit of a gamble for them, but if it took off, they would do very well with it, and so would Ring Engineering. I wonder if Tim has approached any of them?
I had this very conversation with Shane of Scale Trains last year at the Oklahoma City Train Show. I wanted assurance that there would be 'DCC Ready' locomotives that we could convert to RP without the cost of buying a DCC Sound loco and throwing away the electronics. He knew RailPro, liked it, and maybe even supported it (he wouldn't commit) but the market is for DCC. I can't for the life of me understand Tim's marketing strategy.
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I relunctly refrained from saying this before but then? I would like to show others that might like to know something about using RP and here is the sticky part, if the manufacture has no interest in promoting the product such as to setting up a display at shows or having brochures to hand out, why should I or anyone else bother trying to promote the product for a business? I go to many train shows and especially in the past, handed out flyers for other shows or picked some information that was on a table when checking in, that was of interest. Always a table full of handouts. Oh well this is only my thoughts so I best find my asbestos suit for incoming flack ! The old fardt in HOTArid-Zona
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The answer to that question is this: The more folks using RP, the more money Ring will make and the more new products we will see as it becomes mainstream. Maybe they don't see it that way. :-\
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... the more money Ring will make and the more new products we will see as it becomes mainstream.
Or simply the more money Ring will make.
Sorry guys, I am with Darryl on this issue. With all the world's pressing societal needs I don't understand why, if you are willing to volunteer your time and resources, it would be spent benefiting a commercial entity. Especially one that hasn't asked, doesn't actively engage the user base, and seems content with their current situation. Does RP even have a Facebook page? I can't find one.
More is not always better to everyone. What if Tim Ring is perfectly happy with his business volume as it stands?
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More is not always better to everyone. What if Tim Ring is perfectly happy with his business volume as it stands?
I would have to believe that is the case. I can't think of a better reason not to promote it.
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More is not always better to everyone. What if Tim Ring is perfectly happy with his business volume as it stands?
I would have to believe that is the case. I can't think of a better reason not to promote it.
Ring Engineering advertises reasonably heavily in MRH. Speaking as a small business who has advertised in MRH, I can tell you, MRH is quite capable of overwhelming me with business. In fact so much so that I had to considerably scale back my advertising in MRH.
I don't want a bunch of employees, so I have to work at keeping things manageable in my own business. It's not hard for me to imagine that Tim Ring is in the same boat. Although I would like to see him have a few more employees, so he can spend his time developing instead of producing an supporting, I imagine the advertising he does do keeps him very busy as is.
The reason for not advertising in MR? Easy, why spend 3K on an ad that will simply overwhelm your resources? Until Tim has an army of staff and equipment to handle the calls and production, I'm sure he wants to keep the growth under tight control.
Regarding having a booth at a show, there would be nothing stopping a retailer such as myself from taking RP to a show, if I had time to attend shows. (Thank you MRH!)
Regarding MRH, Joe Fugate has expressed interest in running an updated story about RP to me. I've been waiting for the next generation of sound and such to arrive before tackling the subject, since currently it's not that much different than the original product covered in RH a few years back.
A story about Lee's layout and his RP experience would certainly be welcome at MRH.
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Darryl and Allan,
I get what you are saying and respect it wholly but strangely I seem to recall making the same argument about giving away pictures and sound recordings away for free for another's commercial gain before being told how horrible my take on that was. Yes the benefits of the pictures and recordings comes back to us but so does the benefits of promotion.
With that out of the way I would like to stress that in no way have I ever thought of promoting RE. What I want to promote is the system, not who makes it (like people promote DCC as the control system of choice, not necessarily the DCC system they use. Unfortunately RE is the only manufacturer of RailPro in our case.). It's a fine line to draw I guess but given the current data we have available to us we have a weak user base compared to other control systems and a weak community size to go with it. I want to improve that. It's the system I use, it's a great system and I want to see it grow.
It's a good point about business volume and one I had thought of previously as well but I'll ask again, if the workload is high enough to warrant a single RP ad in MRH per month and that's all the business promotion you need to do then where are all the users? Surely more would have found there way here by now?
Lastly, please don't anyone get the idea that I'm slamming RE in any way, all I want to do is grow the system and our community and I can only work with the limited data we have available to us.
- Tim
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Allan, thanks for the info about the signature
TomO
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I just noted a new RailPro thread on MRR's website under 'electronics and DCC'. In view of the preceding discussion, perhaps it would be beneficial for someone with more knowledge than me to help that (widely read) forum give a better description of RailPro to it's readers.
JimW
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...I don't post very much but I check this site out everyday to see if anything has come up. It has served me well but I am not very good in electronics like some of you are so I can't contribute in that manner... but you all have helped me in all of the threads posted in this matter.
Don't get discouraged because some of us don't post. We READ... WE GLEAN
Same for me here. I visit the site every week, sometimes more often but I rarely post. My model railroad time is limited so I prefer to quickly glance over the most recent discussions and spend most of my spare time building and running my layout and planning my ops sessions. I will start running ops sessions with my regular (DCC-only) group soon and introduce them to RailPro. I'll be ready to deflect their DCC-biased opinion because I know that most of them will be closed-minded with RP, especially with comments like "you made a big mistake... RailPro is a proprietary system and I would never invest any money into something that may not be here tomorrow." Of course they might not admit to liking some of RP's cool features but I'm ok with that. It is my money, my layout and I love RP... and that's all that matters to me!
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you made a big mistake...
Ask them to assemble 6 randomly chosen DCC locos of different manufacturer/model as distributed power 3 - 1 - 2 with a long train and run it over the entire layout. Then run RP in the same train configuration. With as big a grin as you can muster ask them who made a mistake. :'(
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I just noted a new RailPro thread on MRR's website under 'electronics and DCC'.
And the moderator removed all the links to RPUG from the thread. How nice! Seriously their forum polices could use an update.
Having a read it reminded me of why I don't visit forums other than this one much, as usual someone asked for advice on the system and as usual the naysayers came out with their reasons against it. I was amazed though that someone actually could see beyond the shoreline and could see how some of RP would be a big benefit overseas but not surprised when "that feature's not needed here".
RailPro is a proprietary system and I would never invest any money into something that may not be here tomorrow.
That argument has to be the #1 fallacy in the model railroad world and is my greatest bugbear with DCC fanboys. You don't want propriety then don't buy DCC either, invent your own system and then give away all the specs and code to all and sundry to build it from scratch themselves.
Tell me how your going to buy a new DCS240 from NCE when yours goes down and DigiTrax went bust last year, or how your going to buy a new ProCab from DigiTrax because yours went down and NCE went bust last year, or how your going to access those manufacturer specific high CV's that your system cannot understand without using the manufacturers programmer. DCC isn't propriety my rear end. >:( >:( >:(
- Tim
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My 02. cents worth.
"There is a principal which a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which can not fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance.... that principal is contempt prior to investigation."
Herbert Spencer
It amazes me how someone can strongly criticize something they know nothing about and refuse to find out. :) :)
Mel