Model Railroad Blog

Exaggerating the Ordinary

In August of last year I wrote a post on the topic of caricature, caricature being defined as an artistic style leaning towards the exaggeration of features. In model railroading terms it’s an orientation that focuses more on fantasy and whimsy.

Styles fall on a spectrum with modelers spread out among various approaches depending on their personal tastes. We tend to view the ends of that spectrum, the boundaries, as having caricature on one side and a prototypical orientation on the other. That’s not the case, and that reality offers the opportunity for a third stylistic approach. If caricature is an overemphasis, then following that same logic, it has a counterpart. That counterpart is underemphasis.

Decades ago I was watching an Allen Keller video on my friend and mentor, Chuck Hitchcock. During the interview, Chuck made the statement that, “The key to achieving realism is to not just represent the ordinary, but to slightly overemphasize it”. It’s a pretty profound insight that has stuck with me to this day.

What would “emphasizing the ordinary” look like? Take an example where you have a city block with six mundane, white, shotgun houses, one yellow one, and one red one. The white structures are the “ordinary” elements. The eye will be drawn to the red one. A stylistic approach of dialing things back would be to make the entire block white structures. If a section of town has a few faded, rusting corrugated, one story warehouses, you might emphasize those and give them more visual priority, more square footage, than something that is more eye catching.

Let’s take another example, illustrated visually. In my last newsletter, I discussed how vehicle colors played out by percentage, the numbers being supplied by one of the paint manufacturers. On a percentage basis it breaks down like this: silver 20%, white 16%, gray 13%, black 13%, blue 10%, red 10%, other 18%. In other words, two thirds of the vehicles on the road today are silver, white, gray, or black.

The left photo is caricature approach with no attempt to be prototypical as far as color percentages go. It’s overly saturated. The center photo matches the prototypical color percentages exactly. On the right, I’ve overemphasized the ordinary and used only “ordinary” colors (white, silver, gray, and black). Even though it’s technically not prototypical, in an odd sort of of way, it looks even more realistic, almost an optical illusion.

There is no right or wrong to any particular style. No style is superior to the other. If you’re enjoying what’s in your layout room then that’s what it’s all about. However…..what IS important is that the style you choose be by conscious decision, by thoughtful intent, and not out of benign ignorance or following the herd.

Curved Structure Faces

Streamline Moderne industry in Vernon (LA)

If you model Miami or LA the odds are in your favor that there will be at least a few elegant Streamline Moderne industries along the right-of-way. The question becomes one of how to model the signature curved faces. I’ll start by saying the job would be easier if you have three hands. I spent an hour looking around for a plastic pipe or bottle of the required radius. No luck. On to plan B.

Begin by cutting two cookie cutter shapes of the correct radius out of .060″ styrene. These will be the formers that you wrap the wall around and then glue in place to hold the shape. Although I generally use .060″ styrene for walls, in this case I dropped down to .040″ for the curved wall because it’s easier to bend. Cut a section of .040″ styrene of the correct height and length for the curved wall.

Gently bend and roll it in your hands to start forming the curve. Although you won’t get it to stay exactly in shape, you’ll impart enough memory to get it close. Next, liberally apply MEK adhesive to the lip of one of the formers and bend the wall to its shape. Here’s where the third hand would be nice. Hold the assembly shape in one hand (maintaining everything in shape and tightly fitting) and then apply a few drops of thin CA at the connection point. Then immediately pop the joint with CA Instaset. Repeat with the second curved former.

As a final note you’ll notice a door on the left. I cut that in wall section before starting the bending process.

Ops: 3 plus 4 = 60

An impromptu session on the layout consisting of three car movements, and only using four turnouts, took about sixty minutes. 3 + 4 + 60.

Gaining an understanding of how much model railroad we need in order to be “entertained” is one of the fundamental pillars of a”successful” design. Easier said than done if you’re just starting out.

A major challenge of being new to the hobby is that the modeler doesn’t have the experience to know how much layout is required to spin off the degree of play value they require to feel satisfied. They (including me at that stage) don’t know what they don’t know. In order to compensate, and build in a margin of error, they overload their “wish list” of desired features. It may only take “X” amount of layout to keep them entertained but they don’t know that yet. So, in an effort to avoid putting heart and soul into an effort that falls short in the fun department, they set a scope of “6X”.

Typically it’s not “just a bit” of overcompensation, it’s taken to an extreme. The end result is a myriad of design problems, chief among them being 6X won’t fit in their space. A close second being they have yet to gain the construction fundamentals to build 6X. What often happens is the layout never gets off the ground.

Everybody is different, each of us requiring different levels of element density to be satisfied. It may be a bitter pill to swallow but you can’t gain that self-awareness by surfing the net or conducting endless hypothetical thought experiments on your computer. Spending two years sketching and hand wringing will tell you absolutely squat. Investing three months building a small test layout will tell you tons. You’ll gain the self-awareness and the intuition needed to understand how long construction tasks take and how much operational fun you get from different arrangements.

I encourage people to think in terms of how many minutes of op. session enjoyment a plan will spin out. Keep in mind that you’ll usually be running by yourself and most people have “had enough” after an hour or so of running and playing around.

As a point of reference, let’s look at today’s blog title: 3 plus 4 equals 60. That’s three car movements, utilizing four turnouts, spins out a leisurely 60 minute session. Yesterday I put a cup of coffee on, and ran a session consisting of picking up one empty and dropping two loads at the end of the line. I didn’t use car cards. I wasn’t running with wrinkled brow or any degree of seriousness. I took frequent pauses to represent the conductor walking back and forth. I set the fusee’s for the road crossings. I ran at a slowish pace but it certainly wasn’t a 1 mph crawl either. I was surprised when I looked at the clock to see that an hour had passed. In other words it didn’t take that much to keep me entertained.

If you’re new to the hobby, and interested in branch or industrial switching operations, a good starting point is a plan with four to six turnouts. Get off the computer, slap a shelf on the wall and start experimenting.

As a sidebar, here are two examples that might prove helpful in establishing the pace of operations.

Example of plain vanilla prototype car pick up HERE.

Examples of good model railroad switching pace can always be found on Rick’s SoCal Models YouTube page. This is about the speed I run at.