Film often contains a large art component and a lot of thought goes into the backdrop locations they use for their shoots. Picking the right one can really set the tone. The Downtown Spur has appeared at least three time on film and t.v. I suspect there have been others.
Go to the 15:00 mark for the start of the scene which begins with a look down the “canyon” between Proveedora Jiron and Florida Bottling. It then moves over the Gulf Atlantic Warehouse with glimpses of Trujillo and Sons in the background.
All of this ads a layer of fun when running the layout….knowing you’ve walked right by some famous photo shoots a dozen times.
There is probably no person on earth that knows the nitty gritty details of CSX operations in Miami more than Tolga Erbora. It was a pleasure to have him run a one person operation session of the layout during the Mid-Atlantic RPM open house. He documented everything on video which you can watch HERE.
His attention to detail was amazing and I learned a few things. For example, at the end of a branch run what do you do with the EOT device? Never thought about that but it would be on the wrong end of the train. The answer, you need to move it to the other end! Watch for the move at the 15:48 mark. Enjoy.
In August I wrote about the caricature trap, caricature being a treatment that has an “amped up”, contrived, “model railroady” look to it. There’s no shame in that…..as long as it’s intentional….as long as it something you enjoy looking at. Often though it’s not intentional, and that’s where it’s time to take a pause and evaluate if the look you have is the look you want.
A key section of the East Rail 2 layout is the middle “L” where I’ve employed negative space as a scene separator. It’s very noticeable. In the top photo is my first run at things. Here you can see how the caricature issue can swing too far the other way to the point of being overly bland and lifeless. It can be tricky to dial in. On the original layout I put a billboard in the scene next to the 35th Avenue, the road that frames the left side. The only problem is that 35th Ave. is a quiet, two lane road in an industrial park. There is no way anybody would put a billboard there. The sign was a caricature, a little amateurish.
So, now I’m stuck. The scene in the top photo is too bland. Putting a billboard there for some snap would be model railroady. What to do? The solution I ultimately settled on was a flat of an industry called Garland Foods. The color was carefully chosen to contrast with the green foliage. Flats can be very dicey and if you don’t take some key steps they will really muck up your look. Some tips for working with flats against the backdrop to keep them from wrecking a scene are:
-Keep them low one story affairs
-Keep them distant and lower on the horizon
-Set the viewing perspective at ninety degrees
-Hide the edges of the flat as I did with the trees on both ends.
Scene composition takes careful thought and sometimes you don’t have a lot of leeway either way. If you don’t have enough snap it will look lifeless. Go too far the other way, which is usually what happens, and it slips towards looking like a toy.
Labor Day weekend say the installation of East Rail 2’s trailer park. With that addition, the major features of the first half of the layout (right side of the L shaped bench work) are now in place. I’ll spend a few months puttering with details before moving to the remaining half. The mobile homes are from Inter-Action Hobbies, nice kits with excellent instructions. The queen palm in front of the blue trailer was scratch built using my craft cutter. The fronds of the queen are much finer so I had to make new artwork for those.
For a fun comparison here’s a photo of the same basic scene on the original layout taken in 2005.
Your switch list looks easy enough, just switch one industry, a logistics warehouse in Miami’s East Rail industrial park. Three cars are spotted there and you have three incoming loads. Pull three cars, set them aside, spot the incomings, job done right? Well, sometimes. In the real world there’s the way things should “go” and then there’s how things actually play out. Sometimes a crew has an incoming string of cars destined for specific spots BUT not all of the cars presently there have been unloaded. They were “supposed” to be ready but, hey, sometimes shit happens and they aren’t. I call them the “problem children”. What’s a royal pain for a rail crew is an opportunity for a relaxing forty minute operating session that only needs one turnout. Working through this common situation isn’t hard but does take some time.
Here’s the graphic of how the op. session is staged to begin with. The glitch is at door 3. We have an incoming load but the car that’s there now hasn’t been unloaded. The foreground track can be used for sorting. What we’ll have to do is spot as many incoming cars that we can. Any incoming loads we don’t have room for will be set nearby to be dealt with on another day.
Different crews use different strategies. I began by using the sorting track to block the incoming string of cars ordering them by the order of the warehouse doors. I had to take into account that the incoming load for door 3 couldn’t be spotted. I then pulled all of the warehouse cars and did some back and forth shuffling until I was done, all of which took me about forty (relaxing) minutes.
Here’s the end result. The “problem child” is back at door 3. The blue CSX box was supposed to go to 3 but there wasn’t room so I spotted it nearby. The next time the crew comes by the car will be spotted….and depending on CSX’s mood there may be a surcharge for the extra switch. (Note, I should have used different car colors to make my point. I did not. Sorry. FYI I used two different Railbox’s and two separate white reefers during the session)
When I operate my own layout the fun for me is visualizing actually being there. I try to avoid a “grocery list, beat the clock” approach. That’s just too dry, implausible, and takes the fun out of it for me. I try to forget that I’m dealing with six long pieces of plastic that I can easily see from all angles. Rail equipment is bigger than my house, weighs tons, and doesn’t stop on a dime. In the real world sight lines are limited. You have to deal with vehicle traffic at the crossings. It takes time for a crew to walk. There are pauses while the crew does some head scratching and strategizing. Then there’s the environment. There are “hot days” and then there are “Miami hot days” which are so suffocating you can’t understand what it’s like until you’ve been there. Taking all of that into account with just one turnout, one industry, and understanding how rail operations work you can have a thoroughly enjoyable evening running trains.
