But let me start with model railroading first. Let me start by (re)quoting a section from Sam Posey's book, Playing With Trains. When I first posted this, I hadn't yet read it; now I have.
"Scenes like this, and the creative impulses that went with them, had put Malcolm in direct conflict with Tony Koester in the struggle for what model railroading should be all about. Bob Hayden had remarked, sensibly, that there was more than one hobby here and one approach was just as legitimate as another, but as I listened to Malcolm, I wondered if I would take the chance of putting him in a room alone with Tony. Tony's total commitment to realism was equaled only by Malcolm's utter disdain for it. "Accuracy is a crutch," he said to me and went on to describe a modeler who told him his embankments were too steep to be prototypically correct. "Can you imagine that?" he asked me, getting angry once again over an incident that had happened more than ten years ago.
Malcolm's extreme modeling was a lightning rod for people who thought the hobby should be about trains, not personal expression. He has had people call him crazy to his face. He has received hate mail. When he was living in Texas, people would come to his house and wait outside his door for a chance to argue with him. He said, "It's as if I was violating the Holy Grail of model railroading."
When he had turned to painting, it had been a relief to leave all that animosity behind, but now that he was attempting a comeback in model railroad, he worried that the opposition had become stronger. He told me darkly that Tony and his legions of operators had gained the upper hand. "The operators will wreck it," he said, "because they don't offer people anything to look at. Scenery—that's what attracts people, gets them excited. The operators want to allude to model railroading as an art form, but when the art part actually comes up they practically run for the door."There are two very different hobbies, as Bob Hayden suggests. Actually, there are even more than that, as I've even more recently discovered. All of them have in common the use of model trains as an important prop in the development of the hobby, but they are not the same hobby.
Here's another quote from Tony Koester in an article I have in a special issue Model Railroader that I have about getting more layout of a smaller space; seemingly a goal anyone can relate to. As you'll see; maybe not so much:
The popularity of walkaround layouts that allow train crews to keep pace with their trains has had at least two major effects on layout design. First, it's changed our vantage point from that of a maestro standing in a central control area to the trackside view of a railfan photographer "chasing" a train. And it's made us even more conscious of aisle width, as train crews have to meet and pass one another just like their trains.
Multi-deck designs exacerbate aisle congestion. They can easily double the length of mainline runs and the number of towns—and, consequently, the number of crews working at once.
To accommodate more spacious aisles and reduce reach-in distances, layout planners have embraced narrower benchwork. A typical track plan is now a shelf along the walls of a room, sometimes with a central peninsula. Obviously, the wider the aisles, the narrower the perimeter shelves and peninsula.
For those of us who grew up on the sweeping scenic tours de force typical of older tabletop layouts, weaning ourselves from deep scenery has proved challenging. In return for making such sacrifices, however, we achieve much more. The resulting track plans almost always foster the feeling of going cross-country with our trains. Easier access for construction, scenery installation, maintenance, and operation is another major virtue of the narrow-shelf approach to layout design.
But what of the difficulty in modeling deep scenes on a narrow shelf? The Midwest Railroad Modelers in Batavia, Ill., found one answer: Don't even try to model them. Except in yards, towns, and major industrial areas, they modeled only the railroad's relatively narrow right-of-way, typically about a hundred feet or so between the fences.I can categorically state that any approach to model railroading that has nothing but the train, and the tracks on a narrow shelf with some grass and bushes and a few building flats against the wall to represent industries, that focuses entirely on train operation, is not a hobby that I actually have any interest in. Sure, sure—maybe it looks on paper like model railroading the way I know it, but it isn't. It's completely eliminated the most compelling aspect of the hobby and given prime importance to an aspect of it that I don't even care about very much. That's not my hobby.
Now, I don't really care if other people in their basements are "doing it wrong" but the problem is that Tony Koester is (or at least was; I'm not sure if that's still true) the editor of a major publication, and his point of view is ascendant—because he personally is ascendant and makes sure that his paradigm is given more attention in the publications than that of other paradigms. Which he maligns subtly by implying (dishonestly, in my opinion, but I dunno. Maybe he's genuinely right) by calling it old-fashioned and suggesting that nobody does that anymore, that it's dead, a thing of the past, best let go of and forgotten. The smug, arrogant, SJW-like little man is pretending like he already won, is insulting those with different tastes, and is ruining the Great Model Railroads issues by filling them with unsatisfying and ugly looking pictures (because the photography isn't up to scratch either, on railroads that aren't up to scratch. They may be a real joy for operators to operate, but you can hardly tell that from the articles in the magazine.) In a sense, he's the one who can't leave other people alone who do the hobby differently than he does, although he's less overt and much more passive aggressive about it.
So, as far as I'm concerned, he's got a totally different hobby than me; one that I'm not even interested in. I'm perfectly happy with that designation, because I don't want to get caught up in some kind of event or product that is for him and his kind by accident and being burned because I have no interest in it. I don't even have any interest in him; and I've heard anecdotally that the people who run in his operating sessions are not the kind of people that normal people want to hang out with. Which would explain why they've focused on a spergy, autistic aspect of model railroading and promoted it as the only part of the hobby that's actually important. Now with regards to the label "model railroader" I'm perfectly happy fighting and not ceding that label to his variety of doing things, but I actually welcome the spergs coming up with a disdainful alternative label, because that at least makes the enemy that much clearer, so I can either take the fight to them or at least completely avoid them as terrible people to hang around with socially that I have no interest in being with. Sounds divisive? So what? Division isn't bad, and unity isn't a good per se. Christ himself was here to divide the sheep from the goats; the wheat from the tares. I don't care with being united with pure evil, and more prosaically, I don't care about being united in hobby terms with people who are doing things that I think are tedious, boring, arrogant, pretentious and missing the point. Divide away!
Not that model railroaders have tried to come up for an alternate label, in part because they're older Boomers who don't run around calling people names because that's "not who we are" but in part because I think at some level the Koester crowd realizes that they don't really have the high ground, or at least not as firmly as they pretend to. If they were to do that, they know that there'd be a backlash against them personally and against their preferred style that would be difficult if not impossible to bridge.
Y'know, again—those games would be so tedious, self-righteous, and terrible to me that I'd never want to play in them. If they want to say that they're a different hobby than mine, they're free to do so (although I refuse to cede to them the label of "roleplaying games") just so I can be sure to steer clear. As I've pointed out before, much of the Gen-X and later crowd that came to gaming—which other than a few Boomers and Generation Jones people who played in the very early years is basically everyone who came to gaming—don't really care much about wargames and whatnot, or what the "original" form of D&D was. Gygaxian purity is not something that they value. They were fans of fantasy fiction; they'd read Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander and maybe the early Terry Brooks or Ursula Le Guin, and that's what they wanted and expected of D&D; or at least that's the premise and the promise that brought them to D&D in the first place; without it, they wouldn't have become gamers. Maybe gaming could have remained a purist Gygaxian... whatever, but most likely it would have simply faded away without the people who came looking for it to be something just a little bit different than what it actually was. Those who are bitter and resentful at that are just broken, narcissistic, bratty little princesses. They are the Bella Thornes, the Amanda Bynes, the Miley Cyruses of gaming.
Anyway, getting back to the trains for a moment, the third hobby I mentioned at the beginning, which I just received a book I ordered on, is photography. The book I got was co-written by four of the modelers who are among the most prominent of the anti-Koesters, if you will: Dave Frary, Malcolm Furlow, John Olson and Paul Scoles. In any case, I was impressed by how much they took photography of their model trains separately from model railroading per se; it's its own, separate hobby, really. Frary discussed rather radical set-ups, in terms of removing buildings and replacing them, changing scenery, and otherwise doing all kinds of things to set up photogenic dioramas for a shot that don't necessarily represent his railroad normally. John Olson said best what I think I appreciate the most, though. Not only does he see photography as secondary to the model railroad itself, which he mentioned twice, but: "My photos are intended to capture the look and feel of a visit to my railroad. I work hard to exclude peripheral items from the camera's eye (edge of the railroad, control panels, etc.) because there are distractions. However, I hope to avoid technical stunts that would portray my railroad differently from how it actually looks. I don't confuse creative photography with ingenious special-effects photography. Any changes I have made in my techniques have been to communicate better. However, there have been such revolutionary developments in photography that photojournalists will soon be able to create a scale world that goes far beyond the limits of the actual model. High-tech camera, video, and print processes can make average models look extraordinary. This is Star Wars stuff, heavy on the special effects—not wrong, just not my direction."
So yeah; he adds figures, additional vehicles and stuff like that to make his pictures look good, he obviously spends plenty of time on composition and lighting to get good shots, etc.—but he's also photographing his layout, not some diorama that happens to use his layout as a base. I can dig that. There's a reason, I think, that Olson's book is still my favorite of all of the model railroad books I own, and probably will be forever. That's curiously another casualty to the Koester crowd; I'm amazed at much of the photography in Model Railroader, even the Great Model Railroads special issue that they do every year. And by amazed, I'm amazed that such amateur-looking, terrible snapshots are printed in a magazine that should know better, and clearly used to be better in the past.
(As an aside, Olson's quote kinda makes me chuckle at the very end there. The book was printed in the early 90s; since then the advent of digital cameras and Photoshop has made his comment look very old-fashioned, and yet also strangely prescient. Although I guess it'd be much easier to digitally add smoke to a digital image coming out of a steamer than to wave painted cotton during a long exposure, or paint smoke on plexiglass between the camera and the model, and getting brightness and color balance right can be "fixed" to some extent digitally after the fact rather than needing to be perfect up front like it used to need to be.)
As an aside, I recommend the book; A Treasury of Model Railroad Photos, as a wonderful book that talks about model trains... but not really. It's really a book about photography. Of the first three chapters, there are a few pictures that I have in some other book; considering that I have Furlow's SJC book, John Olson's J&SW book, and I used to have the first edition of Dave Frary's scenery book (the first edition is still kicking around my folks house somewhere, I imagine. I have the third edition, where he didn't use any of the old pictures of his and his friend Bob Hayden's railroad anymore, for some reason. It's actually a step down visually.) But even so, it's a great collection, and I don't for a minute regret the relatively cheap price I paid to get a used copy on Amazon.
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