Model Railroad Blog

Stepping Outside The Sandbox

Room In New York. Edward Hopper

Model railroading is a hobby that allows it’s participants to dig in and participate as much or as little as they’d like.   On one end of the spectrum would be the casual recreationalist.  This is someone who wants to have a basic representational layout that he can unwind with now and then, perhaps entertain the grand kids, and limits his participation to a few hours here and there as the mood strikes.  On the other end is the passionate modeler that is driven to produce the absolute best end result he can for himself.  There’s a lot of real estate between the extremes and there is no right or wrong approach.  If you get out of the hobby what  you’re looking for, then it’s mission accomplished.

If you find yourself on the right side of the spectrum, the person that would describe their pursuit as passionate, you are in the minority and  have to take a different approach to attain the results you are striving for.  In model railroading we have a culture that defines “high quality” modeling as getting all of the rivets in the right place and mastering neatness of assembly.  That’s really only half way up the ladder and the easy part.  To get to the top rung means stepping beyond the easily quantifiable and moving on to mastering the concepts not mentioned much in the hobby media, the concepts that make up the foundation of art.   The second half of the journey, which encompasses color treatment and composition is much, much harder.  To find the information you need, you’ll have to step outside of the sandbox, outside of model railroading, and go to venues where those discussions are the over arcing theme.    Over the decades there have likely been thousands of articles written on how to sand, glue, paint, and match bolt patterns on the modeling subject of choice.  Very little is written about the second half of the journey (largely because most hobbyists simply aren’t that interested).  That ‘second half of the journey’ is  the step that takes a model from a neatly built, accurate, but essentially soulless architectural model, and transforms it into something that possesses that hard to define visual quality that grabs you and draws you in.  It is….art.

Moving from being highly skilled at copying a prototype rail subject to creating art entails an entirely new mental approach to the hobby, a different way of thinking.  To get the necessary skills you need to go to places where that culture, approach, mindset, and drive exist.  A place where over the centuries a culture of striving for quality is the cultural norm….the arts. Specifically, the visual arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, and film.

I’m talking about understanding why the masterpieces work visually, understanding the approach the artist took, understanding the basic concepts, and understanding what was trying to be accomplished.  Gradually that frame of mind will begin to transfer and your modeling will improve.  Listed below are some suggestions of areas and ways you can immerse yourself in the areas necessary to changing and broadening your thinking.  I want to emphasize that the exercise isn’t one of learning new techniques.  It’s a process in re-wiring your brain, changing the way you think, and how you approach things overall.

 

Painting

-Spend time in art museums.  Don’t worry about being an art expert.  Don’t get drawn into thinking you need to like something because it’s famous.  Go, wander, take it all in, linger in front of the works that draw you in and walk past the ones that don’t.

-Read the biographies of the great artists of the ages: Vermeer, Rembrandt, Hopper, etc.  After a few books you’ll start to notice some common themes, chief among them is a relentless pursuit of perfection.  Yes, the masters were gifted but they also brought a work ethic and drive that was unmatched.  They didn’t just roll out of bed in the morning, roll a brush around, and create a masterpiece.

-Take classes on understanding art, composition, and color theory.   Note that I didn’t mention classes on how to paint, etc.  I’m speaking of more conceptual studies.

 

Film

Change the way you watch film and high quality television. Spend more time watching lower budget independent films (as opposed to blockbuster action flicks) where the  emphasis is more on quality than appealing to the masses.  Watch how the scenes flow, the mood, the lighting, the pacing.  When you see a film or series you like, Google interviews with the writers, creators and producers.  The interviews are goldmines of information on what they were trying to accomplish and how they went about it.  Some of my favorites are Sean Baker (Florida Project, Tangerine, Starlet), Michael Mann (Miami Vice) , David Simon/George Pelecanos (The Wire). Nic Pizzolato (True Detective).

 

Military Modeling

Military modelers approach their hobby entirely differently than railroaders do. It’s a different culture.   To be blunt, the overall skill level is much higher than our hobby,  the standards much higher, and they are much more driven to try new techniques.  Almost everything they do can be applied to railroading.

Broadening the sources of where you get input, stepping outside the sandbox of model railroading,  won’t yield instant results.  None of this will come over night.  However,  if you embrace the idea, I think you’ll find that over the years you’ll see a hard to define but clear and noticeable upward tick in the quality of your work.

Supporting the Layout

For a variety of reasons, the handling of the BT bench work support was critical to the  look of the layout and overall gallery space.  It deserved a lot of thought.  Traditional legs, no matter how professionally assembled, would look spindly, spidery, and amateurish.  A “curtain wall” under the layout would add visual mass and I’m trying to go in the other direction, minimize it’s size.  In addition, decent looking curtains aren’t cheap and are dust magnets.  The  solution I ultimately decided on was to use three pedestals similar to what you’d see in sculpture gallery.  They were painted semi-gloss black to minimize their size (flat black is also a dust magnet).   No matter how much planning you do, how many preliminary sketches you make, you can never be sure if you’re idea will work or not until you see it executed in front of you.  In this case, thankfully, the pillars have accomplished what I had hoped.

Layout “Gallery” Room

Looking into the “Layout Gallery” from the door. The look will improve once the Brooklyn Terminal gets its pedestal supports and fascia.

 

In addition to the satisfaction we get out of building and running our layouts, they can also provide enjoyment through the simple act of just looking at them.  That is, taking them in and viewing them as we would a work of art.  In that vein I’m setting up the front room of my home as a layout “art gallery” for lack of a better term.  The goal is to create  an environment where I can go to take the work in or allow visitors to see it.  I’ve been trying to visualize how a professional sculpture gallery is set up and follow the same approach.  If there is one characteristic that stands out it’s the lack of clutter.  You have the sculptures (supported on pedestals) and that’s it, generally no other furniture.  The first step was cleaning up all of the light and computer chord runs with zip ties and chord covers.  All furniture was removed from the room with the exception of the computer desk.  I was going to move the desk but the fact that it is entirely glass does wonders in terms of making it essentially invisible.  The support of the layouts is important visually.  The LAJ is on floating shelves.  The Brooklyn Terminal, my present layout project, will be supported on three column like pedestals which will be painted semi-gloss black.  I really wish I could have made the Brooklyn Layout one foot shorter on the long leg of the “L” but it simply wouldn’t work out operationally so I had to make a small concession visually.  By luck, the room has two large windows which allow light to stream in for a pleasing effect in the afternoon hours.

The layout of the gallery room, which measures roughly eleven by eleven feet.

 

Here’s one of the pedestals under construction. They are built of 3/4 birch ply and will be painted semi-gloss black when finished. I was struck by the symbolism stemming from the fact that the pedestals have the same outline as the Twin Towers but I doubt that will be apparent once they are painted.

 

Operating the LAJ

While waiting for supplies to come in for the Brooklyn Terminal layout, I doubled back to other areas.

As a host layout for the upcoming ProRail national operating convention, it’s time to make sure all of my ducks are in a row.  I’ll be running both the Downtown Spur and LAJ layouts simultaneously so will have my hands full. Since I’ve never had a guest operate the LAJ, I needed to put that through the paces while trying to get a sense for what the experience would be like for a newcomer.   I’m not a big believer in random car movement generators because I feel you can create a much more believable operations scenario if you plan it manually.  That’s not hard to do for a small layout.

Running running through the whole work order took about an hour without breaks.  My guess is somebody that’s not as familiar with things would take longer and also need a break now and then.

Shown above is the work order I came up with.  The column on the right represents “notes to self” and wouldn’t be seen on the copy the guest operator gets. The spot number refers to the location for unloading each specific grade of corn syrup.  Each incoming tank car carries it’s own unique grade of product and must be spotted correspondingly.

I’m glad I ran the session as there were a few takeaways that need to be addressed:

  • Shelf couplers, while very prototypical, a very thorny to use in actual practice.  All of the tank cars will have them replaced with standard scale couplers by the time of the convention
  • It would be super helpful to have enough length on the Sabor Hispano spur to stuff a third car in there during the car shuffling process.  I’ll extend that lead about four inches.
  • It would be all to easy to get forward and reverse on the throttle confused and push an entire cut of cars off of the Sweetener Products spur into the great abyss.  I’ll supplement the cosmetic rail stops with a nail spiked into the fascia.

Other than that, it was a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend a morning over a cup of coffee.  Those interested primarily in industrial switching have life so much easier than those that prefer the more traditional approach of moving freight traffic from town A to town B.  With a miniscule footprint, and for very little cost, the LAJ project has provided many hours of enjoyable research and construction time and is a joy to operate.

I wrote a blog on my business site on “Choosing Your Theme, Setting Your Project Scope”.  You can read it HERE.

Mock Up Testing

Latest iteration of the Brooklyn Terminal track plan. Layout dimensions are now 5’6″ by 7′ 0″.

 

One of the things you pick up after decades of modeling is a storied and lengthy list of mistakes that fall into the category of, “Wow, didn’t expect that”!  Although the lessons weren’t fun at the time, having them in your arsenal is an enormous advantage.

One of the major lessons I’ve learned is that, when you go down a new modeling path, things aren’t going to play out exactly as you envision them.  You don’t know what’s going to pop up, but you know something will.  They aren’t always bad things either, sometimes things we worry about turn out to be non-issues.  Knowing this going into a new layout, the last thing I want to do is dive right in, spend dozens of hours on a super-detail project, and then find out there was a conceptual problem going in.

To get around this, I like to start with what I call operational mock-ups.  Once the bench work is done I get temporary track tacked down as soon and quickly as possible and start running trains.  I’ll also add mock ups of the structures.  With this approach you can uncover needed changes and make adjustments before you’ve invested a lot of time.  Once your testing is done you can go back and replace the temporary track and structure mock ups at your leisure but you have an operational layout as you do so.

After spending an enjoyable weekend running the mocked up layout hard it became apparent that I needed a better flow of track coming off of the car float and a longer run around.  Doing so required adding an additional foot to the long leg of the layout, something I didn’t want to do but was necessary.  My plan is to have the sun room be a layout gallery of sorts and as the layout grew in size it took more room than I would have liked.  To compensate I’ve decided to round the two outside edges.

Central to the theme was street running using the Kato Unitram pieces as a foundation.  Brilliantly engineered, they do have the downside of excessively tight curve radii keeping in line with it’s trolley theme.  Some gentle passes with a file to open up the flange ways in a few spots resulted in an enormous improvement.

If there has been one pleasant surprise it’s the superb running quality of the recently release Model Power Mogul.  It’s an absolute jewel, and features all wheel and tender pick ups, which is particularly helpful when you have slow speed running through complex track work.

I’m now confident enough in the plan and composition to start fastening things down permanently.  Once that’s done I’ll gradually start the detailing process.