When the superintendent of my NMRA division suggested, at a gathering a few years ago, that I work to earn a Master Model Railroader (MMR) certificate, I recognized the gleam in his eye. Decades earlier, my scoutmaster had the same gleam when suggesting I go for the Eagle badge. It awakened some surprisingly complex feelings from deep inside myself.

I spent over five years of adolescence in scouting, and I enjoyed it, but earning merit badges was never a priority for me. I earned maybe two of them the whole time. To earn the rank of Eagle Scout is an impressive accomplishment, but it would have meant doing a lot of things that didn’t matter to me. I didn’t want the badge that badly. The activity was its own reward.

Same with the MMR. It’s the capstone of the National Model Railroad Association’s Achievement Program (AP). It’s the highest level of recognition the NMRA (and indeed, the entire hobby) has to offer, but what’s that to me? My friends in the hobby already know what I can do. They don’t need a certificate on my wall to tell them that. The rest of the world won’t care.

I have friends who have achieved MMR, and wax very enthusiastic about it. They were able to fulfill requirements with existing projects, things they’d built years or even decades before. They gained recognition for both past and recent accomplishments. They ventured outside their comfort zones to try new things. All good.

I did give the MMR idea some serious consideration, and took a long look at the requirements. Am I capable of fulfilling them? I think so. I’ve spent a lifetime in the hobby, collecting more than enough skills, research, and tools to do the tasks.

Ah…but do I want to? Much tougher question. I spent a long time thinking on it.

There are eleven certificates in the NMRA’s Achievement Program (AP), arranged into four categories: rolling stock, scenery and structures, construction and operation, and service to the hobby. Earning an MMR requires seven of those certificates, with at least one from each category. In perusing the AP section of the NMRA’s website, I noticed some things that bothered me.

Scratchbuilding and Superdetailing

At the hobby’s origins in the 1930s, “ready to run” was rare, and frankly, much less ready than we’re accustomed to today. If you wanted to be a model railroader, you had to build things. There was no getting around it. In today’s world, you can pull contest-quality models straight out of the box, but the MMR program still reflects a heavy bias toward scratchbuilding and superdetailing. That’s all well and good for those who want that, but I’m not interested. It’s not my style. I run N scale on T-Trak modules at shows and public exhibits. I don’t need full underbody detail on my boxcars to run them at a show. I don’t want to invest 400 hours of construction time in a locomotive that’s going to get poked by pre-schoolers. I don’t like the idea of building stuctures so fine and fragile that they won’t withstand Sunday-afternoon teardown time. But that’s the expectation baked into the AP requirements. You can’t get an MMR without scratchbuilding and superdetailing either cars or locomotives.

The “superdetailing” part in particular kinda rankles me. What does that even mean in N scale? I already need a magnifying glass to appreciate everything the manufacturers put on. It’s just more stuff to break off, anyway.

Could I earn certificates without adding complexity to my projects? Couldn’t I just churn out some pretty, irrelevant things specifically to satisfy requirements, get them signed off, stick them on a shelf, and carry on with my normal activities? Some people do. I could too, but why? I already have two lifetimes’ worth of projects I want to do. I don’t need busywork.

Troubleshooting

Let’s take a look at one requirement for “Model Railroad Engineer–Civil.” To fulfill it, you need to scratchbuild three examples (from a long list of interesting options) of track features, and demonstrate their satisfactory operation. I haven’t done much with handlaid track, but I grew up watching Dad do it for his O scale trolleys. It’s very doable. To “demonstrate satisfactory operation,” you have merely to send one locomotive through all possible routes of the completed feature under its own power. Just one.

Big whoop.

Here’s my problem with that: any semi-competent hobbyist should be able to lay some rail, clip power leads to it, pick the most forgiving locomotive on their roster, and breeze it through. One of my overarching goals in this hobby is to get every locomotive through challenging bits of trackwork. Doesn’t matter if it’s my Centipedes, my buddy’s USRA Heavy Mikado, or that one crappy old Bachmann that Larry insists on running. I thrive on troubleshooting. Trains never run perfectly, but I strive for it. Track, wheels, couplers, weight, drivetrains, I’m squinting hard at all the potential causes of problems I encounter, and doing everything in my power to solve them.

My clubmates appreciate these efforts. The viewing public, which mainly wants to see trains run at all times, does too. The AP requirements do not. The NMRA’s standards and recommended practices are the very cornerstone of good operation, and yet there’s very little in the AP program about applying those standards broadly, across an entire railroad. If it’s that easy to game the criteria, why bother?

Hairsplitting

It was the NMRA’s Discord server that sealed my decision. Don’t get me wrong, I like Discord. Having a chat platform for discussing hobby things amongst devoted participants is a great idea. NMRA Discord discussions are intelligent and civil (I don’t need to tell you how rare that is on the internet). In the past, I’ve stepped away from other social media platforms, and Discord seems blessedly free of the red flags I saw elsewhere.

There are several channels for AP/MMR topics. I just lurk without posting, and some of the conversations trouble me. Somebody will frequently ask whether the use of Technique X or Technology Y is “legal” for AP purposes. Fair questions, and they elicit fair answers, but much hairsplitting is contained within those answers. So very, very much. (This is not exclusive to Discord. I’ve encountered it in conversations elsewhere, too.)

So…it counts as scratchbuilt if you do the CAD work yourself, and it’s okay to send it out for fabrication, but the service can’t make any production adjustments to your files. (In my day job, I run a CNC routing table in a wood shop. A customer’s file shows what they want, but they have no idea how my machine actually works. If I have to make adjustments to the customer file to provide the product they expect, I do it without hesitation.)

It counts as scratchbuilt if you made it with basswood sticks you milled yourself, but not if you pulled them out of a box with a mimeographed instruction sheet. That’d be a kit.

The two intricately-shaped chunks of zinc that are integral to your N scale locomotive’s drivetrain disqualify it as scratchbuilt, because the frame is not on the Motive Power certificate’s list of excepted parts.

Then there’s my favorite: your online article earns credit for your Author certificate if it’s posted by a traditional hobby publisher, but not if it’s on your own blog. I don’t need to explain my problem with this, do I? True, random hobby-related natterings can hardly be considered a “service to the hobby,” but sometimes I do post legit how-to material here. I’ve had things published before. I could go through the whole editorial rigamarole again, a process fraught with gatekeeping, long lead times and bad copy-editing, or spare myself the frustrations and simply post here. To hell with the AP credit.

To be fair, the people who make these determinations aren’t dictators. They’re persuadable and reasonable. There are proposed revisions to the Author certificate that might make it easier for me to claim credit for things I’ve done. The AP chair of my own division was very helpful in clarifying the qualifications of my past and proposed projects, and his judgements tended to lean in my favor. But still. This has all the fun of parsing out state sales-tax regulations. Structuring my projects to fit such restrictions, or pleading my case that those restrictions should be modified or removed, sounds like just another distraction from higher priorities. No thanks.

So, I’ve made my decision, but I’m still left with questions. When a Scoutmaster, a teacher, a parent, a colleague deems you capable of attaining some high achievement, but you decline to pursue that goal, have you let them down? Or yourself? Are you making excuses, or setting limits?