Model Railroad Blog

Comfort Zones & Inertia

A tandem of York Railway GP15-1’s slowly glides back and forth as it works the NS interchange in York. Just as I got into position for this shot, a hole opened up in the clouds letting the sun light up the sides of the units. What can’t be captured in a photo is the amazing, deep bass, sound these units make. Photos are entertainment. Being there in person is an experience that you’ll remember forever.

Inertia: Objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects in motion tend to stay in motion…or something to that effect. Probably like a lot of you I find it all too easy to let inertia set in and slip into a comfortable routine that’s neither unpleasant nor invigorating. I can grow roots in front of the computer and live my rail experience via social media, YouTube, and Google Streetview.

About a year ago, for whatever reason, I gave myself a kick in the ass, grabbed my camera, and pushed myself to get out in the field more often and so some rail fanning. I always feel so energized afterwards. There was no reason why I got out of it really, just slipping into a routine more than anything. The laws of inertia work both ways and once I got back into things it was pretty easy to keep it up.

Rail fanning, or just site visits, add such a positive dimension to the life experience. Photos only capture a sliver of being there in person. The way things actually look and feel when you’re out in the world is so much more encompassing. The sounds. The people you bump into.

I’m aware that by lucky circumstances I have opportunities that many do not. The Baltimore region is just loaded with shortline activity. It’s a community that embraces their industrial heritage and is very generous sharing information with strangers that are clearly interested. It’s also a landscape where you can get your photos and railside experience safely and unobtrusively from public property…including a Starbucks parking lot in one instance.

Earlier in the week I decided to play hooky from work and, with a little self-nudging, made the 90 minute drive up to York, PA. Catching a train is always hit and miss so I set my expectations low going in and hoped at best to get a few rail cars parked at industries.

At times I really think there are rail fan gods up in the sky that love to f$#@% with us and then roll over laughing about it. They’ll roll clouds in just as the perfect shot unfolds. They’ll roll trains by at the most inconvenient locations. They’ll send the trains in and out ten minutes before you arrive. But, every now and then, to hook you, to keep you coming back for more punishment, they’ll reward you.

The weather report for the York trip was “supposed” to be an amazing day with sunny skies. Not. I get up there and the clouds were pretty thick. The first location I picked was totally quiet so I did some walking. As soon as I got a few hundred yards down the track the rail-fan-god, court jesters, sprung their joke and rolled a train into the location I’d just been at but was now completely out of photo range. Next they peeled away the clouds. All well and good but I’m totally out of position. Fortunately, the job was coming in to do some slow switching of the NS interchange with back and forth moves that would last over a good hour. Pay dirt!

I hit a few more industrial spots and then went into town for an ice cold IPA and burger. Life doesn’t get much better than that! The other thing I’ve found is that pushing myself to get out and about greatly increases my enjoyment of modeling. I’m no longer just looking at a piece of plastic on a shelf. My mind shifts back to time to those great times in the field and makes that A to B association as to what the models represent.

When I arrived at my first photo location not much was going on. A quick scan to the west showed what appeared to be the typical situation of an industry whose rail days were a distant memory. Something lodged in the back of my mind though. When I came back later, there it was, shiny rail all of the way down the spur. I walked to the other side and it was a beehive of semi-truck activity. During a break I walked up to one of the guys and asked, “Just curious, do rail cars come in here?”. “Yep, all of the time”. When I got home Google StreetView confirmed it, a cut of four cars spotted there. I never would have picked up on that had I not been there in person.

After a successful day of shooting, I hit the White Rose in town for a craft beer, burger, and background info. from the locals. For those in the Mid-Atlantic, York would make for a great day trip with your spouse/SO.

The Plausibility Payoff

This is real railroading. There is no circus train passing a marching band on a nearby street. There are no saturated primary colors or eye-catching architectural masterpieces. It’s flat black tankers under dull brown trees, gray gravel, and mud puddles. The shot was taken earlier this year in Old Hickory, TN at what appears to be a team track facility a block from the RJ Corman yard. At first glance I thought these were incoming loads. They aren’t. Actually, what’s happening is very common. The tank cas are being loaded with waste automobile oil. The vendor, in this case Noble Oil Services, is an environmental services firm that goes from gas station to gas station collecting their waste products. They then go to the team track facility where an empty tank awaits for them to pump the oil into. The employee in the distance is clad in safety gear and reading his cell phone while the truck is pumping out (A ModelU figure maybe). Are the other tank cars spotted for Noble or another vendor? In examining our approach to the hobby we need to decide what we want from our scenes and how to compose them. Are we going to be a like a cat with a laser pointer in our element selection? i.e. “Hey that’s cool, gimme one of those. Oh, there’s something else that’s cool (and totally unrelated), I want one of those too”. Or, do we want to identify and locate scenes such as this and blend them into a fabric of plausibility. It’s not my railroad. You decide.

One of the driving reasons people engage in model railroading is to be transported, to be taken away to “someplace” in miniature. Where that place is seems to fall into two primary camps. First, you have the largest group of folks that want to go to the realm of pure fantasy, a land where fun, caricature, color saturation, amped up and unusual architecture and the out-of-the ordinary drive the composition. If you’re reading this blog, that’s not you. Sorry, you’re in the other camp, you’re in the minority. You want to go to a place that actually exists, existed at one time, or very well “could” have been. If there is no way in hell the scene on your layout would occupy a spot in real life railroading, you tune out and do so quickly. If I had to pick a single word to describe the effect my readers are after it would be “plausibility”. It doesn’t have to be rivet-to-rivet, inch-inch-by-inch accurate, but it needs to be believable.

If that’s your end game, then the focus becomes how to get there. The starting point is careful study and examination. What is it about a location that makes it what it is? Unlike the larger camp, you’re trying to unearth, nail down, and define “ordinary”. You’re doing the opposite of most and trying to edit out the one in a million element defined by shock value. You’re looking for elements with no shock value. It’s day-to-day, down in the weeds, revenue generating railroading. It’s a world typified by dull browns, charcoal blacks, and a dead flat finish on everything. Weeds not golf courses. Operations that tend to be pretty similar week in and week out. That scrap yard is going to need those loaded gons pulled out every week. It’s not going to switch to Tropicana OJ reefers just because Walthers had them on sale and you like the color orange!

It takes time and patience to define “ordinary”, to define the essence of a real scene. If you can do so there’s a tremendous payoff. If you can hit the target, when you walk into your layout room, you’ll feel transported to the world of real railroading and that’s what you were shooting for in the first place.

A New Boxcar

I needed to get a few “less colorful” cars on the layout. I forgot I had this nice Rapido Columbus & Greenville PC&F B100 in storage. Dug it out and spent the weekend weathering it. Most of the effect was done with a wash of artist oils and mineral spirits. After that dried, I touched up a few areas with Bragdon weathering powders. Welcome to the fleet!

Ops 101, Episode 9

Last night I uploaded episode 9 of my Switching Operations 101 YouTube series. In this installment I illustrate how you can get the operational play value of three, reefer served, industries without a single turnout, spur, or structure being needed.

I’ve been very appreciative of the clarification and elaboration provided by the professional rails that follow the channel. Often this great information falls between the cracks in the comments section.

With respect to this episode, professional rail Tim Garland wrote, “

“A couple of things. On NS there is a minimum of two handbrakes applied and any additional if there is a grade involved. Over time the air brakes will eventually bleed off and if there is not a sufficient number of handbrakes applied the cars could roll away. Loaded cars are sealed with a thin metal band that has a number associated with the load. Cars that contain valuable shipments will also have an anti theft lock that requires a bolt cutter to remove it. After removing the EOT a conductor will either lay it on the ground or put it on the locomotive. Once you’re done switching, you can either use the runaround track to transport it to the rear of the outbound train or if during your switching moves you are at the rear place it then or you could couple to the train, pull the rear up to you, hang it, shove back off the crossings and perform the brake test. If it is just a transfer test traveling less than 20 miles back to the yard all the conductor has to do is walk them on to check for application. Once he reaches the locomotive the engineer can use the EOT to verify the brakes are released on the rear.” Thanks Tim!

You can see more of Tim’s excellent work on his Seaboard Central YouTube channel.