Model Railroad Blog

In his classic 1951 piece, If I Had A Million, Linn Westcott outlines how the money could be applied to the hobby. Would you do the same?

Those who have been around awhile likely remember Model Railroad editor Linn Westcott’s famous article “If I Had  a Million”.  The article posed the hypothetical possibility of becoming suddenly wealthy and how to apply that change of circumstances to the hobby.  He immediately made the leap that the funds would be applied to a massive layout.  Every few years, the same thought experiment pops up on one of the general discussion forums and evokes the same feeding frenzy leap to buying a pole barn and filling it with a railroad.  In each case, a direct connection is made between square footage and hobby satisfaction.  Is that the case though?  For some people, maybe.  The missing piece in all of this is having a true understanding of yourself and what aspects of model railroading you get the most enjoyment from.  For most of us, that may take decades to sort out.  If you don’t jump into the game and start building things, you’re running totally blind.

It does make for an interesting exercise in introspection both in terms of the hobby implications as well as life in general.  The answers are likely all over the map and driven by individual circumstances.   Here’s the thing though, just as with athletics, music, or the arts, no amount of money will make you a better modeler.  Having a ton of money won’t make you a better tennis player or golfer and it won’t make you better at scratch building that saw mill scene.

I suspect what a person would do with the windfall would depend on how much they equate layout size with hobby enjoyment. When you really dig deep into it though, things become more interesting.  What if you’ve spent twenty years building your current layout and don’t want to part with it?  What if your satisfaction comes from structure and freight car building? In those situations, I don’t see how money will move the needle for you.  If your enjoyment comes from having a representation of a long stretch of transportation system, it would.

I’m curious how my readers would hypothetically handle a windfall like this, not only on the modeling front but with life in general. My career experience has given me a fascinating, forty-five-year, fly-on-the-wall witness account of how personal wealth plays out in life, if not modeling.  I spent twenty years in financial services working primarily with first-generation wealth holders, mostly small business owners and professionals.  My custom building clientele is similar.  What I’ve learned is that real-world wealth is nothing at all like what you see in the media.  My clients typically “got rich slowly” and, for the most part, live pretty under-the-radar lifestyles.  Many stayed in their old neighborhoods and drove Camry’s, Buicks, and pickup trucks.  They are a generally happy and content group of nice, high-integrity, classy folks.  What’s interesting is that none of them pursued wealth, they pursued a passion and the money slowly built up, almost unnoticed.  By the time it dawned on them that they were in fact, “wealthy”, they were pretty set in their ways and not that motivated to make huge changes. (For a fascinating, and very accurate read, check out Thomas Stanley’s The Millionaire Next Door)

My guess is that on the modeling side, the answers would depend on how much modeling experience you have.  The fans of the hobby, those with little or no experience, would probably want to go large.  The more experienced modelers would probably be less likely to simply because they know the tradeoffs and have more self-awareness.  Experienced modelers are more likely to be mid-stream into a layout you’d need the jaws of life to pry them away from.

What about life changes?  Would you retire? Buy a new house locally?  Move?  Stay in your house and build an addition? Make no changes?  My guess is that those folks who are employees would probably retire.  Business owners and private practice professionals, as a group, prefer to keep working until they are planted six feet under.

I’m unlikely to hit the lottery, primarily because I don’t play it.  If I did hit the jackpot, let’s say 5 mill, I suspect I probably wouldn’t alter my life that much.  I find my custom layout building, design, and writing business satisfying (most days).  I think I’d go nuts if I retired.  It’s taken me decades to get my 1952 house close to the way I want it. I like my neighbors and living in DC so I’d be unmotivated to move.  The thought of tearing down my layouts makes me cringe.  My interests lie more with industrial railroading which doesn’t take much space to model.  I’m keenly aware that massive layouts are not a free lunch and what they entail.  

What to do with all of that money? Hmmm.  All I can think of would be buying three or four top-of-the-line locomotives and sending those out for boutique electronic upgrades.  I could use a full-scale LED light upgrade in my basement.  Now I’m running out of  ideas.  As a scratch builder, I spend less than a hundred bucks a month on the hobby. I guess that’s it on the modeling front.  On the travel side I’d make more frequent trips to LA and Miami for rail fanning.  I might make some minor home renovations.    That’s about it. In short, it would be nice to have the money from a security standpoint but I wouldn’t change that much in terms of my modeling habits or lifestyle.

What about you?  What would you do on the modeling and “life” front if five mill. plopped in your lap?

Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House and Vermeer’s “Woman Holding a Balance” are both fairly small dimensionally. Even so they’re held up as the pinnacles of artistic excellence.

The subtle psychology of semantics, word choice,  can be fascinating.  Often we slip into, and make very telling, word choice selections without even knowing it.  Case in point, the terms “just” and “only”.   A quote from the net makes the point… The words “just” and “only” come across as an apology, even when it’s not intended to be.  For example, saying “I  was hoping you could “just” consider raising your hand before speaking” can sound like an apology when it could be more directly stated as “please raise your hand before speaking”.

The issue always comes up in model railroading with layout size.  It’s “just” a switching layout.  It’s “only” switching layout.  And then there is a well-intentioned email I got from a reader of the RMC East Rail article, “Sure, American homes keep on getting bigger but many young adults have not reached the salary level where they can yet afford the behemoth homes we see getting built seemingly everywhere. Until the day that a modeler has that large basement, layouts such as East Rail II fit the bill nicely.”  Ouch…. sort of like saying, “Hey Lance you run pretty fast, ……for a fat old guy”

Switching layouts, because of their size, are often viewed as substandard ventures by those who don’t have them.  They’re looked upon with pity. What’s worse, and the focus of today’s blog, is that those who own them give their own layouts the same negative connotation.  They apologize for their work.  If this is you, stop it, stop apologizing.

It’s a failing of human nature, particularly in modern times, to associate quality with size.  Doing so is sign of artistic ignorance, maybe benign ignorance, but ignorance just the same.  The Mona Lisa and Vermeer’s Woman Holding A Balance, considered some of the most brilliant works of all time, are relatively small (15” x 14” in the case of the Vermeer).  Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House in LA, considered an architectural masterpiece, is a relatively small home. 

There are excellent model railroads of all sizes,  John Wright’s Federal Street and Tim Nicholson on the small side, Tom Johnson and Klimoski in the medium range, and Mike Confalone on the large side.  Excellent each and all.

For those that don’t view layout size as a dick measuring contest, there are really two factors that come into play in planning and ultimately selecting your format.  Surprisingly, available space isn’t often one of them.  I would say that more than half of the switching layout owners I know are either financially comfortable or, cough, quite a bit more than comfortable.  They have average to large homes.  So, lack of space often isn’t the driver for selecting that format.  So, what are the two considerations?

First, is the preferred rail fan style you like most.  It’s like chocolate vs. vanilla, your tastes are what they are and won’t change.  There are two groups.  The largest is those who enjoy main line running.  To them, watching a train (often a long one) go from A to B to C to D is where their interest lies.  Math being what it is, this format requires more space, and a longer run to pull off, which makes for an inconvenient preference as a result. The second group, the switching layout crowd, is more interested in what happens at a single location.  That’s me.  I love watching the slow rhythm of a train working an industry and the crew dynamics.  You can’t get this with a container training whizzing by at fifty miles per hour.  From a railfan standpoint, switching operations give you a much longer “movie” to watch.  A mainline train appears on the horizon and then passes by in minutes.  End of show.  With switching, you can watch a single operation for twenty or thirty minutes…or hours in the case of a yard.

The second consideration when selecting a layout size is resource-related.  It’s available time.  By virtue of their smaller size, you can bring a switching layout to critical mass more quickly.  It’s easier to bring an intense level of focus to them.  It’s easier to create a higher quality level of modeling to the table because you aren’t looking down the gun barrel of another thousand square feet of layout that needs attention.  Many of the owners of switching layouts I know are successful professionally.  Those professions don’t leave a lot of free time.  They may have large basements, but they don’t have the time to fill them with layout so they make the wise decision to not bite off something they don’t have the time to work on…or maintain.

Make your layout format decision based on the operational style you prefer and the amount of time you want to allocate to the hobby.  Stand by that decision, do good work, and stop apologizing for something that doesn’t need to be apologized for.