Gorre & Daphetid RR

Pronounced Gory and Defeated; this model railroad, by early giant in the hobby John Allen, remained the gold standard for model railroading for many, many years, and has probably only recently been surpassed by guys like George Sellios in the last decade or two.  In part because Sellios is still alive and has access to better gear for his photos, whereas John Allen died in the early 70s, his house caught on fire and his layout burned less than two weeks later, and most of the surviving pictures of his layout were very old taken with what would today be considered crude equipment (although it was state of the art for the time, and Allen was a professional photographer by trade) and most of the images of the layout that survive were singed or smoked by the fire, or they are bad scans of old magazines, etc.

Allen did all kinds of things for the first time: weathering and super-detailing of structures and trains, realistic operation, scale time (including lights dimming for night-time operation), and the use of numerous scale figurines all over the layout to create the illusion of life (look at model railroads that don't have people on them; they just aren't convincing; they look dead and toylike.)  He also is renowned for dramatic scenery, including cliff-faces that literally stretched from the floor to the ceiling.  He also was adamant that he model the American West during the heyday of steam power, so his layouts were very California from before California became a de facto province of Mexico and the mob—big high Sierras and a bustling port city (called simply Port).

For many, many years, it seems that model railroaders, even professional ones, struggled to get out of the shadow of John Allen.  John Allen was to model railroading what Depeche Mode was to synthpop; everyone was either aping what he did, or reacting against it, but nobody could simply go their own way ignoring him. Guys like 70s and 80s icons Malcom Furlow and John Olson made what could almost be considered miniature pastiches of the Gorre & Daphetid in many ways; although maybe that isn't exactly fair, since EVERYONE has followed in at least some of the footsteps of John Allen in the years since with regard to, say, weathering or detailing or figure use, and they should because it dramatically improves the look of the railroad to do so.  If Allen hadn't pioneered those ideas, eventually someone else would have.  But the specifics of railroading through dramatic western scenery with a big industrial waterfront is too iconic and precise to be anything else, so when reading, for example, about my favorite small layout, the Jerome & Southwestern RR, I can't help but think that it's a 4x8 (with a 2x6 expansion) slightly tamer and easier to build G&D pastiche in most respects.  I may not have put two and two together to figure that out if the Back Alley & Wharf wasn't an obvious miniature version of Port itself.  This isn't meant as a knock against those guys, because frankly, I'd want to model a similar kind of thing myself; like many people, regardless of whether or not I'm talking about model railroading, which honestly, most of the time I'm not, I'm just a huge fan of the American west and southwest.  Even though I don't get the people that live there quite as well as I do my own people, the backwood Southerners, the reality is that the West was largely colonized by Southerners following the War of Lincoln's Aggression, and some of the southern southwestern territory was actually considered Confederate territory (the southern third, more or less, of what is today New Mexico and Arizona.)  And the environment and scenery; well, that just feels like home to me more than anywhere else in the world.  The land was made for me and me for the land—which is why it is both ironic and maybe even tragic to some degree that I've lived for nearly twenty years at the juncture of the Midwest and the Northeast, and before that I lived for more than a quarter century a hundred miles inland but still ecologically on the Texas Gulf Coast.  I have literally never—except when I was an infant too young to remember—lived in the territory that I most feel is home.

Anyhoo, one of the things that made the G&D so dramatic was not just the scenery, but the method by which the trains had to traverse them.  Gigantic bridges such as the last one Allen built, the Scalp Mountain bridge, or the four layered bridges of French's Gulch, with the really big elevation changes for the model trains (up to four or five actual feet; which, keep in mind, at 1:87 scale can be over 400 scale feet) is part of what makes the G&D so dramatic, and few—if any—modelers in years since have been quite so dramatic as John Allen.  Part of that is practical; John Allen was a dedicated modeler and photographer, a confirmed bachelor, and had the ability to devote his entire basement and twenty years of his life to making this thing, which most others cannot spare.  John Olson's J&SW, for instance, while clearly a pastiche, is limited to a 4x8 with a 2x6 expansion; the fact that he was able to do a below tabletop Apache Gorge with a big dropoff from the track to the gorge floor was pretty impressive at all given his self-imposed constraints.

Here's a few pictures of some of the most dramatic of the G&D's vignettes.  I'm especially focusing on the big bridges, because that's something that if I ever build a model railroad, I'd want to find a way to incorporate in at least some format or scope or scale; even though it'd be smaller than that done by John Allen by default.  Also, keep in mind that like I said, these pictures are considerably lower quality than what you'll see for modern railroads, but it's the best that can be done given the constraints of both the time period and the preservation of what pictures there are.

A book I own has an even more dramatic view of this curve; the most dramatic part is just to the left of the picture here.

You can see just a bit of that curve to the right here, with the stacked bridges of French's Gulch in the background in the center, and one of the bigger bridges just barely to the left of that.

Look at the stuff going on in the background.  You can see the curve again, just a bit, here.  Also, that witch's hat cupola become a layout trademark for stations; he had several of them.

One of the most dramatic instances of differing elevation on the G&D; the lower track is the lowest elevation on the railroad, while the upper tracks are nearly the highest (as you can see because they nearly reach the ceiling.)

A different shot from a slightly different angle of the same spot.

The biggest and latest of his bridges.  Sadly, it's really hard to find images of this during the "daytime."  Because it was built so late; before Allen's fatal heart attack in early January 1973, there are comparatively few pictures of it.  The next several are some different shots, though.

More of Allen's famously stacked track on multiple bridges along the same cliff face; one of his favorite spots to take pictures of engines and cars.  This is a distance shot of the whole area.

Another bunch of images of French's Gulch.

And rounding the collection out, here's some more of my favorite huge bridge.  I'm really wondering where I could fit something this dramatic in, or if I even could, with my much more modest ideas.

And finally, his Cross Junction station, one of the more memorable ideas from the G&D, plus some pastiche version of it from someone else's railroad.  It's so cool that I'd be tempted to pastiche this idea myself.

Final track plan look

I don't intend to keep talking about this, but here's a few options for a 4x8 track plan that I like pretty well.  The images themselves are (sometimes) of poor quality, but the trackplans can still be "divined" from them, mostly without too much trouble.  Let me talk briefly about what I like about each.

The Jerome & Southwestern Railroad

The Jerome & Southwestern RR, the one I've talked about a few times so far recently.  This is a low-res scan, but of course, I actually have the book that it's scanned from that I can refer to, so that doesn't bother me too much.  In addition to the traditional (albeit somewhat freeform) classic loop around the table, it's got passing sidings on both of the long edges, a reverse loop so you can change direction, a very long Y-shaped spur and a much shorter spur.  It also has elevated track; the long spur goes up over much of the rest of the route, and it has tunnels to hide passage and create the illusion of greater travel (and less looping) and as you can see, it has two spurs that go off on to the Back Alley & Wharf RR expansion that would be up to the top left (although unfortunately, I don't have a scan of that track plan.  I do have the book with me today, though—maybe I'll grab a quick picture of it with my phone and add it later.)

While of course the scenery can be done differently, I also like the below the table elements that allows for big bridges and/or trestles, even without elevating the track; although the track is also elevated later on, of course.  All in all, this plan allows for a lot going on in a small space, which is ideal.

The Dunnow & Hoocares Silver Branch Railroad

Speaking of which, although the tunnel expression of the eastern end of this loop isn't shown, it's obvious that this is the same track plan flipped, rotated and placed in a different scenic context.  This shows what can be done with a track plan to "own it" and make it your own.

The Lime Ridge, Hercules & Portland Railroad

This is another nice one from an older collection by Linn Westcott, who—holy cow—has been dead for nearly forty years now.  But he wrote a number of books that I still had in my collection back in the 80s when I was first reading them (he was already dead by then, even.  He died in 1980.)  Westcott was the developer of such techniques as L-girder benchwork, hardshell scenery and zip-texturing, all of which I first read about in his primer book, HO Railroad that Grows and read about in more detail in other books like McLanahan's scenery book, etc.  This one lacks passing sidings, which is too bad, because I think they add a lot if you're running more than one train at a time (although they add very little if you're not), but it has a slightly more complicated spur, and the loop is twisted to kind of go in on top of itself, effectively doubling it's mainline length, which I think is really quite clever and neat.

I don't think I like it quite as much as the J&SW.  Of course, it could be modified by turning the weird spur up there by "Pit Tower" into a passing siding, so there's at least one, and the Hercules spur could be extended to to all the way over to Lime Ridge nearly.  Combined with the spurs that go off into an expansion, that would actually make the doubled loop really cool, and allows it to not take away from other operational possibilities too much.  I still like a good reverse loop, but that could be on the expansion section instead, if desired.

The Nantahala & Smoky Mountain Gorge Railroad

This is the other one that potentially vies with the J&SW as one to build off of, although it's readily apparent that it's a very similar plan in most respects—it does have the double passing sidings, a long spur (although it's location is somewhat different than that of the J&SW), a couple of shorter spurs, as well as a folded loop on top of itself, like the one above.  I like the elevation options; although it has one of them under a mountain, the scenery could, of course, be rearranged differently to have a dramatic bridge crossing right there.

It also lacks a reverse loop, even though it looks like it has one; you have to follow the mainline very closely to see that it doesn't.  There also isn't really an option to include one, because the pretzeled up loop takes up too much real estate as it is.

I'm not a huge fan of using the crossovers, but only the one in the middle of the table really stands out; the other one on the sidings is more discrete.  I'm also not entirely sure where those shorter sidings in the southeast corner could possibly go unless they're merely holding tracks or something; you couldn't possibly fit any kind of industry there where it's already crammed next to the mainline and to each other.  And I could probably eliminate the middle crossover by elevating one of those branches, or keeping one of them elevated long enough to cross over the other, or something—although based on the track plan, both are already elevated now.  Maybe one of them can come down to cross under the other, or something.

Like the one above, this would need to add two spurs in the southeast to allow the track to go into the expansion area

UPDATE: What maybe I'm evolving to like even more is a modification to the LRH&P RR.  What if I took that weird two-way vaguely T-shaped (except with a very short stem and very long top) spur and turned it into a passing siding?  Also, add short spur coming off of that passing siding into the center of the table.  Then, take the spur that goes to Hercules, and extend it nearly across the table (more like the J&SW spur that goes diagonally across the table, in fact.)  Put attachment tracks that would go off into an expansion, in pretty much the exact same fashion as the J&SW track plan, and then what I've managed to do is get nearly all of the operational complexity of the latter, but with the doubled pretzel loop, which gives me also more opportunities for dramatic showcases of tracks nearby but at different elevations either running next to each other or cross over each other, etc.

Keep in mind, however, that that track plan has a minimum curve radius of 15", which is quite small.  It doesn't bother me too much, as I'd prefer to use older, smaller engines and rolling stock; if I ever put a steam engine bigger than an 0-6-0 on the line, I'd be surprised, and I'd actually prefer 0-4-0s.  Older rolling stock less than 40 scale feet is a must as well.  So I can probably handle the 15" curves, but the question is—would I want to?

If I were to build a layout in the next five years...

I probably won't.  But if I did, here's how I would do it:

This would represent a spare bedroom or basement, if we can free one up in the next five years (which is actually a reasonable thing to expect.)  The dimensions here don't represent the entire room, necessarily, but a minimum area within the room that is 8x12 feet.

The green area is 4x8; a typical standard plywood size, and a very standard size for a "first layout" in model railroading.  I'd probably do it as a western desert railroad, not unlike the Jerome & Southwestern (in fact, so "not unlike" that I'd use his track-plan, more or less.  It's a really good one.)

When Olson expanded his J&S, he built the Back Alley & Wharf RR, which was a 2x6 extension coming out of the one side.  However, why not take the opportunity to do even more, assuming you've got the space?  Years ago, I considered leaving open an expansion that was a whole 'nother 4x8, but it seems that that would leave many parts of the railroad essentially unreachable to a person with normal sized arms.  The 2' dimension was a smart one.  But, if you took a 4x8 plywood and took a 2x3 bite out of the corner, you could get the best of both worlds; another (almost) 4x8, but with the accessibility you want.  The orange sections would represent this expansion, which I wouldn't do until the green section was (more or less) done, perhaps—or maybe I just plan on it from the get-go too!  This obviously would leave me room to do considerably more than the BA&W trackplan, so I'd have to freestyle my own material out there.  This is OK, because I don't know that I want urban per se; I'm thinking more semi-urban at best is what I'd allow this railroad to grow to; it's a small railroad servicing a town that's (at best) the sized of Blackwater in the RDR games, plus an expanded suite of industries that are rural by nature; because the desert section would be especially focused on mining, the orange, which would be a primarily mountain section, would be focused on logging, and both would also do livestock, plus some other smaller industries while I'm at it.

This wouldn't be a truly very "prototypical" railroad, where model railroaders refer to the real world railroads as the "prototype"—it'd be a total fantasy that would meet my hobbyist needs regardless of how realistic or whatever it ends up being.

The gray area is not part of the layout, obviously.  The green and orange "north" and "east" edges would be against the wall, or close enough to it, but I might want to add movable backdrops to put on the southern and western 4' edges too, at least for picture taking.

What else would this layout do?  Well, while the green section, especially if I build it first, would make a continuous loop the orange section cannot make a second loop, although it can have one side of a loop on the bottom edge, and a bit long loop can be made with the entire green + orange section.  A lot of serious model railroaders decry the loop, and prefer "switching layouts" with "realistic operation."  I've—curiously—never been super interested in operation of model trains, but rather the building of them and the framing of them in diorama-like scenic vistas.  This isn't to say that I may not take more interest in it at a later date, but I'd still want loops to just run trains around and watch them crawl through the scenery, as well as for operations—loops simulate travel time between stops, if nothing else, as well as create potential mainline bottlenecks if multiple trains are running at a time on the railroad.  Which they should be, ideally. 

Anyway, I don't intend to make this a major topic on this blog.  I am revisiting my past interest in this potential hobby, and I've been piqued by the possibilities anew, but I still have constraints that limit my ability to get into it quite a bit, not least among them the fact that I have too many interests and potential hobbies.  But we'll see.  Maybe in a few years, something like this could be a reality.

Model Railroading

Curiously, one side effect of me playing lots of Red Dead Redemption 2 is that I've rediscovered my interest in model railroading.  RDR2 does have, of course, a number of railroads, train stations and stops, etc. although that's hardly the focus of the game.  But something about it has sparked my reminiscences of thinking that one day I'd have that as a hobby when I had the money and time to do so (that still hasn't happened.  But maybe it still will, sometime.)

I also really like the fanciful yet believable names of places in RDR that remind me a lot of the fanciful yet believable names of fantasy model railroads like the famous ones that people still talked about when I was a kid, like John Allen's Gorre & Daphetid or John Armstrong's punnish names on his railroad too.

And I had several books that I bought at the hobby store not far from my house; when I was younger and had free time, most notably during the summer, I'd walk or ride my bike the few blocks to the Townshire shopping center and explore the Waldenbooks and the hobby store.  My favorite of all of the railroads that I ever read about, and one that I'd like to emulate in many ways, was the modestly sized yet fabulous looking Jerome & Southwestern by John Olson; originally done merely on a 4x8; the classic "beginner's" layout, but with a 2x6 extension added later that created a somewhat L-shaped layout, it is not only a great idea of how a beginner can do something pretty cool, but how he could add on to it.

Ideally, I'd do two 4x8s, with a different scenic vibe to each (western mountain vs red rock desert, maybe) in two corners of the room, with a 2xwhatever connector to keep them running smoothly as a single layout.  And it could eventually be added on to even more with another 4x8 in another corner (maybe representing a rural south, with a large port city too?) assuming I had a big enough room.  That would end up having become a significant sized layout, but built in modular format as several "beginner" layouts that are interconnected.

Like John Olson, I'd probably feature Great Depression era small-town frontier, western themes, I'd focus on fantasy and compression rather than excessive realism (like RDR in this regard too, I'll add) although I won't be nearly quite so whimsical as some of the classic modelers did.

Anyway, that's probably a pipe dream.  If I'm already 47 and have no plans to get started with this (maybe when my last son moves out in a couple of years, I can talk about converting the basement?) and honestly, I haven't done much with the hobby other than buy a few pieces of rolling stock and some kits and paint and weather them when I was younger, so the idea that I'd make it one of my major hobbies suddenly is probably not really realistic.  But every once in a while I sit back and think about what might have been.

Anyway, I found a place that has scans of what I think are all of the color photos released for this in the page of Model Railroader.  Not that I read them there, but I got the "fixed up" version of the articles converted into a book, Building an HO Model Railroad With Personality.  I really should dig that sucker back out one of these days.  I think I know where it is, but it's a bit of a pain to get to.

Not the Jerome & Southwestern, but some similarly themed images from John Olson's other projects.

And finally, I can't find a scan of the track plan from the book that's high enough resolution to be useful, but here's the plan redrawn for n-scale with a different scenic layout in two different variants.  The first is a bit more true to the original; the second is a bit "warped" although it's still the same basic layout.  The track plan itself, however, I believe to be same.

Does not include the Back Alley & Wharf RR extension.

Philistines were European Sea Peoples

I've been gone for about a week and a half, and I'm so busy catching up from being gone that I'm not really up to posting something really substantive yet.  But, here's an interesting abstract recently posted, with the paper no doubt soon to follow.  Thanks to Davidski of Eurogenes for the heads-up.

The ancient Mediterranean port-city of Ashkelon, identified as "Philistine" during the Iron Age, underwent a dramatic cultural change between the Late Bronze- and the early Iron- Age. It has been long debated whether this change was driven by a substantial movement of people, possibly linked to a larger migration of the so-called "Sea Peoples". Here, we report genome-wide data of ten Bronze- and Iron- Age individuals from Ashkelon. We find that the early Iron Age population was genetically distinct due to a European related admixture. Interestingly, this genetic signal is no longer detectible in the later Iron Age population. Our results support that a migration event occurred during the Bronze- to Iron- Age transition in Ashkelon but did not leave a long-lasting genetic signature.

Probably much less surprising than the Greek-European genetic admixture in the Philistine cities is the fact that no trace of it can be found later in the Iron Age.  Where did the Greek-Philistines go?  (Of course, with the number of samples, they can't say for sure that it went anywhere; they may just not have sampled enough later Iron Age individuals to have captured something that was, in fact, actually there had they sampled more.) They either all left or were killed off without any trace of their admixture popping up in later generations.  Samson must have been more thorough than we give him credit for.  Anyway, I'm curious about the details.

Anyway, there's some DNA evidence that I'd like to see that is curiously slow in coming out; maybe for modern day political and cultural and social considerations.  Why do we still know very little about the Tarim Basin mummies and their relations to both Afanasevo and Andronovo cultures?  We can predict, probably pretty confidently, that an earlier wave of Yamnaya/Afanasevo people came into the area, to be later joined by Andronovo/Scythian groups.  In fact, given the linguistic situation that later appears, where Tocharian texts exist here and here alone, but Prakrits and Saka and Sogdian are also very well attested, nothing else is really very feasible.  Still, it's a bit frustrating to not have that confirmed, and there's a lot more about the details of the two macro-groups and their penetration of the general area that are unknown and would be nice to know, not to mention the timing and extent of their admixture with more localized Siberian/proto-Mongolian or Turkic population elements.

I'm also surprised and disappointed that we still don't know anything officially about the participants in the battle of Tollense, which seem to represent two distinct populations, equipped very differently.  There's probably modern day ethnic ego to bear on this question.  Poles and Germans have been unhappy with the situation in that general area for centuries.  (For what it's worth, I think what was done to the Germans following the World Wars and the ethnic cleansing of their population from much of Prussia and the Sudetenland, not to mention Russia, is inexcusable in the extreme.  That said, it'll happen to peoples again who allow themselves to get into a position where it becomes inevitable.  *cough, cough America cough cough.*)  But regardless, it'd be nice to know what's going on.  My guess is that one group represents the Nordic Bronze Age, and the other is an early Balto-Slavic group, which will probably cluster close to Old Prussians.  The Poles won't be happy either way, although it's hardly a secret that they were later arrivals than the Balts who were there first, and it'll also not be a really big surprise to discover that the Nordic Bronze Age extended all the way to modern day Estonia—I think most people who actually know anything about the NBA already know that anyway.  Of course, if that's the case, what does that mean exactly?  That ethnic Germanic Parent Language-speaking peoples related to the later emergent Germanic peoples may have been wider spread earlier on, to be compressed later by the spread of Slavs and Celts, and then to explode later again during the Migration period over, to some extent, territory that their ancestors already controlled culturally?  People are often way too hesitant to give Germanic claims any merit whatsoever.