I do have my Ruritanian States of America Railroad blog up and running, and I've been filling a pipeline of probably dumb, meandering, rambly posts, just like I do here. But because that's (so far) been specifically about my plans for my own future model railroad, I didn't want to muck it up with this kind of post. This will probably be the last one that I post on this tag on this blog... I hope. I do have another home for this topic, after all.
Here's a video from a channel that goes around looking for model railroads to feature, and he does these videos of them. This is a pretty nice layout in many respects, and I hate to find fault with it, but it does a couple of my real pet peeves. Probably because it's a club layout and they have no choice, but I dunno. I suspect lot of people don't seem to care about these things.
First, what's good? One of my pet peeves is ghost town railroads, and this isn't one of them. It's swarming with little HO scale figures, and everywhere you look, there's more of them out and about doing stuff. You could probably spend hours just looking around at little vignettes here and there, asking yourself what this guy is doing, and what those guys are doing, and what's with that car accident, and the hazmat suit guys in the foundry, etc. It's great to see someone pay attention to that detail, because all too many times people don't.
The layout looks a little old in places. There's dust and cobwebs that haven't been kept clean, and some figures and models have their paint chipped and stuff. That's inevitable, I suppose, but it's occasionally pretty noticeable.
Sometimes the scenery isn't super well done, and you really notice it. The foundry was a pretty cool idea, but something a little better than obviously splashed on orange paint needs to be done to make a convincing effect. Kathy Millatt, a prominent YouTube diorama and scenery builder showed us a Tomb Raider themed diorama with lava that looks much better than this molten steel does.
An especially prominent and somewhat surprising failing of this type is that weathering is hit or miss. In the sense that sometimes it hasn't been done at all, making the models look like little plastic toys rather than a realistic, eye-fooling diorama. This is especially true when plastic mold lines aren't trimmed away, and the model is still shiny. Many of the figures have this failing; they really are quite shiny and plastic looking. I'm really kind of mystified as to why this was done. The other pet peeve of mine is buildings (and figures) that float above the scenery, because they were just placed on their base, and then set down on top of the ground cover. It does take a little more effort and planning to make your stuff look like it wasn't an afterthought, but actually belongs on your miniature world the way real buildings belong in the real world and sit on top of it convincingly and with some degree of solidity, but it's a pet peeve of mine when just because it takes some effort, modelers don't always do it.
I'm more impressed all of the time with John Olson and his Jerome & Southwestern layout. Although it bills itself as a beginner layout, and in some ways it is, it's surprisingly sophisticated, surprisingly well planned, and surprisingly well-executed. Many much bigger layouts, made by many modelers, and with a long vintage, (i.e., they've been in operation for many years) quite honestly aren't nearly as good still. Then again, shortly after his experience with Model Railroader, he went on to work at Disney, where he designed and built much of the scenery of the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. He was clearly quite good at that kind of thing, and he was also a really good photographer, who knew how to make his models, dioramas and whatnot look really good under photographic conditions. But man, how the industry has fallen. Reading Model Railroader now compared to even when I was a kid in the 80s, is a major step down in the quality of the images. Given the vastly improved techniques we have for not only making scenery but also lighting and photographing it, that's just kind of inexcusable.
And it's a major condemnation of the kinds of people who have taken over the official "voices" of the hobby, i.e., the people who print the books and magazines. Quite honestly, you can often get better content from amateurs on YouTube. Check out Luke Towan, for instance, or Jason Jenson Trains.
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