Model Railroading

I actually have another blog dedicated to my armchair model railroad... not that I post there much, and probably won't until armchair starts to transition into something more tangible... but I have been watching a lot of model railroad videos on youtube lately, and there are a few things that bug me pretty consistently about most peoples' railroads, or at least their presentation of them.

I. Wasted Space. I get it; you want to model the wide open expanses of the American West. Who doesn't? But your space is limited. Modeling the Tehachapi Loop more or less to scale might seem cool, but it isn't. All you've managed to do is take space that would be big enough for an entire model railroad and cover it with nothing but gently sloping hills, grass and a few bushes. Model railroading is a hobby where space is at a premium, and utilizing it efficiently and smartly is a plus. Doing otherwise is... not cool. I'm less and less impressed by big vistas in model railroads than I am with creative compression that gives the illusion of space without actually taking a lot of it.

II. Realism or Operation Over Fun. It's been a thing in the hobby, probably since the beginning, that we want to create realistic railroads. However, the Koester crowd has turned this into a spergy caricaturish parody of what it once was; the idea that you're only modeling a very specific real place during a very specific and limited real time, is boring. One of the things that was always fun about model railroading is creating something unique. This is sometimes called "freelancing" but in reality, the evolution if the term freelancing has become considerably less free than what it used to be. We almost need a new term to specify what we mean when we're creating our own stuff that isn't specifically supposed to represent a real railroad or real place except in broad terms; a Ruritanian railroad, or something like that. For the entirety of the hobby, the gorgeous modeling and realistic looks is what has impressed people and fired their imagination. Your realistic scheduling and operations only impress the spergs.

III. Poor Lighting and Composition. If you're going to film or take pictures of your railroad, for goodness sakes don't do it "warts and all." Nobody wants to see the shadow of your buildings or trees on the wall right behind them; move some lights around so you can't see that! Even moreso, nobody wants to see people standing around in the background or other things that give away the illusion; that this is a model in a basement rather than an actual railroad. One of the things I'm more and more impressed by with the really famous railroaders of the 70s and 80s like Dave Frary, John Olsen, Malcolm Furlow, etc. is that they were as much photographers as they were modelers, and beautiful photographs of model trains on model scenery was at least as much of an aspirational product as the model itself. They were always careful to move lights around, work on composition, etc. that furthered the illusion in their magazine and book photographs, or videos in the rare occasion that they existed back then, that these were real photos of real trains, not models sitting in someone's basement. Heck, even John Allen himself was a professional photographer, and his realistic photos are what put him on the map. It helped that his photos were realistic also because the models were also high quality and realistic, of course, but that wouldn't have been enough without his professional lighting and composition that furthered rather than destroyed the illusion. 

It's been especially disheartening to see these flaws turn up in the Great Model Railroads issues of Model Railroader the last many years. Truly the triumph of the spergy Koester crowd, which as Malcolm Furlow "hinted darkly" would ruin the hobby; because it fails to understand what the appeal is to the majority of normal people, has been a tragedy for the appeal that it has. Great Model Railroads is supposed to be the gold standard of presentation of railroads, not of piss-poor presentation of railroads that impress the operational spergs.

IV. Dead Layouts. Another thing that Olsen, Furlow, Allen and more did that really made their railroad photographs pop was the inclusion of many, many scale figures of people, animals and more. To be fair, I'm not sure how many of these "lived" on the layout normally as opposed to being trotted out and placed specifically for the photo ops, but most of the time when seeing modern railroads in photographs or video either one, they look like dead machines running through ghost towns with hardly anyone out and about. Olsen in particular designed the J&S and its extension, the BA&W as almost like a series of linked dioramas that were separated visually through subtle vertical elements. He could take advantage of that, again, through lighting and composition to not only make his modest sized layout look incredibly large, but also by increasing the illusion of scale by having these linked dioramas seem separate, discrete and different from each other. Sometimes the link between them was somewhat subtle, and he didn't always show it to not break the illusion, but one of my favorite pictures from his book, which I took a quick snapshot of below, is the line between the mountainous "background" scenery of the J&S and the BA&W urban waterfront scenery. The transition is really quite clever, so that unless you're specifically focused on the transition, it doesn't necessarily feel like one. Putting his small buildings up on terraces to better transition to the mountains, and having the trains pass from one module to the next via a hidden tunnel works extremely well, given the sharp contrast in themes, tones, and even colors between the two modules.

There's a reason that when I make my model railroad, if I ever in fact do, that I'm going to use the track plan and broad scenic plan with very little, if any, change from the J&S. I'll also have thematic contrast, although I'm retheming the Jerome Arizona area to trans-Pecos west Texas like the Davis or Chisos Mountains, and the Back Alley & Wharf to a more frontier-like boomtown and set next to a Louisiana style bayou with cypress trees with their knees popping up out of dark fetid water, dripping Spanish moss, etc. And in light of my approval of "unrealistic" whimsy, I might even have a small scene of Inspector Legrasse breaking up a lascar cult of Cthulhu worshippers just for the heckuvit. Then I'll have another entire 4x8 railroad based on Rocky Mountains scenery attached to the other end of the BA&W part.

UPDATE: Here's another image of the border between the main railroad and the expansion, from another level. Here you can see the line between them, of course.