Ian Cowley 

I used to lie awake at night worrying about what I’d do if my numbers came up on the lottery. Mind you, that was before Lancelot changed his balls and for the first 18 months Camelot didn’t owe me anything on a £2 a week stake. Be that as it may, I found an ideal cure for insomnia was to plan how I would use part of my massive jackpot to launch a magazine for railway photographers. The beauty of it was that I would use the inevitable(?)  financial loss to offset some of the tax on my portfolio of pukka investments and so make my hobby ‘pay’ at the same time as doing a far better job than all the editors of the established railway mags. who had to suffer under the considerable constraint of having to earn a profit.

My magazine, ‘Railphoto’ or perhaps ‘railphoto’ – I never could decide which was sexier, would be the first to encourage real interaction with its readership – a la carte instead of table d’hote you might say. It would be like a circulating photographic portfolio such as Phoenix only on a monthly basis and involving a far wider potential membership. Readers would submit pix which would be published and the comments of the readership would be invited, the best and most constructive of which would appear alongside a thumbnail reproduction (Railway Mag, eat your heart out) of the picture to which they referred. From these comments, the wise old editor would be able to discover what readers really wanted and circulation would rocket, allowing the crafty old devil to sell out to IAs and live a life of idleness and luxury. Oops, wait a minute, all this was predicated on winning the bloody lottery in the first place!

As you may have gathered, Lancelot hasn’t come good so I haven’t had the opportunity to put my cunning plan into practice. Subsequent sleepless nights have brought a realisation of some of the likely practical problems besides those of finance. The principal one is the time factor. Pretty certainly, by the time comments came in and were analysed and edited, the deadline for the next edition would have passed. Well now Martyn’s cunning plan has overcome that problem and, I imagine, as comments appear on line, people can actually react to them if they wish. It promises to be stimulating stuff. Perhaps members can report on new equipment – especially but not necessarily – new digital gadgetry. They might like to give tips on how to use it for old duffers like me. (As editor of my putative magazine, I was going to invite manufacturers of new equipment to send buckshee new gear to me to undergo the ‘Cowley test’ – if I could make it work then anybody could!) 

I have to admit that I still have a hankering for an actual magazine printed on art paper, beautifully laid out and printed and containing stunningly imaginative pix but in the meantime this is a promising start – and, who knows, it might even establish that there is a sufficient market out there to make such a thing viable – and I might even have won the lottery by then! In the meantime, I can ‘rollover’ content and get a good night’s sleep.