The NASG pays for the Railroad Model Craftsman's inside-the-front-cover ad to help promote S, the NASG, and S manufacturers to a large audience of scale modelers. We have had this space available for many years, and RMC is helping us to promote our scale.
Beginning with the May 2022 issue, the ad has been completely redesigned to be more impactful. However, running the same ad each month leads to the reader glossing over the ad. To avoid that, we are running a series of ads that feature a large photograph of exemplary S-scale modeling, like the modeling you're doing right now! The photo gets the readers' attention and drives home that S is a viable scale for quality modeling today. The text around the image directs the readers to this NASG web site where they can get all the help they need to model in our favorite scale, and it explains that the NASG is here to help.
In order for this campaign to continue to be successful we need your help by providing photos of your modeling for upcoming ads. What could be more exciting than having a photo of your modeling on the inside cover of Railroad Model Craftsman?
The theme of the campaign is "Look What's Being Done In S Today". Images should feature one or more engines and include other rolling stock, vehicles, and figures, all in an interesting setting with plenty of color and texture. We will also consider photos of individual models. Photos of modules or dioramas are also welcome. Photos must be of layouts and models that use code 125 or smaller rail, scale wheels profiles, and scale couplers.
To present our best efforts, images need be crisply-focused and well-lit. We can provide assistance adjusting lighting to some extent in Photoshop, but there is little that can be done to correct out-of-focus images. Images that are slightly wider than they are tall (about 3 x 5 proportion) will work the best and files should be at least 2MB in size. Most modernday cameras and cellphones are easily capable of that. Please send the camera's original photos; the higher the resolution, the more we have to work with.
Take a look at this document (PDF), which captures all of the photos and descriptions we ran in our RMC ads from the start of this project until the end of 2024.
Our contact person for composing the photo and the ad is NASG Vice President Brian Jackson.
Brian will be happy to answer any questions you might have. Feel free to send him multiple photos, perhaps from different angles of the same scene.
NASG membership is not required to send in your contributions, nor do you have to subscribe to the RMC magazine, to be able to participate. If your photo is accepted, it will be run in a future RMC inside-the-cover ad (magazines have a lead time measured in months), and it will be featured on this web site's home page photo rotation in coordination with the release of the RMC issue in which your photo is revealed, as well as in the (updated) image shown above. Your photo will then also more permanently reside in the "Layouts" section of this web site.
We hope you'll participate in this exciting new S-scale promotional program by sharing photos of your S-scale modeling for inclusion in an upcoming Railroad Model Craftsman issue!