Model Railroad Blog

Managing Print Media

New library in my under-construction mid-century modern layout room.

Understanding how the brain works, how it reacts to visual material, experiences it, and remembers things plays a major role in our hobby. For deeper dives, subjects that warrant closer study and reflection, print is more effective than digital. The experience has more depth and we remember things longer. Each has its place, but it’s important to know the distinction between how we interact and process them.

Over the years our collection of print media piles up. Without realizing it, archiving becomes an issue. It’s human nature that we aren’t going to access something if a) we can’t find it in the first place and b) we have to dig through mounds of crap to access it.

This is my current (unworkable) system. Look familiar? First, it’s in the Downtown Spur layout room in the basement. If I want to browse, I need to walk downstairs. Second, those large magazine sleeves make it hard to tell what’s in the box. Plus, the cardboard ones fall apart over time. The big pile on the bottom shelf? What’s in it? Your guess is as good as mine. The system sucks and, as a result, I don’t access my content as much as I’d like.

The topic is important to me and I thought it through over a fair amount of time, as an overall system. Step one was to identify the magazines I access the most. Second, I needed a better binding system. Finally, I needed a library on the main floor of my house.

I gutted and renovated a closet in the upstairs LAJ layout room and modified it to be the library. Second, I separated out the most used magazines. Those ones featured articles on the LAJ, B&O Georgetown Branch, Canton RR, and Brooklyn. I purchased some ingenious magazine holders from Amazon, mounted the magazines in 1 1/2″, three-ring binders, and labeled the spine.

Here’s the first binder. I’ll make additional ones grouped by subject (MRP, specific layout features, etc.)

I can already tell this will be a much more user-friendly system that will result in me accessing the content much more frequently.

The Golden Hour

“In photography, “golden hour” refers to the first hour after sunrise and the last hour before sunset, when the sun is low on the horizon, producing a warm, soft light ideal for capturing stunning images.” Google AI

I bought my house 28 years ago. It’s surprising that it’s taken me almost three decades to realize my home is not oriented north-south. It’s skewed to the southwest. The end result of this being the sunset is perfectly framed in the center of the southwest window of the LAJ layout room. At the “golden hour” the room, and LAJ layout, are flooded with warm light. You couldn’t ask for better lighting.

This is one of several reasons behind my decision to gut the room and give it a total makeover. Details in an upcoming blog.

The Impala Publicity Shot v.2

My March 7 blog featured a model of one of the staged new car publicity shots that were so popular in the 1950s and 1960s complete with one of the ubiquitous Foster and Kleiser billboards. Although the billboards are clearly ads, there was some hard-to-define “something” that made them captivating. I decided to revisit the photo and alter it with two experiments.

First, I had another F&K billboard image that I really liked. My first inclination was to make a model of the second billboard and take another photo. That would be doable but a fair amount of work. I wondered if I could simply photoshop the other billboard into the image. To my surprise that worked pretty easily. (use Adobe’s “distort” tool to wrangle it around).

The second issue was cropping. Sacrificing compelling content for the good of the whole is tough, whether it be movie editing, book editing, photography, or model railroad design. In the original photo, I included the crossbucks to suggest the rail element. In a hard-to-describe way that was an overreach that detracted from the photo. In version 2, I cropped in tighter which highlighted the automobiles. The end result was a much better image.

Here’s the first photo showing the original billboard as well as the portion of the shot I cropped out.