Model Railroad Blog

This older view of the layout is a classic example of visual chaos. The eye dances around a sea of pastel cubes and struggles to make sense of the mess.

Some of the most enjoyable, and useful classes, I took at The Smithsonian were on artistic composition and visual literacy. The applications to model railroading are very direct. A key concept that is discussed often is that of avoiding visual chaos, taking control of your work, and directing the viewer’s eye to where you want it to go.

When I originally planned The Downtown Spur, my focus was on being prototypically accurate, capturing the sense of the place, and providing a framework for interesting operations. Although individual scenes and industries turned out fine, I gave zero thought to the overall look as a whole. When you walk into the room you were presented with a sea of pastel, one story, cubes. It was exactly what art professors tell you to avoid, visual chaos. So, how do you fix a mess like this?

From a compositional standpoint there are a number of ways to direct the eye towards a subject. First, is its size. Simply make it bigger. Second is color. A bright, saturated tone will stand out more than a gray or beige. Closely related is contrasting a subject with its neighbors. Five red brick buildings side by side won’t contrast with one another. Throw a faded brick building into the mix and it will stand out.

In the above mock up you can see how I’ve attempted to apply these concepts to my layout’s viewing experience. 1) The shear size of the Jai Alai fronton draws attention to it. The size also blocks out all of the noise behind it. 2) The red coloring of the signage on top draws the eye towards it. An added bonus are the words Miami and Jai-Alai which tell you where you are. 3) The container stack storage yard blocks out more visual noise behind it. In this case we want to take the opposite approach to color. I want the containers to serve only as a view block, not to draw attention. By using only grays and beiges, such as the containers on the right, they fade into the background. 4) The tree provides the extra few inches needed to block the bench work in the back.

With these changes, when visitors walk into the room the eye is naturally pulled towards a central subject that tells them they are in Miami.

As I mentioned in my last post, the last thing anybody wants to do is spend hours and hours on a structure only to find that, after putting it on the layout, it doesn’t fit in the way you expected. It’s not something that can be worked out on paper either. Mock ups are a quick way to get a sense for overall shapes and proportions, possible problem areas, and features you may want to omit. The mock up above was made out of foam board and is more developed as far as final shapes and lines than what I posted previously. It wouldn’t make sense to model the entire Jai Alai complex but, as luck would have it, I do have space for the primary structure.

Here’s a closer look.

With no projects that really moved the needle for me, I took a few months off from the layout. I knew that if I consumed enough craft beers, and took enough naps, eventually something in the way of an idea would float up from the bottom of the pond. And….eventually it did. That “something” being Miami Jai-Alai (pronounced Hi Lie). Jai-Alai is vaguely similar to handball and, although not mainstream, is exciting to watch. Unfortunately, its strong links to gambling keep it from rising to the prominence it deserves. It’s played in large arena’s called “frontons” and was even featured in an episode of Miami Vice. The Miami Jai-Alai Fronton (now also a casino) is massive and sits directly across from FP&T.

From a modeling standpoint it solves a number of issues with the layout. One of the problems with my design is that, from a compositional standpoint, it’s overly symmetrical both vertically and horizontally. As you enter the layout room you are presented with a grid like sea of fairly similarly sized cubes, all of equal height. The arena’s large size would break the uniformity up, particularly in the vertical plane. Second, in an earlier blog I mentioned that it bothered me that, upon entering the room, the entire layout unfolded in front of you. I toyed with the idea of using backdrops to break up the sight lines but was (thankfully) talked out of it by every single modeling friend of mine. Again, because of it’s height, the Jai Alai fronton blocks the view of everything behind it, solving the view block problem naturally. Finally, the structure has a massive logo on the front that serves as a marker letting you know that you are, in fact, in Miami.

Here’s where the structure is located on the layout.

Before investing many hours building a structure, it’s always a good idea to build a mock up first to see how it will look in 3D and how it will fit into an overall scene. I added an inch to the height of the structure to make sure it blocked the view of the layout behind it.

In terms of construction the structure is fairly simple. One challenge will simply be it’s large size. The second will be modeling the sawtooth awning on the first floor. It looks like I’ll have plenty to keep me busy during the cold winter model building months.