Model Railroad Blog

Choosing Your Industries

Ordinary

Realism is enhanced when we model industry types that are found with the most frequency. Clockwise from upper left: LPG, scrap metal, team, plastics or warehouse.

Over time, our brain subconsciously registers the most commonly found rail side features whether it be through photos or personal railfanning experience. It expects to see certain elements in certain frequencies. When we look at our layouts, if the eye doesn’t see what it expects to see, subconsciously something seems off and it can be difficult to pinpoint why. The “off” part is typically not picking representative industries, placing our structures too closely together, or not painting them the most commonly found colors.

There are exceptions to everything but there are specific industries that are almost always found in any rail served environment. Particularly if you are freelancing or proto-freelancing the more we can stick to the norm in our industry selection the better the layout will look. To an extent, this is era specific. If you model the steam to diesel transition era, Sanborn maps will show that almost every town had: a timber unloading ramp serving as a team track, a lumber dealer, and a fuel (coal or heating oil) dealer. In the modern era, you certainly have the leviathan industries such as coal, chemicals, auto rack unloading, grain elevators, and ports but these can be hard to model given our space limitations. As you move into the urban areas though, modern era industries include a heavy dose of: LPG facilities, scrap metal, warehouses or plastics facilities, and the timeless team track.

When designing your layout, the vast majority of your industries should be those that are most commonly found in the real world.

Finally, a note on color. As you look at the photos note the preponderance of white and grays. More than half of your structures should be colored accordingly. Note the amount of dead vegetation. A heavy dose of your rail side vegetation should be beige, not green.

Model the ordinary, not the extraordinary, that’s the key to realism.

Nothing Is Black or White

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The subjects we model are out in the elements.  They are ravaged by the weather which takes it’s toll and does so quickly.  The end result is a color spectrum that will always drift towards center. Darks fade and light colors shift to gray.   Although, at first glance, subjects may appear to be pure black or pure white, they very rarely are.  They’re charcoal and light gray.

Shades

Photo editing software has a tool called an eyedropper which, when you use it to click on an area, will show you exactly what color it is.  I’ve illustrated this in the shot above where you can see the true colors of the crossbucks and signal face.

Black

Instead of pure black, use Rustoleum Dark Gray primer.  If you want to step to an even lighter gray, try Rustoleum Painters Touch 2x Ultra Cover Flat Gray Primer #249088.

White

Instead of pure white, try Model Master “Light Gray” #4765.  If you’re using rattle cans, lay down an initial layer of Rustoleum Light Gray Primer and then lightly fog on a layer of Flat White.  The underlying gray will show through and tone down the brilliance of the white.

Gloss Doesn’t Scale Down

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We can’t solve a problem if we aren’t aware of its existence. One appealing aspect of railroading is the sheer, awesome, mass of our subject matter.   Prototype rolling stock is huge and the challenge as a modeler is finding a way to capture that in miniature.   A very, very subtle modeling problem that we face is that glossy surfaces don’t scale down.  A glossy prototype locomotive or freight car looks real in a photo because…well…because it is real.  What if we want to model a subject that has such a glossy surface?  We have a problem.  As we move from prototype to model, our challenge becomes apparent.    A level of sheen that looks fine on the real thing looks like a toy when applied to a model.  We lose the sense of mass.  As modelers, we need to develop an awareness of this inconvenient reality.  Each person needs to decide how they want to handle modeling newer or generally cleaner looking subjects. Personally,  I think I’d take the route of applying a dulling agent and just forgo additional weathering.