Looking east down 22nd Street on the layout. The “39” on the fascia is a milepost. The red dot on the 17th Avenue label means that it’s a street that can’t be blocked by trains. You’re looking east down 22nd Street in Miami.
A view westward down 22nd Street from 13th Avenue. Peaceful. Optimistic. Unique from an architectural, surface texture, and color standpoint. Numerous visits have given me a sense of its essence, what makes it what it is. If I could successfully capture that in model form, I’d feel like I was “there” whenever I walked into the layout room. I feel that I’ve hit the target. It only took 15 years but I eventually got there. I’ll often just walk into the layout room to give myself a brief 15-minute vacation to Miami.
It’s been written that the most difficult human endeavor is deep thought. I’ll add self-awareness as close second. You can’t design a fulfilling model railroad if you don’t know what you want it to do for you. It sounds easy enough. Personally I don’t think it is. Making it more difficult is that our interests shift back and forth over the years. People immediately jump to track plan sketches simply because it’s easy and fun. We skip conceptual planning because a) we don’t understand its order in the hierarchy (plan first. design second) b) we don’t grasp its importance and c) introspection is a lot harder than sketching.
As for myself, I’ve come to the point where my overarching goal is that when I walk into my layout room I want to feel like I’m in a place that elicits positive thoughts. Miami, LA, Brooklyn, Baltimore? So many positive memories and hopefully more to come.
Next in line as for what the layout’s “job” is? I enjoy the building process. My ratio of build vs. ops time is probably 50:1
Finally, I do like operations and wouldn’t want a layout that didn’t support that. Here’s a vital metric we all need to dial in. What’s your hourly number? How long do you want your sessions to last? If it’s thirty to forty-five minutes why put so much effort into shoehorning in enough spurs to support a six-hour session? Only needing to be entertained for less than an hour takes a lot of design pressure off. Somewhat related is how often you plan to have guests over for sessions and how long those sessions will be. Again, for most of us, we don’t have formal sessions that often. When you do host others, believe me, your guests will privately thank you if those sessions don’t go beyond two hours. One hour to socialize before. two hours running. Dinner/socializing after. If you’ve judiciously chosen your industries, it doesn’t take many spurs to keep your visitors going for those two hours.
This week I finished the 22nd Street corridor shelf run. It’s 17′ 6″ long and only has two industries, Pan Am and Miami Waste Paper. Furthermore, each of those two industries only got a car every year or so. I rarely switch them. I know that other areas of the layout will provide any necessary operational entertainment needs so there wasn’t any need to worry about working spurs into this section. I was free to use the entire run as negative space and a platform to establish the “essence of place”.
It’s common for a modeler to study a prototype and sub-consciously resort to “scanning for spurs”. Look for the spurs. Found them. Delete everything else (top diagram). However, it’s the “everything else” that contributes the majority of a place’s overall look. Take a breath, and allow ample space for industries that are no longer rail-served. You’ll have enough to be very satisfied. You won’t be bored. I promise.
It’s a milestone of sorts, the last major structure on The Downtown Spur, 2201 17th Avenue, is now a wrap. Although building the structure itself was fairly straightforward, the surrounding scratch-built palms, and back parking lot took some time.
Here’s the back parking lot. The biggest challenge was finding a finely detailed wrought iron fence. BLMA made a great one but those are gone for good. Ultimately I figured out a fairly challenging and tricky way to weave together a series of Tichy security bars. The dumpsters were made from photos.
I still have some bare spots on the layout and smaller projects but, at this point, the big stuff is now done. Fifteen years in the making, where does the time go?
Quiskeya Foods. Facing south from 71st Street. November 29, 2024, Tolga Erbora Photo.
The ever-vigilant Tolga Erbora recently sent me this photo, taken on Lead 1 in FEC’s CIS Industrial Park. You’re facing south. The industry is Quiskeya Foods. If you take a second and put the entire scene into context it has interesting implications both on the design and operations front. If you look at the track you can see that Lead 1 is a fairly busy branch. Further to the south, just out of view, is the largest customer, Trujillo Foods.
Here’s the interesting part, notice that the customer has no spur. Notice the unique loading dock and ramp arrangement. It’s not like this is at the end of a section of track that’s sinking into the weeds. They’ve spotted the car right on the main. Because Trujillo is so busy, they won’t be able to leave it there long. The customer will need to unload it quickly and I’m sure FEC made that point ahead of time. Rail GM’s are constantly complaining about customers who take too long to unload cars. When the TBOX is ready to pull, they would either pluck it off the track individually or push it all of the way down to Trujillo as part of working that job.
Here’s a map of CIS. The red box is about a half mile long north to south.
Another view taken from the same 71st street vantage point on a different day. The track has been upgraded since the shot was taken. Quiskeya is on the left with the blue awning.
So, there you go, you can add an industry and some interesting ops. without laying any track or putting in a turnout.
I have an entire chapter on the CIS industrial park in my book, 8 Track Plans For Modern Switching Layouts.
I remember visiting the Miami rail scene for the first time as if it were yesterday. No photo, video, or television screen could match the all-encompassing sensory experience of seeing it in person. The heat, breeze, humidity, sounds, smell, and impossible-to-define energy completely transcended any previous ways I’d thought of it. It was the same on my first visits to LA and Brooklyn.
In recent years I’ve become increasingly aware of the vast divide between experiencing a place in person versus seeing it in a photograph. I call it the sensory disconnect. It sort of sucks to be honest with you. I’ll often notice it on vacation or a day trip. You’ll be loving an experience or vista laying in front of you and take a photo of it. You look at your screen and go, “hmmm that doesn’t capture what I’m feeling and experiencing right now”. You re-take the shot with different focal lengths. Same result. It’s just not the same. On the positive side, it works in reverse. I can vividly remember visiting a place that I’d previously only seen in photos and being awestruck by how much better the sensory experience of seeing it in person is. Light years, night and day different. It’s the size, the feel, the sounds, the way a place just wraps around you. It’s always millions of times better in person.
There’s a direct correlation to how this affects our modeling experience. Even if a person could masterfully model a given scene in miniature, it will never, ever give you the same experience as seeing it in person. It’s interesting how this plays out in op. sessions. When I visit a layout based on an area I’ve been to, somehow I enjoy it just a bit more than a perfect layout of a place I’ve never seen. The reverse is a problem also. If you have a group of operators over, I struggle with how I can give them the feeling of being in Miami or LA if they’ve never been there. I don’t think you really can. No matter how hard you try, to them, they’re looking at nicely arranged pieces of plastic.
Taking track-level photos of your model helps but only a little. Taping prototype photos of scenes on the backdrop during op. session helps…..a bit. I’ve read a lot of blogs and forum posts on photography sites where the discussion focuses on which lens size is closest to what the eye sees. The forum discussions tend to go in circles with no real consensus. The bottom line for me is that there isn’t a specific lens size that provides the magic bullet to bridge the gap that much. I have noticed in some rail fan videos where the videographer is low and closer to the tracks the imagery is more like being there in person. Larger screens, such as in a movie theater, get you closer.
I built the model of the structure at 4722 Everett Avenue in LA many years before actually seeing it in person. When I finally did have a chance to stand in front of it, my immediate reaction was, “Wow, this thing is gigantic!” The mental impact was just so different than looking at the four-inch tall piece of plastic on my layout.
To an extent bridging the sensory gap is an unsolvable problem. I’ve been rolling this over in my mind for a while and come to the conclusion that there is only one thing that gets you pretty close and that’s visiting the actual place in person. Experience the sights, sounds, smells, and panoramas and register those sensory experiences in your mind. Create vivid memories. When you do this, your brain makes an A-to-B connection when you look at your layout. When you look at your models your mind ratchets back to the real life experience. In the past, I never gave it that much thought but in recent years I’ve become increasingly aware of how much visiting the sites I model improves my modeling of them and my overall enjoyment of the hobby in general.
A note to my overseas readers that model the US. I understand that visiting here is a significant investment of time and money. For those that can swing it, I highly encourage doing so. If you’re seriously considering such a trip, drop me an email and I’ll try to offer suggestions as to how to make the trip as productive as possible. For switching and branchline modelers you want to visit cities where you have the best chance of getting a lot of shots in a short period of time. This would mean places like Miami, Baltimore, or LA.