Announcement!

[Otto Vondrak]

It has come to our attention that young railfans should be treated no differently than anyone else. Young railfans share our common interest in trains and model railroading, and they have come here to learn. What better way for them to learn than to make room for them at our table and allow them to join our mainstream conversation? That said, we will be closing the Teen Railroad Enthusiasts Forum on or about November 1, 2010. We will retain the posts here as an archive, but no new topics will be generated. To our young friends, we welcome you to explore and use the rest of the site to your advantage, and learn as much as you can. We only ask that you use proper decorum and speak clearly and carefully-- This is not the place for leetspeak and other Internet shorthand. We welcome your opinions and perspectives and do not feel you should be sequestered to your own section away from the main conversation.

This thread will remain open for the next couple of weeks for comments. Thank you for choosing RAILROAD.NET!

[ns3010]

I have absolutely no objection to the end of this forum. As a pretty regular user, I very rarely visited this particular forum, as there was much more interesting discussion happening elsewhere.

I am also a member of the National Teenaged Rail Enthusiast Society, which works well because it is a fully-teen board, not sub-forum on a larger site (new members are always welcome!). Here, however, most teens seem to ignore this forum in favor of the other more active forums.

Most of the discussion here is duplicates of threads in the other forums, which we could easily join into, if we haven't already. It would be just as easy to participate in the "adult" discussion, rather than having our own.

[3rdrail]

From what I've seen, you guys will have no problem mingling with the vets ! Welcome aboard ! (Even though you were always welcome anyway.) If you do make an error- don't sweat it. Nobody is making up a report card and that's how we all learn. I know that I speak for all the moderators when I say that if you have a question about anything such as what forum to use, etc., don't be too shy to ask any of us. (Don't ask me to write school papers for you.)

[Rick Rowlands]

I'm all for forum consolidation. There are way too many individual forums on this site.

[Amtrak7]

I disagree with the closing, but it looks like it never did!

If it closes, there would be no place to discuss issues pertaining to teenagers and teenagers alone. While it does have low traffic, there is logical no place to merge it with that I can think of.