Joe:
Right! You sound similar to me. I would call my hobby inter-
ests “big-tent.” I am broadly inclusive – traction, diesels, steam,
freight, passenger cars, whatever – all of it fascinates me!
Barry:
Sadly, you and I will never live long enough to do all the
things we want to do in this hobby.
Going back to the entertainment aspect of TMTV, I hope to
make our content so that even if you’re not interested in trac-
tion, even if you’re not interested in Colorado narrow gauge,
there’s still something in there that entertains you, so that at
least you’ll sit and watch it, and we hope go, “Wow, I didn’t
even know that – how fascinating!”
Joe:
Yes, neither one of us can get too much of trains. So,
where did this idea of TrainMasters TV come from?
Barry:
Something like TMTV has actually been rolling around in
my head for 20 years. It’s the “democratization of media” that
has allowed us to do this.
TMTV asks, “What if we could have a whole TV station devoted
to model trains?” How about getting an audience who like this
topic too, and not be forced to watch what we’re fed by a net-
work or a cable company? That’s pretty exciting!
Joe:
It is! After the genesis 20 years ago, what happened next?
Barry:
The short version of the story goes like this – I was
working on a show about classic cars, and I felt we could get
another 13 episodes out of the network if we switched out the
wheels – from tires to steel. Put the wheels on rails,
Wheels on
Steel
we called it, and do a show about trains.
We did a short
Wheels on Steel
pilot to show the network what
it might look like. Unfortunately by the time the network saw
the pilot, they had changed hands and they were no longer
interested in either cars or trains.
After throwing this idea around, one day I thought: if I can’t get
the networks to pay me $25,000 for a show, what if I could get
25,000 people to pay me $1 each for that kind of program?
That’s really where things kind of took off. I contacted you, and
you know the rest of the story – how I happened to walk in the
door at the right time.
Joe:
Yes, I’d already been telling the staff, “The next new
media thing for the hobby is some sort of ‘streaming Netflix
for model trains’.
4: TrainMasters TV Executive Producer Barry
Silverthorn, editing the report on the 2013 National
Model Train Show.
4
MRH introduces TrainMasters TV - 4
MRH-Dec 2013
