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.

One last model railroading post...

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.

Locomotive power

Just a quick post to document what I'd like to have for my Ruritanian America Western Rail Road (RAWRR!!!)? Because it's a combination of Ruritanian fake geography as well as alternate history, this railroad represents an America that never got overly corporatized. While this may have slowed down the roll-out of some luxuries and conveniences, it also means that none of those luxuries and conveniences were allowed to sweep the country without there being a more controlled and organic social reaction to them. Anyway, it means also that I'm handwaving a lot of details about the era I'm modeling away; generally I'd prefer not to use anything on the model that's more modern than 1940 or so, but in reality it means that I can do whatever I want within reason and just handwave it away as an artifact of the alternate history. It also means that with a number of non-corporatized railroads, all kinds of railroads will tend to be esoteric in terms of their equipment and operating patterns, depending on what the railroad in question needs and what they were able to get their hands on. 

Anyway, the RAWRR uses very small locomotive power, and short, multi-use trains and operates much more like a hardscrabble short line. I'd like to use some geared steam locos, because I'm going to be in the mountains a lot, either in Rockies analogs or desert mountains, either one, but I'm also thinking of using small switchers, like 0-6-0s as regular engines. If I ever get to the point where I have three 4x8 "railroads" connected by 2xsomething bridges, I'd probably want up to about half dozen locomotives. I may want that many anyway, just because I like locomotives and want options. Keep in mind, I don't ever intend to have the kind of railroad where I invite a bunch of friends over for operating sessions, it'd almost certainly be just me most of the time and occasionally a guest or two. 

Anyway, first link: some Bachmann 0-6-0s. https://shop.bachmanntrains.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=258_276_286

I'd probably have more than one of these, even though other than the paint scheme, they're all the same, it looks like. The only difference I can see is the tender type. Maybe I'll get three so I can have one of each tender type? That seems like a lot, unless I can think of other ways to customize them too (different smokestacks or something, I dunno) but I'd definitely like at least two. A Vandy tender and a short haul, maybe. The slope tender would be the third choice if I get three of them.

Two different 2-truck Heislers: https://tonystrains.com/product/rivarossi-hr2882-ho-heisler-2-truck-std-dc-curtiss-lumber-co-2 and https://tonystrains.com/product/rivarossi-hr2881-ho-heisler-2-truck-std-dc-pickering-lumber-corp-3

The differences between them are subtle; obviously the color scheme is a bit different, and the smokestack, but I really like geared steam, so I'd love to get my hands on some of these. There are three truck Heislers out there too, but I like the smaller ones.

Speaking of which, here's a two truck Climax. This seems to be one of the easier options to actually get your hands on too. I think there may be three truck options, but they seem harder to find. Again, I prefer the two truck anyway. https://www.hobbylinc.com/bachmann-50-ton-2-truck-climax-ritter-ho-scale-model-train-steam-locomotive-80602

The last one seems to be the hardest to actually consider getting your hands on, because everywhere I look, if I can find them at all, they're out of stock, out of production, and unavailable. Even the used market seems to be totally dry. Heck, even the link I did find doesn't have the right pictures (these are Climaxes.) Why in the world can I not find Shay locos? They don't seem as hard to find in N scale, for some reason. https://hogtrainz.com/BACHMANNTWOTRUCKSHAY.htm

Although the Shays were originally my go-to in terms of geared steam, given that I don't seem to be able to get any, let's just say that if if came down to ordering my locomotive power right now, I'd get two Climaxes, two Heislers, and three 0-6-0s for a total of seven locos. Then, along with installing battery powered RC dead rail capability in them, I'd also look for ways to customize them and make them stand out from each other, given that I have more than one of each type. 

Poking around on the Hobbylinc page, I even see some super cheap 0-4-0s and tank-type 0-6-0s for a little variety, although they're listed as "currently unavailable". (Besides, a tank engine can hardly be used to haul anything anywhere; after a couple of miles, it's out of fuel!) But that would give me a bit of variety. There's some other smaller, but not quite as small options; like 2-8-0s or 4-6-0s if I wanted that variety, but I dunno. I've always had a thing for the "baby steam locos" like 0-4-0s and 0-6-0s. And they seem to fit the idea of the very small railroad business model that's run more like a mom-and-pop than a giant national corporation.

UPDATE: Better deal on the 0-6-0s. Also, found some Shays. They're expensive brass, but I expected that.

https://www.modeltrainstuff.com/bachmann-ho-50406-0-6-0-steam-locomotive-with-tender-boston-and-maine-406/

https://www.brasstrains.com/Classic/Trains?searchtext=shay&showsold=True

Franklin & South Manchester

I earlier showed a larger scale yet highly detailed model railroad that I aspired to be as good as, but it's always nice to see someone in my preferred, smaller scale, HO, who can do it too. George Sellios is probably as good as John Allen was, if not even better in some ways, although since he didn't model the western mountain scenery but rather East Coast urban blight during the Great Depression with a bit of coal country northern Appalachians in between his big cities, I have to say that I kind of prefer Allen's work. That said, there is a lot to love about George Sellios and his urban blight railroad. He's one of the best modelers in railroading who's still active, so to speak (he actually retired his fine scale model business; I'm not sure if he's active in any other form or not. That said, his stuff is still out there.)

Here's a link to a lot of still imagery in, sadly, not super high resolution form. http://www.modvid.com.au/html/body_franklin___south_manchester_re.html

And here's a video tour of his railroad.

Details, details, details

Although this is a larger scale than most people model in, with almost everything being custom built, George Selios certainly showed that this degree of detail can be done in HO scale as well. This is the secret to model railroading, and honestly, I think most people miss it. It's details, details, details. No matter how many scale people you have sitting around doing stuff on your railroad, it's almost certainly not enough. No matter how many animals you have, you could have more. No matter how many little random piles of junk and litter you have, you need more. Almost every square inch of this railroad is a whimsical museum quality vignette. From black bears scaling the scaffolding of a trestle to a puppy chasing a bullfrog to a bucket full of water with a goose and her goslings floating in it, to a table with a rabbit being butchered to a tree full of pre-teenaged boys climbing up to get a glimpse of the naked ladies on the second and third floors of a cathouse, you just can't beat the detail of a railroad like this. The operational guys who nail down thousands of feet of track in complicated yards but can barely be bothered to glue down some flock to represent grass simply don't get it. Look, if that's how you want to spend your free time in your basement or wherever, knock yourself out. But don't expect anyone else to be very excited about your spergy, joyless parody of the hobby of model railroading. Especially not if you're going to self-righteously attack the very people who make the hobby interesting to those outside of it by calling their work a caricature or cartoon.

Model railroading as a hobby has completely lost its way, judging by the kinds of people who run the magazines that are the voice of the hobby, and the kinds of people who drive much of the discussion online. Without rediscovering what it once was about, I predict that it will confine itself to an increasingly shrunken, self-referential ghetto that has nothing to offer those outside of it, until the businesses that support it are no longer able to sustain themselves. At which point the whole hobby collapses. Maybe it can be reborn like a phoenix when those who refuse to give it up, forced to scratchbuild, remind people about what made the hobby a fun one to have in the first place.

Anyway, this video is a reminder of what the hobby can and should be. View it on YouTube and full screen and at least HD resolution if not 4K.

These guys are open one day a month out in Odessa Florida, a suburb of Tampa. Next time my family wants to go to Orlando to see the Pedophile amusement parks, maybe I'll be making a run to Odessa. It's only a two hour or so drive. It looks like it actually hosts four rail lines, probably because they were made by different craftsmen. The Sundance Central is the one shown here, but there's also the Muskrat Ramble that has a kind of bayou Louisiana vibe to it, the Dolly Varden Appalachia-style railroad, and the Silverton Central.

Rod's MR

Speaking of model railroading, what an astounding article! Apparently Rod Stewart is a model railroad enthusiast, and his model railroad is, quite honestly, pretty darn good.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-7678617/amp/Rod-Stewarts-secret-hit-track-Veteran-rocker-finally-lets-world-legendary-model-railwa.html

Layout design

In particular because I play Trainstation 2 on my phone as a time-killer, I find that model railroading is never too far away out of my mind, even though it's one of the great hobbies that I never quite managed to have, but always wanted to. I find that my approach to the hobby, were I to be able to indulge in it after the kids are gone and all that (and who knows, I probably can. And that's not very far away, really) is quite a bit different than what seems to be in vogue nowadays, in two key areas.

One of them is actually the simpler of the two; I have no interest in "prototype replication" which seems to be the way most modelers do it. It's all about operation on layouts that have little if any interesting scenery, and the operation is meant to replicate the real thing from a specific time and place as closely as possible. To me, this seems like a spergy, joyless parody of the hobby. Since the very beginning, back to John Allen and Bill McClanahan and Lynn Westcott and others of the original bunch of the hobbyist magaziners and whatnot from the 50s, whimsy, fantasy and fun were the whole point. I don't know that I'd be quite as whimsical as to name my railroad Gory and Defeated or anything like that. This paradigm was still prevalent in the 80s when I first got interested in hobby; heck; John Olson and Malcolm Furlow were both probably at their peak influence and popularity at the time. Exaggerated and beautiful scenery were the whole point, almost more than train operation even, and I always was drawn to model railroading for the same reason that I'm drawn to worldbuilding in fantasy fiction or roleplaying games (see how I keep it topical?) Not only would my railroads focus more on scenery and theme, but they'd also be alternate history, Ruritanian romance type locations. Not unlike these images I just found online, actually; check out the PNW logging and mining railroad, and then the whimsical scene of a poached Triceratops being loaded on a boat. Maybe they forgot to tell modelers in France that model railroading is serious business.

Speaking of Ruritanianism, Red Dead Redemption 2, which I haven't talked about in quite a long time, is a good example of the kind of Ruritaninianism I'd like to see. In fact, I'd almost like to specifically replicate the same environments as RDR2 in many respects, although I certainly wouldn't be so freakin' revisionist that I'm practically woke, like RDR2 is. Read chapters 7 and 8 of Reassessing the Presidency and then read Clyde Wilson's stuff. At the very least, the brief essay on the Yankee Problem, if not the entire book. If that doesn't depress you, then imagine a model railroad based on a Ruritanian "Greater Texas" that includes everything from the eastern Texas Piney Woods and the bayous to the trans-Pecos desert mountains, the southern reaches of the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains in all their glory that either never joined the Union at all and remained an independent Republic, or which won the Southern War for Independence and remained an autonomous Republic in loose association with the rest of the Confederacy. Unlike the Deep South further east, this Greater Texas never really indulged in much chattel slavery for its labor, so it remains a fairly homogenous population of Dukes of Hazzard style cowboys. Maybe Boss Hogg and Roscoe P. Coltrane would even be railroad bosses on this layout, and the Dukes would be protagonist Robin Hoods of the backwoods.

No, but what I always liked was the idea of modular railroading. I don't mean that the way most people do, though. I mean, what if I started off doing something like John Olson's 4x8 foot "standard beginner" type railroad (the Jerome & Southwestern), did a 2x8" Back Alley & Wharf addition, but instead of stopping there, had the BA&W railroad abut a completely separate 4x8 railroad on the other end? I'd start off with the 4x8, but with switches already built in with the expectation that the 2x8 expansion would come as soon as the original 4x8 is done. Each would be added discretely, so that I've got a fully operational railroad while the next module is under construction. I can actually see, if I had a 25x20 foot or so room to build it in, having nearly four full 4x8 railroads connected by narrower expansions, so I can easily reach everything. 

I've never known of anyone doing railroading this way, but the idea appeals to me strongly. Each 4x8 could even be ecologically discrete, with the thinner sections serving as transition pieces. Let's explore how I'd like to do this, shall we? Here's a diagram.

The orange in the top right would be the original railroad, and like the Jerome & Southwestern, it'd be a mountainous desert region with all kinds of southwestern flavor (although I'd probably go more for Big Bend and the Davis Mountains terrain rather than Arizona.) The green extension would be like the BA&W extension in Olson's railroad. He did it as 2x6, but I always thought that was unusual. With 4x8 being the standard plywood size (hence its ubiquity as the standard beginner's RR size) then why not just split it up the middle and make it 2x8 rather than 2x6? I assume some kind of space constraint must have driven that, but whatever. With an extra 2x2 on the far end, I've got a bit more room to do something interesting. I actually wouldn't do this as an urban environment really, although a cowboy town like Blackwater might feature at the top end of it, then a big river gorge with a cool bridge for my trains to cross before entering the Rocky Mountains section in the next module, the light blue.

I admit that the corner here would be the hardest to reach, and if I don't have room to come around from the back to work on it, I might want to come up with something clever like some kind of access hatch or something. The yellow section would again be transition, probably going through farming and ranching rolling high prairie with western Nebraska style Scott's Bluff and Chimney Rock like formations here and there, on its way to the Appalachians (not unlike the Heartlands region of RDR2's New Hanover, with the purple railroad being the Roanoke Ridge area.)

The final pink addition is a little different, as in order to make it fit a bit better, I've cut a section out of the 4x8. That's OK, it'd be the Saint Denis-like fake New Orleans, nestled in the bayou, although a lot of the buildings would be suggested by the backdrop rather than it being thickly modeled with them. Although no doubt it would have quite a few; probably as many as most of the rest of the modules combined in some ways.

Because model railroads are distinguished by their extreme compression and the use of forced perspective and divides to suggest distance that doesn't actually exist, I can see a good two small desert towns in the first module, one on the second transition module, at least two stops on the Rockies one (a logging town and maybe a livestock town near the transition area, as well as maybe a mine buried in there somewhere too. The desert mines copper, the Rockies mine silver, and the Appalachian section will have coal mines as well as maybe some river trade. The bayou/city area might have some different kinds of livestock, as well as of course a big city with a wharf and port, so it can be whatever I need it to be.

Again, where I'd be different is that each individual 4x8 would be seen as an independent "beginner" style railroad with its own loop of track (plus sidings and spurs, etc.) that just happens to be connected in modular fashion with additional railroads so that trains can travel the entire breadth of the area.

I'd also like to embrace the new(ish) technology of dead rails; remote control locos that are powered by batteries, not by the tracks, which aren't even wired in this paradigm. My locos might have colorful names like the General Lee, the Jeff Davis or the Stonewall Jackson. I don't know how many I'd need, but realistically how many times are more than two or three people going to be using it at once? I'd probably want a roster of half a dozen or so just for variety, but with that much space to cover, they don't have to "belong" to any specific 4x8 module. The modules don't have to be seen as independent regional railroads anyway, although that's much more the way that the South would have done it, rather than the power and plunder-grabbing Yankees, which led to the big railroad moguls.

UPDATE: Here's a slightly smaller version of the same idea, but with significantly shorter transition bars. I actually probably like this one better.

Two different hobbies

Actually, I'm giving two examples of a hobby that's really two hobbies (by one definition), so maybe I should have titled this post four different hobbies.  The two hobbies are two of my hobbies; model railroading and fantasy RPGs, but as I'm going to point out, the endpoints of the spectrums of tastes are sufficient that they almost should be called two separate hobbies that don't really intersect quite enough for people on either end to talk to each other in the same language about what they consider their hobby to be.  This doesn't bother me personally; I tend to have much more of a K-strategist mentality, and I don't particularly care about "unity" or the endorphin rush of feeling like "like, OMG, we're all under the same big tent."  I prefer to set up my own tent far away from the big tent where I can get some peace and quiet and privacy, quite honestly.  While that applies to my camping preferences specifically, it also applies just as much to my approach to the metaphorical big tent.  With regards to FRPGs, then, I don't care to feel like I'm on the "same page" as somebody in some other state or even country or continent who posts about D&D online.  The only time it matters being on the same page as another gamer is when they're actually at my gaming table.  If some other gamer hates the way that I game (and I hate the way that he games)—really, who cares?

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.

In the RPG world, people are either spergier and more stupid, or they don't care.  OSRians, for example, have come up with the pejorative label "storygames" which they contrast with roleplaying games; i.e., they've literally tried to label a subset of the hobby that plays differently to them as a different form of game altogether. Again; I'm OK with this.  Not that I'm going to accept their label, but in that I want to know who those people are so I can dismiss their opinions as worthless to me, and refuse to game with them.  They're the ones trying to write me and my tastes out of the hobby; I'd leave them alone, but they can't leave me alone—so I welcome the clarity of their hate.  It does seem, to me, that the people who are most prone to this in the RPG world are the OSRians, who praise the sandbox, tactical combat, and complete lack of anything related to "story"—no attempt at pacing, at character development, at anything like that is allowed.

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.

A "final" post on model railroading

I found a copy at a decent price of Malcolm Furlow's book on a narrow gauge HO railroad.  I always kinda wanted to buy this book back in the 80s when I was buying these books, but I hadn't done so.  I clicked on "order" from an independent Amazon retailer earlier today, so I'll have a copy.

Malcolm Furlow seems like my kind of guy, honestly.  I prefer his approach to that of the Tony Koester types.  Here's some quotes from this thread that apply:

If you try to approach Malcolm Furlow through the operations/prototype/serious paperwork /serious history/serious track planning lens, you will never understand him nor the work that he did - nor why that work gets so much recognition. 

You have to start with the understanding that Malcolm is first and foremost an artist who chose model railroading as his medium of expression, and he did a phenomenal job doing it.   In a lot of ways he was a bit of the Bob Ross of model railroading, he made it look easy, and produced scenes that are the entire back story to the railroad without any exposition whatsoever.  No histories, no operating schemas, no grand stories written in the text; just track, buildings, and a collection of scenes that together and alone tell the story, no further explanations necessary.  For those who cannot figure things out without the full dissertation behind the railroad ["I'm modeling the New York Central between Albany South and Albany North on December 2nd, 1934 from 12:08 to 15:62 but NOT 15:63"] his approach is very frustrating indeed - what do you mean, you can have a layout without all those other parts??? 

Malcolm left the spotlight after he became frustrated with the Koester crowd - that's the easiest way I can put it, from what I can collect reading what Sam Posey wrote in "Playing with Trains."  And by frustrated, I mean, tired of having people show up on his lawn in the dead of night to argue with him about how his way was wrong and detrimental to the hobby.  Now you have Reverse Runnings like the one Joe wrote last month about the Era Police, repeating the common [almost rhetorical, at this point] question "has it all become Too Serious?"...   [...] 

Now about the San Juan Central, I've read in places that Malcolm didn't necessarily use any of the track planning guides most people use; he started with a sketch of an idea that looked good in his head, ignoring things like even curve radius, and built it.  The result is the San Juan Central and the railroads that appeared after it.  They're the sort of work that frustrates the logical sequential mind where everything has to be connected to a sublying plot, but if you are willing to unhinge yourself from that anchor, you may find his work to be a real joy, intellectually.   

Now there may be many who gripe about his lack of adherence to "reality," the lack of "proper railroading background" to his premise, but consider this: In a span of about 3 years, or perhaps even only 6 months, from when he started the San Juan to when he sent in his first submissions, he went from a virtual nobody with seemingly little experience at all with the hobby to John Allen's successor/protege. He published articles month after month on end in the most serious of model railroading publications, he gave clinics, he produced a whole line of publications to support others in their pursuit of the hobby, he became as well known around our kitchen tables as any of the well established Old Guard.  And he made it look easy, by and large due to his background - the same background John Allen claims.  Engineering and fine drafting may make perfect structures and perfectly sound designs, but it is art that makes perfectly weathered images of what may very well appear to be a real scene - even if only on a planet imagined by Dr. Seuss or Lewis Carroll - that all together conveys a complete experience.  You've just found that steamer trunk full of old photographs, and alas, there's no text on a single one about where they came form or what is in the pictures, they're just pictures with no "historical" analysis... 

He left the spotlight because quite frankly, he get[s] a lot more appreciation from the art community than he ever did from the model railroading community, and they pay him Very Well for his efforts.  They don't line up to tell him how he's doing it wrong and how to do it right; they line up and hand him money for what he puts on canvas, be it 2D or 3D or whatever medium he decides to work in. 

Some more quotes:

Oh, I'm just the messenger this time... 

Sam Posey, Playing with Trains, pg 150-151 

"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." 

I'm not really saying anything new when I say "The Koester crowd." 

Such a railroad [the SJC] would have never existed.  The reason the San Juan Central is what it is, is because Malcolm designed it that way.  Malcolm had no more or less access to prototype information and the design tomes in the 80's as we do now; he simply chose not to use that information, and I suspect he never would - and in the face of the original, I dare say Malcolm proved such information is quite simply unnecessary.  Those sharp curves and steep grades is just what makes the pictures as dramatic as they appear - it's not an optical illusion! 

There was a layout tour in one of these magazine [It might have indeed been MRH!] a little ways back about a railroad that is in essence a replication of the original San Juan, but the builder went ahead and applied these construction philosophies to the original -better curves, better grades - and the end railroad is indeed gorgeous to look at too. The track plan is a fun arrangement, but if you were to embark on the project, I wouldn't be so bold as to dismiss the original in the manner that you have.  It all goes back to understanding the artist...

Now, to be fair, I have no interest in a model railroad that doesn't really run.  But Furlow's approach is more my approach.  Painstakingly reproducing realistic operation based on "the prototype" (i.e., real life) is much less interesting to me than any other aspect of the hobby.  I'm actually not super interested in trains, railroads or operations—although I would want a layout that actually worked, and I would want to come up with some operation cards to give me something fun to do with it after it's built.  But whether or not it's "realistic" or whimsical fantasy doesn't bother me in the least; in fact, the latter appeals to me a great deal more.

Here's some pics, magazine scans from the 70s and 80s, of Furlow's Denver & Rio Chama railroad.  It was obviously modeled to look like the G&D.  But word on the street is that it was a visual layout with poor attention paid to design considerations or craftsmanship of the trackwork, etc. so that it often didn't run very well.  That said... sure is pretty.  I can see why Furlow appeared, and by making everything look easy, turned into the model railroad equivalent of a rock star for a time period.

I've thought the same thing about John Olson, but maybe Olson was more the complete package, maybe.  I've seen scans of an article that highlight his Mescal Lines RR, but it isn't really all that much to go on, but it looks similar.  So does his small project J&SW, frankly.

"I think the primary goal in my photographs is to bring people into a world that doesn't really exist through my eyes; through my experience.  You can walk as a scale dimensional person through this little miniature world.  I'm not so interested in scale model accuracy as in sharing my little visions and fantasies with other people, and by taking them there through my one-eyed camera, I'm therefore much more able to bring them with me.  And I think that's kinda what speaks for my style and my brand."

—John Olson

And as one guy said in the threat linked above: "It's fine if Malcolm Furlow or John Allen style railroads aren't everyone's cup of tea. I get that because the 8 inch wide shelves with a static grass prairie and building flats slapped against the backdrop  aren't mine. But the thing is, I still consider all of them model railroads, they are just different approaches to the hobby. Calling anyones modeling a caricature or especially a "cartoon" is derogatory in my opinion, it irks me every time I hear it or see it written."

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.