May saw continued work on the scenes surrounding 30th Avenue. At the southwest corner of the intersection is a series of low lying light industrial buildings which was the focus this month.
To help you get oriented, here is where the scene is on the layout.
Here’s the prototype facing southwest from 30th Avenue. Antillean Marine is in the distance and CBI is just out of view to the left.
Going from right to left we have: Fueltech oil, an auto repair shop with a very distinctively tagged cinder block wall, and a two story peach colored business of unknown name. The spur in the foreground is for CBI. All structures were scratch built and, given their simple shapes, fairly straightforward to put together. The biggest challenge was the Spanish tile roof on Fueltech’s office. Still to be done is one more structure to the far left, more vegetation, and some vehicles for the repair shop.
Tolga Erbora catches the local passing Family and Son on The Downtown Spur in this August 2020 image. The fact that the line is still active, and so well documented, keeps me motivated.
What do you do when your layout is getting close to being “finished”? The day is in site when there will seemingly be no more projects.
Much has been written about the importance of getting at least some of your railroad up and running, sooner rather than later, in order to establish momentum and keep morale high. Not talked about as often is finding and adjusting to a new pace once you are up and running and have hit “cruising altitude”. I’ve been guilty of being so singularly focused on the launch that I lose sight of the fact that there comes a time when you should take your foot off the gas, slow down, and simply enjoy the hobby at a more leisurely pace. In other words, the proverbial stopping to smell the roses.
The reason the question warrants some thought is that viewing our layouts as being finished is often its death knell. When we get to that point we quickly lose interest….or at least I do. After you hit critical mass, if you don’t get yourself out of mission mode all you’re doing is rushing towards the day when you’re out of projects and, shortly thereafter, no longer interested in the layout.
Some questions to ask are:
-Am I an operator or a builder? If you’re an operator finishing the railroad isn’t an issue. If you’re a builder, and there’s nothing left to build, then you have a problem.
-Next, does this theme still hold my interest? If not, the answer is simple, start a new layout. If you’ve found a new theme that interests you more, do the same. However, if what you’ve chosen does still have appeal, and the issue is a shortage of projects, then what?
Here’s what I’m doing. I started the Downtown Spur thirteen years ago, still find it interesting, and don’t see anything out there that I’d rather be modeling. I would say roughly eighty per cent of the surface area is fully modeled.
I’m working at a much more leisurely pace without my previous self-imposed push to get projects done. I have no guilt about working slowly and spending a weekend on a small detail.
I’m a better modeler now than I was when I first started the layout. As the mood strikes I can go back and upgrade small portions of a scene or replace structures with efforts that reflect my now higher skill level.
Layouts age. I find it uplifting to take a scene that’s a little weatherworn or ratty looking and restore it to its former glory. In my case I make heavy use of photo laminates for structure coloring. In the early years I used lower quality photo paper. That, combined with humidity and occasional basement flooding, left about a half dozen structures that were badly faded and discolored. I’ve gone back, stripped off the details and laminate, and restored them with new photo laminates printed on higher quality paper.
I enjoy layout photography and am a better photographer now than when I took many of the images a decade ago. As summer approaches I plan to go back and reshoot portions of it.
If you’re a prolific builder and feel a sense of stagnation setting in, be open to the fact that you need not be as “done” as you think.
Tanks, tanks, and more tanks. I don’t think there is a form of storage tank out there that isn’t represented on the Sun Gas property! Modeling them was my focus in April. Fortunately models of all were easily found through Walthers and Rix. There are also a few container stacks used for storage which I modeled with photo laminates. Getting these details in finally makes the industry recognizable for what it is.
The focus in May will be pulling together the row of non-rail structures on the West side of 30th Avenue and across from CBI.
For 2021 I’m going to switch to a new format for my blog postings in an effort to be more consistent. On the first of each month I’ll make a post of the previous month’s progress. In the middle of the month I’ll get back to writing more opinion pieces.
Model railroading is a hobby. It’s recreation. Our “success” is measured by how much satisfaction we wring from our efforts. While the occasional “attaboys” are nice, most of the time, we are performing for an audience of one, ourselves. Unlike a performing or commercial artist, we don’t carry the burden of having to please an outside world. However, just because we are the only ones that need to be satisfied doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ever give thought to what we are doing. From time to time it makes sense to sit back and examine if there are ways of approaching things that might increase our satisfaction even further. Developing a clear awareness of what we truly enjoy and focusing on that creates an intentional approach and increases the odds of making our pastime more satisfying.
Being intentional means having an awareness of what aspects of the hobby you enjoy most and focusing on those without apology. This could cover a lot of topics ranging from whether you are an operator or not, freight car scratch builder or not, etc.
One aspect that deserves conscious decision making is whether your enjoyment comes from modeling individual “parts” or the “sum of the parts”. Are you:
Somebody that enjoys building a lot of individual elements (structures, rolling stock, or mini-scenes, etc.) without concern as to whether they are related or not. Or….
Somebody that enjoys the look of an overall scene. In other words the composition of the whole takes precedence over the individual parts.
In other words do you enjoy modeling the trees or the forest?
Which approach you enjoy most doesn’t matter, being aware of where you fall does. Wanting B) but approaching it like A) creates a hard to define disconnect that subtly keeps you from maximizing how much fun you have.
Let’s first take a look at the individual element approach. We all have friends that are avid military modelers. This is a classic example of the individual element approach. You can have a display case where aircraft are placed neatly adjacent to tracked vehicles, ships, etc. It’s not visually jarring in the least. The eye doesn’t expect one model to relate to the next. They are appealing in their own right and don’t compete with what’s on the next shelf.
It gets dicey when we try to do that with model railroading elements. Take the common example of somebody that enjoys building structures, structures of all types. He may enjoy building a saw mill one month and an ice cream parlor the next. The question is what to do with them when they’re done? You could place them in a display case as the military modelers do. This is rarely done (although it would make sense to do so more often). What happens though is we ask our layouts to be the display surface, a large square footage shelf. We then sprinkle, salt and pepper style, our random gems throughout. Unlike the display case example where they stand alone in their own right, we now have visual chaos where each creation competes with its neighbor for attention. That in and of itself isn’t a problem…..as long as you’re aware of it and are having fun. The individual element approach isn’t limited solely to structures. It also applies to “mini scenes” that are often totally unrelated. For example a mountain with a ski lift, next to an intermodal port, next to a coal complex.
Things become problematic when you fall into the second group, those that enjoy the look of cohesive scenes. Your smorgasbord of elements, while working individually, often doesn’t work as a combination. If you’re enjoyment comes from the visual impact of seeing a totally cohesive scene before you when you walk into the layout room, then you need to take an entirely different approach to your modeling. How models look individually takes a back seat to how they look in combination, how they relate to their neighboring elements. This involves: element selection, size, shape, color, and space between them, and how they are placed in combination. The skills to pull off the second approach are totally different than the first. Composition skills are far more difficult to pick up than assembly skills because there is no step 1, 2, 3 cook book format to follow. If you want to be transported to a prototype scene or a plausible representation things get tricky in a hurry. We have limited space to work with so element selection, omission, and compression decisions must be made. You can’t just copy what’s there. If even if you could the sight lines probably wouldn’t scale down. You are dealing with artistic concepts not technical ones.
If you’re in the second group, the composition folks, where do you pick up the skills to create scenes effectively? The first step is simply to be aware of your interest. Fortunately, effective composition is a major element of the arts. The concepts have been worked out, developed, written about, and taught over the centuries. That being the case, what you need to know is going be a lot easier to find in the art world than the hobby spheres we typically look to. It’s pretty easy to find museums that offer outstanding courses on the subject. You’re not looking for traditional classes in how to draw or how to paint. You want subjects along the lines of visual literacy, composition, and color theory. Googling topics such as principles of design, principles of composition will turn up a lot of useful information. Simply spending more time wandering museums, over time, will improve your ability to pull scenes together intuitively.
Efforts in March focused on continuing to develop the Sun Gas scene. A large part of this month’s effort entailed scratch building the palms which, all combined, contain well over a hundred fronds. I also worked on fencing, hedges, and gates.
The above image features a direct view down 30th Avenue. The backdrop is an edited screen shot from Google Streetview. The sky colors don’t match but, hey, there are only so many hours in a day, and spending a precious weekend afternoon color matching wasn’t a priority. I can always clean up future photos of this view with photoshop.
Here’s an overall view of the entire scene.
Finally, a fair amount of time last month was spent on restoration. The photo wallpaper on about a half dozen structures in the switchback area had become severely degraded and discolored. Repairing them involved stripping off the details, peeling off the laminate, printing new laminate, and then putting the details back on. All six structures were in an area above where the basement floods the most. All of them were built using matte photo paper before I understood that, chemically, gloss is far superior and more stable. I had most of the photo wallpaper files saved which saved time. A few files had to be totally re-created which did “not” save time. At any rate the repair project is mostly done and the layout for the most part is back to looking spic and span.
