The cleaner the presentation of our layout, the more buy-in we get from family members….and ourselves. Shown above is a “current status” photo of the East Rail layout showing its floating bench work. There’s nothing that complicated going on. The bench work itself is sixteen inches wide and comprised of hollow core door slabs (The cost of which has skyrocketed of late. Ouch!) sitting on shelf brackets. I laminated one inch thick extruded foam on top of the doors for the scenery base. The fascia is quarter inch thick MDF ripped into 4 1/2″ strips.
I’ve never cared for the look of shelf bracket stanchions running down a wall. For a cleaner look, I cut the stanchions into, short, four inch long pieces (wear eye protection while cutting) and screwed them into the wall studs with 2 1/2″ drywall screws. From a normal viewing perspective the stanchions are essentially invisible. Overall the bracket assembly mount is solid. Model railroads are much lighter than books so there isn’t that much stress on the mounts. The brackets are twelve inches long.
My third attempt at a layout….1985 give or take. What a mess. Gotta love those photographic skills!
(Note: I actually do get to the point after the long initial rambling so stick with me)
We know we shouldn’t do it. It’s shameful, but we’re all guilty of rubber necking those horriffic three car pile ups we come across from time to time. On one hand you hope nobody is hurt, on the other you are left wondering what series of poor decision making could lead to such an utter mess. With that image in mind, let’s take a trip down memory lane, my very loooong learning curve, and entry into this hobby. The journey is best described as a series of three car pile ups spanning more than two decades, hence the title of the blog.
It’s human nature to look at somebody’s work on the cover of magazines and assume they rolled out of the womb with that skillset. That’s generally not the case. It’s more likely getting there took awhile…maybe “more than awhile”. In some cases, take myself for example, not only was the path much longer than “awhile”, it was rocky, it was ugly, it was utterly devoid of ‘style points’. I have no way of knowing but I’m fairly certain my learning curve was longer than anybody reading this blog. The path was a series of three multi-car pileups and a fender bender before I finally learned how to keep things between the proverbial lines and build a decent model.
I’ll be 63 this summer. I entered the hobby at age 16. It was almost twenty years before getting my first article published, and almost 25 years before I finally figured out how to build a decent model railroad and get a cover shot. 25 years is more than “awhile”.
Car wreck number 1: We were living overseas when I was a teen and I distinctly remember walking into a pretty nice hobby shop. There it was, the magazine rack. I picked up a copy of MR and by the end of the weekend I was hooked. I went back to the store, loaded up on more mags, and read them until the pages were threadbare. Our living situtation was such that I wouldn’t be able to build anything until we returned stateside. My parent’s civil service tour ended, we returned home, and I was given a land grant to a fairly massive, forty foot long, basement. Two years of reading the magazines left me with a lot of pent-up and unbridled enthusiasm. Every aspect of the hobby, every theme, was fascinating to me. Having absolutely no self control, I whipped up a terrible design to span the forty foot space, got the bench work up, and started laying track……of course I wanted it to be hand laid. I never even got the wiring in before the entire venture collapsed due to the utter lack of planning and focus. The layout went into the dumpster, I shifted my focus to rail fanning, and that was the end of my first attempt at model railroading. Ugly. Score? 0-1
Car wreck number 2: I don’t remember the exact year, but I think it was 1985 or so which would have made me age 25. I was out of college and working. For no reason that I can recall, I picked up some more magazines on a lark and decided to whip up a smaller layout in the office of my apartment. I learned ABSOLUTELY NOTHING from my first car wreck a decade earlier. Venture two had no plan whatsoever and, once again, never even got wired up. I was transferred out of state and into the dumpster attempt number two went. Are we seeing a trend here? Score? 0-2.
Car wreck number 3: I think it was 1987 which would have made me age 27. Eleven years after my first aborted launch. I built the layout you see in the lead photo above in a large closet in my apartment. The design? What the…? The plan??? Who knows what I was trying to accomplish. Well, at least I got it running….sort of. Score? 0-3
The “fender bender” (photo below).
1994. I’m age 34….which means 18 years in the hobby at this point. Wow, this guy is remedial! I’m married, living in an apartment. It had a spare bedroom but it needed to serve double duty as a guest room and office. I had the “brilliant” (spoiler alert it was NOT “brilliant”) to mount a Monon themed layout at eye level so the room could serve other functions. It was fairly decent looking, it ran, and a big improvement over previous ventures, but the ergonomics sucked. The lesson learned was that “Rube Goldberg” solutions are generally not workable in the real world.
Despite its flaws, the bedroom Monon layout was the turning point for me. I dropped a note to MR asking if they were interested in featuring it. In short order I heard back from Jeff Wilson, who would turn out to be my “editor for life”. They were interested but there was a barrier. Using very diplomatic phrasing, Jeff stated that my photographs were totally unusable and (tactifully implied) any hope of me figuring out how to push a shutter button was looking extremely unlikely. No worries, they had a guy in town named Paul Dolkos that they’d send over. Score 0-3-1
Finally….after 25 years…..connecting the dots.
After the photo shoot Paul, who would go on to my most influential mentor, invited me over to see his layout. I remember it like it was yesterday. He gave me a tour, explaining his techniques along the way. It was the oddest thing. The light went off. Holy crap, finally, after decades of thrashing around, I FINALLY understood, really understood, how to to build a well executed model railroad. Paul introduced me to the other great modelers in the area and that was my launch. Prior to that I had been a bad modeler, a really bad modeler, for a very long time.
Overnight (seemingly) I went from three car pile ups to being a decent modeler……except it wasn’t overnight. The foundation had been in the making all of those years. I just didn’t realize it. We moved into a house and I built my N scale Monon layout (above). It was featured on the cover of the 2001 issue of MR. I was age 41 at that point. Let’s do the math. That’s 25 years since I entered the hobby. It took me three, multi-car pile ups, and a fender bender to figure things out. Score 1-3-1.
It’s been quite a ride. If you’re a young person, the odds are that your learning curve will be much shorter. Some things to consider:
-Be action oriented. Jump in. Make your mistakess. You learn by doing. Don’t join the legions of “Someday Central” types as Tony Koester wrote about in his April Trains of Thought column. Get off of Facebook. Turn off your phone. Go to your work bench.
-Read. Read MR, RMC, MRH, and the annuals. Study them. Wear the pages out. Occasionally, I’ll hear comments along the lines of “I don’t subscribe to xyz any longer. There’s just nothing in there that applies to me”. What? Total nonsense. Sorry. If you look at the top one per centers of the hobby, one thing they all have in common is that they read everything. I’m not saying that the forums, groups, and YouTube aren’t valuable. They are, but as a supplement.
-Pick great mentors and avoid the trolls. This involves two steps. Not only do you need to identify and surround yourself with positive people, you need to implement their advice.
-Never give up. Pat yourself on the back for your efforts thus far and try to get marginally better with each new project.
My most recent book, 8 Track Plans For Modern Era Switching Layouts, is now available through Amazon. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, this effort is directed towards my blog followers, friends, and Facebook folks. It’s written in the same conversational style I’d use if we were having coffee face to face at an RPM meet. To that end there is a fair amount of advice, philosophy, and editorializing inside.
In no particular order, here are some thoughts to go along with the book:
Designs are not meant to be wall art. They aren’t meant to be analyzed endlessly. They are guides and their only purpose is to provide a launch to a 3D railroad. This is a hobby of participation. It’s a hobby that is far more enjoyable if your time is spent building models, not spending months handwringing and debating design philosophy on the forums.
A strong emphasis was put into making sure the plans are buildable. There are no curved number 3 turnouts! The geometry of commercially available track components was used and all of the offsets and transitions have been carefully planned out for you. As I put each design together, I did a bit of mental walk through and tried to visualize what it would be like to actually build the layouts, especially from the viewpoint of somebody new to the hobby.
If you are a young person, student, or otherwise new to the hobby I recommend either the BNSF team track on page 67 or CIS Light on page 87.
We all like operating and the plans are designed for that. However, modeler’s spend most of their time “building stuff”. That being the case, a design needs to have elements that you enjoy modeling. I envision a construction sequence where you get the mechanical portion up and trains running fairly quickly. At that point, take your foot off of the gas, slow down, and enjoy building the scenery and structures.
All of the plans essentially “steal” prototype designs and are copies of how the real railroads lay things out. Sorry, there are no double switchbacks, unnecessary “just for fun” runarounds, or bowls of spaghetti.
Some of the plans (Malabar, CIS light, etc.) need staging track extensions. These would be single track affairs and can be straight or curved, permanent or removable. The size and shape of your room will dictate what can be done.
As simple as the track arrangments are, I’m confident that as a whole, the plans will keep you quite occupied in terms of modeling projects.
I hope everybody gets an idea or two out of this. Have fun!
The smoother we can make the transitions from one color to the next, the less defined the boundary lines, the better subjects such as scenery and structure weathering will look.
One of the most important steps in improving a specific modeling skill, and it’s a hard one, is recognizing the subject is something that deserves attention in the first place. You can’t improve something if you aren’t aware it even exists! Case in point is how we handle color transitions, how smooth or sharp the flow is from one color to the next. Mastering this skill is exceptionally difficult but, the better you get at it, the more refined and advanced your work will look.
Examples where this comes into play are: bare soils, vegetation, the lines between soil and vegetation, pavement coloring, and structure weathering. Nothing is absolute but, in general, the flow from one color to the next with the scenery subjects we model is very, very subtle. In this same vein, in most cases we are dealing the numerous colors, all very close to one another on the spectrum, that gently flow from one into another. Rarely, if ever, are we dealing with a single solid color. For example, a street isn’t a uniform gray, it’s dozens of shades of gray.
The end goal, and again I’m not saying it’s easy, is to get away from harsher more defined lines when working with scenery and structure weathering.
Note the very subtle transitions in the two boxes at the top. There are no defined lines in the pavement color shifts. Note the number of gray shades in the pavement and gravel. Note the feathering of the grass into the ballast in the bottom box.
Mother nature is very complex. Note the color transitions from green to beige in the tall grass. Note the number of colors and transitions in the bottom box.
I can’t say I’ve mastered this myself. One thing that helps is application technique. For example, applying material with a sifter as opposed to pouring it from a cup. Just being aware of the vast number of colors, all very similar in hue, is important. Using smoother, delicate brushes (such as a ‘fan’ brush), gives you more control. Beyond that I think it comes down to practice, practice, practice.
Looking east down NW 59th Street in 2013 we see several boxes spotted in front of SALCO, a swimming pool chemical supplier in Miami’s East Rail industrial park.
For many, many years I’ve bounced around the idea of building a second version of my old East Rail layout. The questions being: where would I put it? What form would it take? Is it crazy to do so!?
It’s been a slow decision in coming but ultimately I came to the conclusion that the layout had been so successful, on so many fronts, that it was worth making a replica. One of the main issues I faced with version 1 was dust control. It was located in my workshop and, no matter what measures I took, dust seemed to find a way to become an issue. I have a small photo studio in my basement. With a little re-arranging of furniture it became the ideal space for a version 2. Locating the layout there would largely eliminate the old dust problem.
Over the years I played with a few iterations. Ultimately I decided to stay very close to the original design. The leg holding the canal stays essentially unchanged. I did some streamlining on the left leg of the “L” by removing a few spurs that were overkill but, other than that, it stays pretty close to the old plan.
Getting a quick launch and establishing early momentum is crucial. It took ridiculously little time to get the bench work back up. I’ve temporarily placed some Atlas code 83 track down as “proof of concept”. At this point I can pick and choose my projects and develop and detail the project at a leisurely pace. Stay tuned!
