Tracking down appropriate CF-7’s was proving to be elusive. Thanks to David and Guenther for coming to the rescue and setting me up with a unit each. Before getting into detailing and weathering, I want to spend some time sorting out the drive trains to see if any re-powering will be necessary, especially for the Athearn RTR LAJ unit. I just ordered a TCS Wow decoder with Keep-Alive so testing and break in will start soon.
Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, addresses the relationship between the amount of thought that goes into making a decision and the ultimate quality of that decision’s outcome.
As the time devoted to making a decision increases, eventually things flatten out and you hit the point of diminishing returns. More tooth gnashing, more analysis, doesn’t give you a better end result. Taken to the extreme, which it often is, analysis paralysis sets in. The quality of the decision will no longer improve and the opportunity cost of all of the time lost due to non-action begins to mount. The time spent analyzing becomes suffocatingly detrimental.
You see it all of the time in model railroading. The fear of “getting it wrong” is so overwhelming that for many hobbyists years, or even decades, pass without so much as two pieces of plastic being glued together. What if I pick the wrong prototype? What if the layout is boring? What if I make a design error? What if the bench work is too high? What if its too low? What if, what if, what if.
It’s possible that any of the above could happen but even if those “errors” did occur, they wouldn’t be as devastating as you’d think. One thing is certain, however, and that’s the harsh reality that time lost can never, ever be recovered. You can’t go back and retrieve those years you weren’t in the hobby.
One particular passage in the book stuck in my mind. It was an interview with the CEO of a successful mid-sized corporation. They didn’t spend long periods of time agonizing over decisions, perhaps a day or so, even for major ones. Why? First, no matter how much analysis you do, once you put a business strategy into action the market reaction will be largely unpredictable. Second, this particular company put all of their faith in their ability to make adjustments and improvements after the decision was put into play. When a big decision needed to be made, the key players would meet and hash it out for a few hours. They’d make a decision put it into action promptly and then prepare to make the necessary corrections once they saw the consequences they were faced with.
If I had to pick the largest issue facing our hobby today it would be inertia. I have no doubt that there are tens of thousands sitting on the sidelines wondering and agonize over “if and how” they will ever jump into the pool and actually start modeling. I also have no doubt that the issue is compounded exponentially by the dawn of the information age. If you took all of the time spent on social media and writing forum posts the length of a doctoral thesis, added it all up, you could have all of the bench work, wiring and a chunk of scenery complete on a mid-sized layout.
The best time to give thought to the perfect layout is while you are currently working on an existing layout. Plug away, learn what you like and don’t like about your current plan, make mental notes, and when you’ve thrashed your current layout for all it’s worth then move onto the “perfect” layout.
I’ve just posted a new layout design blog on my business site HERE.
For reasons that are understandable, many assume that I’m an advocate of small, switching layouts. That’s not really true. I’m actually more of a proponent of layouts that are simple enough to build (and yet still interesting) that those on the sidelines are motivated to jump into the fray of this great hobby of ours. There is no “right” way to model a railroad and for many, long main line runs are more captivating than switching a more compact area. Large layouts need not be complex hence the subject of the blog.
Here’s the District Blvd. grade crossing with the photo wallpaper laminated on. The sidewalks and crossing signals remain to be installed.
The current project on my workbench is the pavement for District Blvd. in Vernon. The prototype is comprised of 12 foot traffic lanes, a 12 foot median, and 10 foot parking lanes. I used Google Streetview as a guide but didn’t use that imagery. Instead, I was able to find a street overpass in town that allowed me to safely photograph the street below. Using more than a little photoshop to cut and paste and change the pavement color and striping patterns, I was able to put together the image above. This is a fairly common arrangement so I’ve posted it to my photo wallpaper section. Print it out 10.8 inches wide on high-quality glossy photo paper, knock the shine off with Dullcote, and then affix it to your styrene base with 3M Super77.