Model Railroad Blog

Scratch Building

GenA

This scratch built structure cost less than five dollars to build and produced several weekends of modeling enjoyment.  The simple box shape was not that difficult to build using sheet styrene.  The end result was something unique, something that ‘fit’ with the layout, and wasn’t something I could ever find a kit for anyway.

I was browsing through the structure listings of one of the larger online suppliers.  As I scrolled through the pages, I was particularly struck by how expensive the plastic structure kits were.  I’m not talking about intricate craftsman kits but rather routine, average size, injection molded kits priced in the $40 to $60 range.  Putting together a cluster of a few of these would certainly be out of reach of your typical teen on an allowance or retiree on a fixed income.  Cost aside, there are other issues that you run into with many plastic structure kits.  As a custom layout builder I assemble a lot of them throughout the year.    Frankly, I’m astounded and appalled at how poorly made many of them are.  If I make my living building models and am struggling with a kit, how is a sixteen year old just getting started going to fare? When you plop down $60 to $100 for an average kit it is reasonable to expect that the parts not be warped, that the parts fit, and there by limited flash.  Often that is not the case.  In addition, commercial kits have large production runs.  If you populate your layout with them, it will look pretty much like everybody else’s layout.  The New River Mine, ADM Grain Elevator, and Atlas Interlocking stand out in any photo.

I’ve made a point before that I firmly believe that being of modest means (or close to being broke) is an advantage in our hobby.  Having limited funds means you have no option but to learn to make things for yourself rather than purchase them.  In other words you will be forced into learning to be a model builder.  Long term it’s a blessing. Building a structure from scratch is much easier than one would expect and is often a matter of getting over the mind set that it is difficult.  Like anything else it takes practice but after a half dozen attempts you’ll get into a groove.  You will often find that scratch building is EASIER than building a kit with poorly cast parts.

Advantages of scratch building include:

-Extremely low cost.  Once you have a few rudimentary tools and a stock of styrene, a typical scratch built structure is probably a quarter the cost of a kit, maybe even less.

-You get exactly what you want.  You aren’t limited by what is available on the kit market.

-Unique look.  Scratch built structures will make your layout stand out as unique and have a more cohesive look since the model railroad won’t be covered with something ten thousand other people own.

If you want to get started, I suggest picking a simple, smaller structure.  Work from photos. Accept the fact that your first attempts may not look that great and be willing to discard them as ‘practice’.  In terms of tools you won’t need much: sheet and strip styrene, perhaps some window castings, X-acto or razor  blades, a straight edge, and some solvent.  Rather than purchasing commercial hobby glue I just use lacquer thinner from a paint store and an old paint brush.    Rather than sitting on the sidelines saving up for a structure kit that won’t be that great anyway, take control and jump into the scratch building game.

Avoiding the Layout Design Death Spiral

JL

In MRP 2010, Jim Lincoln gives an excellent example of having your cake and eating it to.  That is, having fascinating operations without needing  much track to do so.

 

During the design phase, model railroaders are often terrified that their layout will be boring, that it won’t have enough elements to keep their interest.   After all, who wants to invest all of that time and effort into their passion only to end up with something that isn’t satisfying?   We overcompensate for this fear by squeezing more and more track onto the plan until it is at the bursting point.  We look at it and squeeze in still more  just to be safe.  The end result, to be blunt, is often a mess – a layout with more industries and scenes than the square footage can support visually.   The root cause of this layout design death spiral is simple.  It is a lack of information.  If we as modelers can teach ourselves how railroads and industries really work, we quickly find that it takes far fewer elements, and much less track, to hold our interest.  We can let out our breath, relax, reduce the amount of track on our layouts, and  enjoy a model railroad that is both interesting to operate and also has enough open space to have visual balance.

A little digging transforms industries we initially thought to be boring into scenes that are much, much more interesting than we initially thought. If that rather blah one spur industry all of sudden becomes a complex operation then we need much fewer of them.

This point is brought home in an exceptionally well written article by Jim Lincoln in Model Railroad Planning 2010.  In his article, Jim breaks down the operations for a small corn syrup facility.  If you look at the photo above you see two tracks with what appears to be identical, boring, black tank cars.  Not so.  The cars are not the same.  Corn syrup comes in multiple grades and each offload pipe can only be used for the same grade of syrup or the product will be contaminated.  Now things get interesting.  We now realize the eight cars in the above photo are all different (different grades of syrup) and that they need to be spotted at a specific pipe for offloading.  If the cut of cars arrives and there are still a few tankers being unloaded then those cars have to be pulled, the new cars placed, and the old cars put back into place.

That small two track spur now becomes an hour long switch job on a model railroad.  The point is not corn syrup operations specifically but how having information on operations in general allows us to trim back the amount of track needed to make a model railroad interesting to operate.

A sophisticated design is not a complex or crowded one.  In fact, often the opposite is true.  A successful design creates a maximum amount of operational enjoyment with a minimum amount of track.

Deliberate Practice

A number of years ago Florida State professor Anders Ericsson published a study of individuals that  excelled in their chosen fields of endeavor.   An excellent summary of the article was done by Geoffrey Colvin in Fortune Magazine. Click HERE for the article.

In summary, Ericsson’s conclusion was that acquiring a high skill level in an activity had very little to do with inborn talent and very much to do with hard work and practice. Not any practice but ‘deliberate practice’.  The key though was how he defined ‘deliberate practice’.

In the article Colvin writes, “The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day – that’s deliberate practice.

I see this consistently in model railroading.  I’ll be contacted by somebody that has been in the hobby for some time that, for one reason or another, has decided they want to improve their modeling or photography.  They usually send me photos at the first contact and then follow up every several months.  For many months the results look pretty much the same as they plug along trying to improve.  Then, in a matter of weeks some magical switch seems to flip and they go from being a good modeler or photographer to an exceptional one.   Had they just kept going along using the same techniques and mindset they would not have improved.  However, these folks were very deliberate.  They read up on new techniques, sought feedback, analyzed their efforts, read books, and spent a fair amount of time at the work bench (or behind a camera).   It wasn’t just the time they spent modeling or doing photography it was that they ‘deliberately practiced’.

 

Vehicle Colors

If you want to have an accurate mix of colors for the vehicles on your layout then almost 60% of them should be white, black, gray, or silver.  The annual Dupont Automotive color popularity report broke down as follows:

NorthAmerica_hi-res

Building A Successful Layout

 

To me the definition of a successful layout is very simple.  In my view, it’s simply a layout that provides the maximum amount of enjoyment given the owner’s circumstances.  What other’s think of it, its technical characteristics, the theme, the degree of detail etc. really is irrelevant.   If an individual would truly enjoy placing Star Wars figures on his layout and enjoy running civil war era locomotives around them, that’s the way they should go.  They shouldn’t cave and build, say a 1950’s era Santa Fe theme, simply because others would enjoy it more.   We (particularly me) have to be very careful not to dismiss or be condescending towards the modeler that is truly enjoying themselves simply because their project is not of interest to us, viewed as un-realistic, or does not have operational potential.  The twelve year old student, with unbridled enthusiasm for his newly discovered hobby, oblivious to the crudeness of his early efforts, is light years ahead of the old curmudgeon who spends his time doing nothing more than pontificating on a chat forum.

Having said all of that, there are some things that can be done to maximize your enjoyment and increase the odds it will meet your definition of success.

  • Know your interests and be true to them regardless of what others think.  Are you primarily an operator, structure modeler, rolling stock enthusiast?  Are you trying to recreate a specific place, represent it reasonably, or go totally freelance?   This type of deep self examination is not that easy but well worth the effort.
  • Be realistic about your skill level and the time you have available for the hobby.
  • It is critical to have early success in the construction process.  Being able to get at least one train running from A to B will build momentum and keep you going.  If your design is so complex that nothing can run until some very complex construction projects are done you run the risk of getting bogged down.
  • Put a high premium on reliability and low maintenance, even higher than other modeling factors such as degree of detail or prototype accuracy.
  • The layout must be comfortable to interact with.  Multiple duck unders, long stretches of track that are not reachable or accessible, etc. will gradually sap your enthusiasm.

 

I had a lot of reservations prior to building the East Rail layout.  I’m embarrassed to admit that I was fairly pre-occupied with what others would think.  Here we had what I thought others would view as a rather boring industrial park, in a less than popular era, all located in a region of the country that was not as popular as say the west or Appalachia.  In addition, the layout was not very big.   In the end I put my natural desire for accolades aside and proceeded anyway.  The end result was a layout that provided me more enjoyment than any I had built since.  It was (and still is) a total joy and until I started the Downtown Spur I practically ran the rails off of it.  Surprisingly, people I had never met before came out of the woodwork expressing their interest in the theme, simple design, era. etc.  So now I could count among my misjudgments how inaccurately I judged what others interests were.    Don’t be afraid to be utterly selfish and design a layout for yourself not others.  The vast majority of the time it will be you and you alone that is around it so make sure it satisfies the primary audience – YOU!