A good layout starts with a good plan. A good plan starts with a good concept. A good concept starts with a good subject. A good subject starts with a good idea. A good idea starts God knows where!
This series of entries talks through all of the elements that went into the plan for the Overland Terminal Railway layout. My layout plan grew from a governing concept, which I call prototype-grounded freelance. Prototype-grounded freelance starts with a prototype that interests the modeler, is developed through an insatiable desire to learn everything possible about how and why that prototype existed and functioned as it did, and is interpreted in a convincing model freely adapted to the constraints of the space and resources available. In many ways a great layout is a novel in a different medium - it brings together people, places and events to tell story that is convincing to the reader because it is grounded in the reader's reality. Here is my approach:
Although I admire layouts that strive to be faithful reproductions of a specific prototype, I do not have the desire or patience for building exact replicas; rather, I get more satisfaction out of the creative process of interpreting a prototype to take it in an original but believable direction. For this reason I seek to incorporate as many elements of my prototype into the model - especially in station and mainline operations. Ogden's terminal has all of the elements I want to incorporate into my layout. The station is well-preserved, maintains a good historical archive and is well documented in a number of books, the most comprehensive I have seen are Ogden Rails: A History of Railroading at the Crossroads of the West, Don Strack (Cheyenne: Union Pacific Historical Society, 2005), and Southern Pacific's Salt Lake Division, John R. Signor (Wilton, CA: Signature Press, 2007). As a trained historian, I carefully consult these and other historical publications when making decisions about the layout design and its details.
Memories play a role: My prototype railroads are Union Pacific and Southern Pacific. Like so many model railroaders, my attraction to these railroads goes back to my childhood. Growing up in North Orange County, California, both of these roads operated local branches around my neighborhood. The Union Pacific local ran on Saturdays, and I can remember the distinctive horn calling from the GP30 typically assigned to the branch. My brother and I would run out to watch the train from up the street - usually 5-15 cars with a CA Caboose.
My junior high school was sandwiched between the Santa Fe mainline and a busy Southern Pacific branch, and I sat in the back of the classroom so I wouldn't get caught watching trains go by the school. Just a few months before Amtrak, I rode on the San Diegan from Fullerton to Los Angeles on a school field trip. A year later I rode the same train and route, by this time carrying bi-level coaches recently off the El Capitan. Despite those thrilling rides, Santa Fe never grabbed me for whatever reason, but UP and SP did. 16 years later I moved to Salt Lake City to attend graduate school at the University of Utah. Much to my gratification, UP was the predominant carrier here, with SP and Rio Grande in abundance. I even rode home for Christmas in 1987 on the Desert Wind.
Ah, nostalgia! But that's not really the point and doesn't answer the question of why UP or SP. The answer is, I love the colors - shallow, I know, but I'll own that.
I came into the hobby quite late, around the beginning of 2003 when I stumbled into a hobby shop while out running errands. The shop was Milepost 38 Model Trains, then on Orangethorpe right off Imperial Hwy in Anaheim Hills. The shop got its name from the milepost marker on the Santa Fe line across the street. Seeing how much the hobby had changed, how much detail had come into everything, got me hooked. My attention to fine detail satisfied, I plunged back into it.
I bought trains, more trains, structures, details - all knowing that someday this collection would come together on a layout. More importantly, I started buying books - every book on UP and SP I could get my hands on - and started reading them, learning every aspect of motive power, rolling stock, operations, track, trackside structures, signals, MOW. It was at that point that I wanted to understand everything I could about railroad history and operations and that they must be understood together to make an effective model railroad. Since I make my living learning technology markets, that same passion for building the right product for the right market opportunities developed into an interest - one could say obsession - for model railroading.
From this reading I immediately was drawn to UP power in transition (the 1950s). Mainline steam, first generation diesels and turbines - especially what operational challenges led to their use is a major interest. Because the railroad ran across vast open spaces (Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah), noise was not an issue but the cost of power was. Giving big mainline UP power the space it needs to look natural will be a real challenge in this layout - one that I solve by minimizing track and maximizing scenic space. I will return to this principle throughout this series.
Of course, passenger trains are my main interest. Passenger trains with their different types of cars, like with my earlier fascination with ocean liners and Zeppelins, are moving architecture. Having a lifelong obsession with buildings and architecture, the appeal was natural. All of these elements came together for me in Northern Utah from Echo Canyon to the east, Ogden as the hub, then west across the Overland Route to Oakland. Here are some pictures to explain why:
This picture: West Ogden off 12th Street on the old Southern Pacific mainline to California (now UP).
View from under the bridges, both shots from November 20, 2016.
I am most fortunate in that my career allows me to live wherever I want, so I picked up and relocated back to Utah to be close to my prototype.
Freelance: Like the novel in literature, freelance takes elements from a prototype and puts together its own story from them. Freelance is a pastiche - some layouts more than others, and some more successful than others.
George Sellios' Franklin and South Manchester is for me a really good example of how this approach can work. The layout was built to convey a very specific look and feel - a New England Depression Era railroad city. Looking at the layout, which I have studied with fascination for over 30 years in magazines and video, one gets the immediate impression of a prototypical New England city plagued with the Depression's deferred maintenance to all things. The city is fictional, but it is unmistakably a New England in decline because of how it is arranged and finished - meandering streets sprawling over densely-vegetated hills, old brick, stone and wood buildings with a general patina of wear and tear that the harsh seasons and just not keeping things up can bring about. The layout immediately says New England, and its success is the way the modeling carries it off. Trains are actors in this story, but they are in proportion to the rest of the story in the layout. A simple search on YouTube will bring up lots of video of the layout to illustrate this point. More about this later.
Since I trust my historical research skills far more than my imagination, my approach to freelance is grounded in the Ogden terminal operations of the 1950s, which is well-documented and easy to understand with careful attention to its details. Using this starting point, the layout takes necessary liberties to fit the space and operation. While some elements will be easily recognizable, others will be completely fictional, the whole amalgamation hopefully will be realistic in its execution. Though it will not be a copy of Ogden, success for my layout will be judged by it being a believable interpretation of it on the layout.
Ambience is so crucial to freelancing a layout, but it is rarely mentioned it. I heard George Sellios in an interview say that his model has a general dinginess to it (I'm paraphrasing), a dirty dullness of tone. This draws attention to color, but there are other elements as well. Architecture instantly identifies a place to me. The techniques used to construct buildings, the materials, siting, age, style - all can distinguish one place from another. Architecture will play a major role in my layout for that reason.
These two pictures from Morgan, Utah I took in April, 2015 illustrate the point, even if only generally. The mountain setting situates these buildings in the Wasatch Mountains. The station of stucco with tiled roof is similar to many stations from Ogden to Cheyenne and shows how a Spanish-inspired style was adapted in the 1920s and 30s to the mountain climate. The conifers, grass, budding trees and snowcapped peaks also help to place this scene. Because my friends and I know the area, we can recognize the scene as Morgan.
I took this picture in May, 2015 off West Temple near 1000 South in Salt Lake City. Clearly a spur track at one point served this warehouse districts, where doors are at car level, the alleyway is just wide enough to serve the box cars that were switched here, and the buildings curve in the distance to serve the track. The old brick patched with cement are common in the warehouses on the west side of Downtown Salt Lake City and in Ogden.
This concept draws from the prototypes that most interest me: Union Pacific and Southern Pacific mainline passenger, mail and express operations as they were in the 1950s.
As a freelance layout, the Overland Terminal Railway will be finished with careful attention to these details, colors, textures, and sky color - the general ambience, combined with marker details - to locate it in Northern Utah. That is a long-winded way of showing how prototype-grounded freelance can work - bring the most important elements of the prototype together into scene that makes the place recognizable without being a copy.
Scale matters: The final element of prototype-grounded freelance is scale. In modeling there are two kinds of scale: actual and visual or human scale. Actual scale is a ratio in units of measure (HO scale being 1'=87'). Visual scale, which is an architectural principle of relation between a space and its occupants. Ceiling heights, window and door placement and dimensions, massing are all examples of visual scale. This principle is most often called 'human scale.' Scale is the most important but least understood part of model-building. While actual scale is easy to measure on a scale ruler, visual scale takes a trained eye. Wheel flanges on HO rolling stock is an illustration. On higher-end cars the flanges 'look' correct even though they are not exactly to scale.
What does this have to do with getting freelance right? Everything! The density (one could say crowding) of scene and detail of the Franklin and South Manchester identifies as a New England city as much as the other elements I mentioned. Being in the wide open Intermountain West will create modeling challenges that constantly will force the question of scale. The lower, more spread out streetscapes, the mountains, the trains will look realistic or not based on their relation to each other on the layout. This is a key reason why my layout does not have a lot of track (in places no track at all for 10'), since opening up the space around the track to scenery produces a more convincing relationship between the railroad and the space it occupies in Northern Utah. Too much track takes over the scene, making the mountains and open spaces appear cheap and toylike. I will talk more about track in later entries.
Freelance gets me off the hook for the choices I make in modeling the Overland Terminal Railway while giving me the freedom to emphasize the elements of the prototype that are most important to illustrate. More than this, the use of details, ambiance, scale, color, architecture, the trains themselves and their operation serve to give the model its fidelity to the prototype. I make no apologies because it lays out a method for achieving realism in the Overland Terminal Railway as a model. In the following entries, I will show how the layout was designed, then move onto its construction.
This series of entries talks through all of the elements that went into the plan for the Overland Terminal Railway layout. My layout plan grew from a governing concept, which I call prototype-grounded freelance. Prototype-grounded freelance starts with a prototype that interests the modeler, is developed through an insatiable desire to learn everything possible about how and why that prototype existed and functioned as it did, and is interpreted in a convincing model freely adapted to the constraints of the space and resources available. In many ways a great layout is a novel in a different medium - it brings together people, places and events to tell story that is convincing to the reader because it is grounded in the reader's reality. Here is my approach:
PROTOTYPE GROUNDED
Although I admire layouts that strive to be faithful reproductions of a specific prototype, I do not have the desire or patience for building exact replicas; rather, I get more satisfaction out of the creative process of interpreting a prototype to take it in an original but believable direction. For this reason I seek to incorporate as many elements of my prototype into the model - especially in station and mainline operations. Ogden's terminal has all of the elements I want to incorporate into my layout. The station is well-preserved, maintains a good historical archive and is well documented in a number of books, the most comprehensive I have seen are Ogden Rails: A History of Railroading at the Crossroads of the West, Don Strack (Cheyenne: Union Pacific Historical Society, 2005), and Southern Pacific's Salt Lake Division, John R. Signor (Wilton, CA: Signature Press, 2007). As a trained historian, I carefully consult these and other historical publications when making decisions about the layout design and its details.
Memories play a role: My prototype railroads are Union Pacific and Southern Pacific. Like so many model railroaders, my attraction to these railroads goes back to my childhood. Growing up in North Orange County, California, both of these roads operated local branches around my neighborhood. The Union Pacific local ran on Saturdays, and I can remember the distinctive horn calling from the GP30 typically assigned to the branch. My brother and I would run out to watch the train from up the street - usually 5-15 cars with a CA Caboose.
My junior high school was sandwiched between the Santa Fe mainline and a busy Southern Pacific branch, and I sat in the back of the classroom so I wouldn't get caught watching trains go by the school. Just a few months before Amtrak, I rode on the San Diegan from Fullerton to Los Angeles on a school field trip. A year later I rode the same train and route, by this time carrying bi-level coaches recently off the El Capitan. Despite those thrilling rides, Santa Fe never grabbed me for whatever reason, but UP and SP did. 16 years later I moved to Salt Lake City to attend graduate school at the University of Utah. Much to my gratification, UP was the predominant carrier here, with SP and Rio Grande in abundance. I even rode home for Christmas in 1987 on the Desert Wind.
Ah, nostalgia! But that's not really the point and doesn't answer the question of why UP or SP. The answer is, I love the colors - shallow, I know, but I'll own that.
I came into the hobby quite late, around the beginning of 2003 when I stumbled into a hobby shop while out running errands. The shop was Milepost 38 Model Trains, then on Orangethorpe right off Imperial Hwy in Anaheim Hills. The shop got its name from the milepost marker on the Santa Fe line across the street. Seeing how much the hobby had changed, how much detail had come into everything, got me hooked. My attention to fine detail satisfied, I plunged back into it.
I bought trains, more trains, structures, details - all knowing that someday this collection would come together on a layout. More importantly, I started buying books - every book on UP and SP I could get my hands on - and started reading them, learning every aspect of motive power, rolling stock, operations, track, trackside structures, signals, MOW. It was at that point that I wanted to understand everything I could about railroad history and operations and that they must be understood together to make an effective model railroad. Since I make my living learning technology markets, that same passion for building the right product for the right market opportunities developed into an interest - one could say obsession - for model railroading.
From this reading I immediately was drawn to UP power in transition (the 1950s). Mainline steam, first generation diesels and turbines - especially what operational challenges led to their use is a major interest. Because the railroad ran across vast open spaces (Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah), noise was not an issue but the cost of power was. Giving big mainline UP power the space it needs to look natural will be a real challenge in this layout - one that I solve by minimizing track and maximizing scenic space. I will return to this principle throughout this series.
Of course, passenger trains are my main interest. Passenger trains with their different types of cars, like with my earlier fascination with ocean liners and Zeppelins, are moving architecture. Having a lifelong obsession with buildings and architecture, the appeal was natural. All of these elements came together for me in Northern Utah from Echo Canyon to the east, Ogden as the hub, then west across the Overland Route to Oakland. Here are some pictures to explain why:
I am most fortunate in that my career allows me to live wherever I want, so I picked up and relocated back to Utah to be close to my prototype.
Freelance: Like the novel in literature, freelance takes elements from a prototype and puts together its own story from them. Freelance is a pastiche - some layouts more than others, and some more successful than others.
George Sellios' Franklin and South Manchester is for me a really good example of how this approach can work. The layout was built to convey a very specific look and feel - a New England Depression Era railroad city. Looking at the layout, which I have studied with fascination for over 30 years in magazines and video, one gets the immediate impression of a prototypical New England city plagued with the Depression's deferred maintenance to all things. The city is fictional, but it is unmistakably a New England in decline because of how it is arranged and finished - meandering streets sprawling over densely-vegetated hills, old brick, stone and wood buildings with a general patina of wear and tear that the harsh seasons and just not keeping things up can bring about. The layout immediately says New England, and its success is the way the modeling carries it off. Trains are actors in this story, but they are in proportion to the rest of the story in the layout. A simple search on YouTube will bring up lots of video of the layout to illustrate this point. More about this later.
Since I trust my historical research skills far more than my imagination, my approach to freelance is grounded in the Ogden terminal operations of the 1950s, which is well-documented and easy to understand with careful attention to its details. Using this starting point, the layout takes necessary liberties to fit the space and operation. While some elements will be easily recognizable, others will be completely fictional, the whole amalgamation hopefully will be realistic in its execution. Though it will not be a copy of Ogden, success for my layout will be judged by it being a believable interpretation of it on the layout.
Ambience is so crucial to freelancing a layout, but it is rarely mentioned it. I heard George Sellios in an interview say that his model has a general dinginess to it (I'm paraphrasing), a dirty dullness of tone. This draws attention to color, but there are other elements as well. Architecture instantly identifies a place to me. The techniques used to construct buildings, the materials, siting, age, style - all can distinguish one place from another. Architecture will play a major role in my layout for that reason.
This shot in Echo Canyon near Castle Rock (taken July, 2015) is distinctive for its rock colors, terrain, ground cover. It is attention to the detail and overall effect that make a model convincing even though it is not a replica. The best layouts I have seen incorporate markers or anchor details - location-specific details - to 'place' the layout. Here the sky is important too - clear, high elevation summer afternoon sky always feels like Utah to me.
I took this picture in May, 2015 off West Temple near 1000 South in Salt Lake City. Clearly a spur track at one point served this warehouse districts, where doors are at car level, the alleyway is just wide enough to serve the box cars that were switched here, and the buildings curve in the distance to serve the track. The old brick patched with cement are common in the warehouses on the west side of Downtown Salt Lake City and in Ogden.
I took these pictures of the UP mainline in April, 2015 near Taggart, east of Devil's Slide. Having seen these bridges and the ridges tilted up from the ancient plains, are recognizable from official photography and films. The terrain and the bridges - various truss types built at different times but all with a consistent solid plate on the ends found throughout Weber Canyon. The heavy plate on the ends identifies the bridges as from the same builder and location - an architectural detail that 'tells on' the prototype. I look for these details to locate the layout's place and time.
Another example from a few miles to the east at Croydon (below) shows the same plate ends. Notice that the plates are slightly different on these bridges when seen side by side, as is also the case at Taggart. above. There is a simple, though not obvious explanation for these variations. The bridges were built many years apart. Originally narrowing to a single track to cross the Weber River, UP later added the second bridges to improve double-track operation through the Canyon. I look at these 'plates' as a distinctive architectural feature to anchor the scene.
This concept draws from the prototypes that most interest me: Union Pacific and Southern Pacific mainline passenger, mail and express operations as they were in the 1950s.
FREELANCE
As a freelance layout, the Overland Terminal Railway will be finished with careful attention to these details, colors, textures, and sky color - the general ambience, combined with marker details - to locate it in Northern Utah. That is a long-winded way of showing how prototype-grounded freelance can work - bring the most important elements of the prototype together into scene that makes the place recognizable without being a copy.
Scale matters: The final element of prototype-grounded freelance is scale. In modeling there are two kinds of scale: actual and visual or human scale. Actual scale is a ratio in units of measure (HO scale being 1'=87'). Visual scale, which is an architectural principle of relation between a space and its occupants. Ceiling heights, window and door placement and dimensions, massing are all examples of visual scale. This principle is most often called 'human scale.' Scale is the most important but least understood part of model-building. While actual scale is easy to measure on a scale ruler, visual scale takes a trained eye. Wheel flanges on HO rolling stock is an illustration. On higher-end cars the flanges 'look' correct even though they are not exactly to scale.
What does this have to do with getting freelance right? Everything! The density (one could say crowding) of scene and detail of the Franklin and South Manchester identifies as a New England city as much as the other elements I mentioned. Being in the wide open Intermountain West will create modeling challenges that constantly will force the question of scale. The lower, more spread out streetscapes, the mountains, the trains will look realistic or not based on their relation to each other on the layout. This is a key reason why my layout does not have a lot of track (in places no track at all for 10'), since opening up the space around the track to scenery produces a more convincing relationship between the railroad and the space it occupies in Northern Utah. Too much track takes over the scene, making the mountains and open spaces appear cheap and toylike. I will talk more about track in later entries.
Freelance gets me off the hook for the choices I make in modeling the Overland Terminal Railway while giving me the freedom to emphasize the elements of the prototype that are most important to illustrate. More than this, the use of details, ambiance, scale, color, architecture, the trains themselves and their operation serve to give the model its fidelity to the prototype. I make no apologies because it lays out a method for achieving realism in the Overland Terminal Railway as a model. In the following entries, I will show how the layout was designed, then move onto its construction.
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