I am also a life member. And I second all what Robin sez:
I very much appreciate what the NMRA has done for us model railroaders. The standards developed have persuaded manufactures to produce products that we can all enjoy.
So why should we appreciate NMRA? Let me explain:
You buy and lay several brands of track, mix up your trains with locos and cars made by umpteen different manufacturers... and all that stuff works together. (Oh well, perhaps there are some little glitches - but I still have to find a piece of American model rolling stock which doesn't run on my PECO or ATLAS tracks.) :thumb:
That's why you can say 'thank you' to the NMRA! When I started model railroading in the 1960s, in Europe you had LOTS of problems with different manufacturers: Couplers were different, wheel profiles were different (and all extremely toylike), even the scales in H0 were different. There was the AC three-rail track of Märklin, three-rail DC-track (!) of Trix, two-rail DC track of Fleischmann - and cars of any manufacturer simply wouldn't run through the turnouts of a different manufacturer.
Märklin uses both rails as electrical ground (the center rails/contact studs feed the power to the loco), so the wheelsets weren't isolated. Therefore you simply couldn't run a Märklin car on DC track - probably you still can't today. (Or are they at least isolating the wheels from the axles now?)
When I switched to American railroads, I made the jump from toy trains to real model railroading - it was like opening the door to another world.
If there hadn't been a NMRA before, you Americans/Canadians - and yes, probably also the modelers from down under - would have the same system-salad today like we Europeans had at the time.
The European situation became a bit better when the NEM (Norms of European Model railroads) were released - but I'll never understand what the members of these norm committees were thinking. Instead of adapting the NMRA norms they 'invented' their own, which were (and are) a lot less realistic and (in my opinion) less functional and reliable.
Quite a long time I had problems to decide between American railroading and European railwaying - but finally it was the reliability of the NMRA standards and RPs which helped me to make the final change to American style model railroading.
Ron
PS: Come to think of it - if I hadn't switched to American model railroading, probably I never had found the Gauge, and I would have missed out on one of the greatest bunch of modelers on the net! :thumb: :thumb: :thumb:
PPS: Sorry for the long sermon - but now you see why I love the NMRA!