In his must-read piece, “11 Lessons Learned” in the April issue of MR, Tony Koester writes “One huge lesson gleaned from even a cursory review of the V&O was to model the ordinary. It’s all too easy to compile a list of eye-catching prototypes to model, and the inevitable result is that everything competes to […]
Category: Opinion
Scene Composition
Scene composition, more than any other factor, telegraphs to the eye whether our work is believable or not. It matters more than detail, more than construction neatness, and more than prototypical accuracy. For our purposes, I’ll define scene composition as the elements we choose to incorporate, their size, shape, relative position, and spacing. Since […]
A Little Bit of History
I have to laugh when you watch those crime shows and they have somebody in the hot seat asking them where they were/what they were doing at 1pm six years ago. I couldn’t tell you what I was doing at 1 pm last Wednesday! From time to time people ask me about previous layouts, […]
Obstacles
Frustrated by the fact that, despite years and years of resolutions, you’ve yet to lay so much as one turnout on an actual model railroad? Started a layout but demoralized by the woeful lack of progress? You have a lot of company so, welcome to the club! Feel better? Didn’t think so. The first step […]
Fear of the Inconsequential
Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, addresses the relationship between the amount of thought that goes into making a decision and the ultimate quality of that decision’s outcome. As the time devoted to making a decision increases, eventually things flatten out and you hit the point of diminishing returns. More tooth gnashing, more analysis, doesn’t give you […]