Trains Magazine Complete Collection 1940-2010

[Pat]

I received “Trains, The Complete Collection” and loaded it onto my hard drive. This is the PDF copies of Trains Magazine from 1940-2010 on DVD that Kalmbach is offering for $149.95 including shipping.

From 1940 through 2003 the PDF’s are scans. Picture quality is good. The text quality is mostly good. I have found a few issues with a faint fuzziness that need a bit of zoom to read. All in all they are decent scans and I haven’t found any pages I couldn’t read. From 2004 on the originals were stored digitally and quality improves.

The text is searchable with options to set a date range, key words (and & or), titles, railroad, authors name and department i.e. Ask Trains, Railroad Reading etc.

It comes on two DVD’s and both have to be loaded onto a hard drive to function. It won’t run directly from the DVD's. Total space on my drive is 16.4G.

If you don’t have access to hard copies and you want to read a bit of history, I give it a thumbs up.

 

[mrbbq]

I got this for Christmas the year it came out. Great collection for railfans. The only thing I don't like about it is that you cannot rotate the vertical pictures and make the horizontal. Nice to be able to have virtually the entire run of Trains and it's many cosmetic changes over the years. A lot of fun on days when you cannot get out and railfan.

 

[PrairieRailfan]

I have access to the hard copies and quite frankly I prefer the digital! A lot easier to search thru even with Trains rather clunky search function. Right now the hard copies are boxed up as I figure out what to do with them.