Loading

About Large Scale Trains

Mission Statement

To grow the Large Scale / G Scale community through our website, it’s social community and our biweekly live stream Large Scale Consolidated Live.

 How this all started

To say there were any plans to end up here would be telling a lie as we started out on this path not even thinking about where it would lead too. What started as two separate YouTube channels (Andrew “MrPictovid” & Shawn “Dakman Productions”) creating and uploading videos of their own model trains and layouts would eventually grow and turn into visiting other modelers and making videos of their trains and layouts. Eventually we found that others really seemed to enjoy the videos we were creating and our channels started to grow. We had a chance encounter at the East Coast Large Scale Train Show in York Pennsylvania one year where our friendship began. As we created and uploaded videos we would message back and forth sharing our experiences and knowledge to help each other out. 

How our two channels came together

When the unfortunate “Show Stopper” as we like to call it happened in 2020 it brought a screeching halt to all the train shows and most layout visits. At first we both retreated to staying at home and working on our own layouts and creating videos of them. What we started to notice though was a lack of community and togetherness amongst our fellow modelers in the Larges Scale / G Scale Community. It was at this point that Shawn started (relentlessly) to talk to me about doing a live stream show on Large Scale / G Scale trains. I wanted nothing to do with it although it was a great idea that needed persuade. I’ve just never been the type of person that likes talking in front of a bunch of people especially ones I don’t know. Well, it’s funny (in a manner of speaking) how things can happen in your life that completely change your perspective. I won’t go into what that was for me here but it was enough to make me say “Why not? Let’s do it!”. If only saying those words magically made all this happen (They didn’t! LOL). You’d think settling on a name for a show would be an easy thing but that alone took several weeks of back and forth between us. We eventually settled on “Large Scale Consolidated Live” as the name of our show.  Large Scale obviously for large scale g scale trains, Consolidated represents the variety of scales encompassed by G Scale as well as our shared interest in Conrail (Also the coming together of our two channels.) and Live of course to reflect it’s a live show.

How the Large Scale Trains website came to be

When we decided to do our show we still wanted to maintain our individual YouTube identities. This was mainly due to the fact we could cast a wider net so to speak since we both a decent subscriber base. To do this we decided to rotate the channel the show was hosted on every other show. The first show was on the “Dakman Productions” channel with the second show being on the “MrPictovid” channel. We soon learned that this was as much a detriment as it was a benefit to us and the show. Trying to make sure we explained every show which channel to tune into next time and people missing the show due to not knowing created a headache to say the least. So, LargeScaleTrains.com was born to help fix this issue and the first version of the site was little more than a placeholder with a link to the next upcoming show. Eventually the site grew to host embedded archives of the show and the upcoming live stream with the live chat.

The New Large Scale Trains website

At one point we had decided to start a Facebook group to function as a community gathering spot for fans of the show and G scale trains in general. While the group has done well, we soon learned not everyone wants to get on Facebook for various reasons. That’s when we began looking into adding a forum to our website as sort of a neutral ground where anyone could join and share with the community. Honestly though when you look at old school style forums they just don’t look pretty or modern to say the least. We really like the layout and function of the Facebook group though which lead to testing multiple forum setups until we settled on what we have now. We don’t like to refer to it as a forum just because it sounds dated which is why we like to call it our Social Community. Currently our new Social Community is in it’s infancy and there are bound to be some issues with it but we will prevail with the helpful feedback provided by our community of G Scale enthusiasts!