Planning and Building Scenes

'When the honeymoon is over, the marriage begins.' - Edith Wharton

'Time is the fire in which we burn.' - Soran

In my earlier essay I expressed a profound disappointment in the moment that my mainline became operational.  The Confucian Tradition in Chinese Philosophy holds an understanding of crisis as a moment of opportunity.  Crisis is a time of instability and destabilization of things that are comforting and certain to us.  Victor Turner described the personal, intellectual and political space in which crisis occurs as 'liminal space.'  In that space is both fear and freedom.  It is on this point that the next phase of my model railroad begins.   

In my case the crisis was reaching the culmination of so much effort - planning, engineering, building, tuning - was not completing the mainline but beginning the model.  Completing the room, the benchwork, trackwork and installing the basic DCC infrastructure culminated in the platform for the modeling to begin.  The platform looks something like this:

View into the layout as one enters the room.  Straight ahead is the Terminal Zone.  At left on the bottom is Jallen Canyon  and Sellios Heights on the mail level.  To the right is the loop leaving Trojans Junction (lower level) and Downtown (upper).  

Foggy Hills Branch up close showing the railfans' perspective of traffic with its optimal vanishing point for viewing complete trains in action.  The inspiration for this spot is Sunny Hills (Fullerton, CA), where I grew up.  

These pictures show the current state of the layout with the mainline in place and packing paper used to mock up large visual elements.  In this bottom picture, for example, the paper is used to hide the staging yard from normal view.  In hiding this necessary evil (I HATE yards!), the view block draws attention to scenes I want to emphasize: Port on the lower level (ode to John Allen), the terminal on the right side and the Foggy Hills Branch on the left of the main level.  One idea I'm entertaining is painting a backdrop for Port on the drape to create one continuous scene.  

The original vision for the layout is an urban setting with a passenger terminal and city freight switching set in the West in the 1950s.  This concept originally involved a single platform as close to eye level as possible so that all activity is seen from the ground as humans in the scenes experience railroading, as opposed to the birds-eye level shown on virtually every layout photo in our trade publications.  A lower level was proposed later when I became convinced that the layout needed a staging yard for effective operation.  Several 'might-as-wells' later, the lower level was built into the benchwork, which had the effect of creating a whole new level for a mainline with some additional switching opportunities.  

As it happens whenever a layout materializes, the drunk monkey of modelers, called 'scope creep,' starts talking. "What if I did this,' 'wouldn't it be cool if . . . ' 'how about . . .' ad infinitum. The drunk monkey is always shoulding all over the layout.  In all of those possibilities I lost sight of the original concept.  Now that concept is coming back into focus, and the real challenges of building this layout are about to begin.  Like George Sellios, I love buildings most, and the layout was intended as a city to showcase the buildings.  

Here is one challenge:

What I originally thought would take 4-5 days during the holiday break has taken nearly a month just to get to this point.  My workbench now is home to a pair of truss bridges slowly - too slowly! - taking shape. It is not just that the bridges are taking longer than planned, which is the Murphy's Law of layout building, but that they are for the lower level scenery and not the main, original level.  In my frustration over these bridges emerged the question of why I am devoting so much energy to the lower level at this time.  This level is not the original concept and therefore extra territory for extra credit when I get around to it.  Whenever I do work to impress, it leads to distracting scope creep.  No more.  

So here is the main point of this essay - that time is the most precious commodity in modeling.  

Technology Changes Everything

George Sellios, to whom I look as a guiding influence in this model, commented in an interview that the quality of models coming out now is mind-blowing.  To his point, new technologies, such as CAD, injection-molding, laser-etching, 3D printing to name a few, have created models with a quality of detail that was not even conceivable 30 years ago when he began building the Franklin and South Manchester (FSM).  The quality of motive power and rolling stock out of the box today easily puts to shame the best modeling of 20, 30 or 40 years ago.

Yes, the higher quality that new manufacturing technology has given us has produced a perception of laziness among modelers.  Ready-to-roll, they decry, has ruined the modeling aspect of the hobby.  They argue further that the creativity is gone because the manufacturers have done all the work for the hobbyist.  Within all of these criticisms of current modeling technology is the familiar language of fear that as new technologies continue to raise the quality and detail of what comes out of the box they take away the modeling.

As someone who has spent his career in the thick of fomenting technological change, I have a different perspective.  The new quality of models coming out of the box have changed our perception of quality and significantly raise the table stakes for good modeling.  It is well-documented in the Humanities and Social Sciences that technological advances change perception.  Model railroading is a good example of this transformation in action.  Athearn 'blue box' models were mainstream quality in the 1970s and 80s but considered toy-like when compared to Athearn Genesis, ExactRail, Tangent, Walthers Proto, Atlas Master, Intermountain/Red Caboose currently available.  In this comparison, the mainstream model puts its predecessors to shame.

In computing this change in perception is described in Moore's Law, which states that computing capacity doubles every 8 months.  We take for granted that our smart phones now come standard with 100 GB of capacity, but we struggle to imagine that the amount of computing that a single app on our phones utilizes is larger than the power that landed the astronauts on the moon 50 years ago.  That technological advances change perception is well-understood.

In model railroading this phenomenon has several implications.  First, the bar for a good model is raised much higher than it was even a decade ago.  Modeling is the art of perfecting what one has to work with.  Because our starting point is higher, the final assessment of quality is at a level that simply was not conceivable 20 years ago.  Good modeling has more resources than it has ever had before, which creates new challenges for model railroads to achieve realism.  

Second, and perhaps more importantly, is time.  New modeling technologies and accompanying techniques, properly understood, can speed time to value in ways never imagined before.  As a modeler, this layout first popped into my head 40 years ago and, while the details have become more refined, the concept has not changed dramatically in that time.  But I am 40 years older now!  That forces the question of how much time I really have to bring this concept into reality.

Because time is the most precious commodity in a hobby and in life, I have to become stingy in how I use my time and on what I spend it.  To me the quality of models coming out of the box gives me something back as a hobbyist - the time to finesse and perfect the model in building out the scenes on the layout.  The ultimate value of these technological advances is in the time it gives me as a modeler to accomplish more.  It is a myth that great artists are pure in their genius; historically, great artists are masters of and in their medium.  Every medium - such as a model railroad - has constraints that change over time and technological advances.  

It's About Time

So why are these bridge kits getting on my nerves so?  It is precisely because time spent on these kits comes at the expense of modeling I want to do now.  When a friend came over and saw these bridges coming together at their snail's pace, he asked what I plan to do with the brass bridges I had collected from OMI and BLMA over the years.  Then he said, 'why don't you just use the brass bridges, which are already higher quality as the nearly-from-scratch models' I was struggling to build?  I did not have a good answer.  

Over the years I have collected a multitude of great starting points for models, but I still get pulled into the mindset that it has to be completely scratch-built to be of any value as a model or that I somehow have to demonstrate my scratch-building prowess on what others want me to build.  The British have a great word for that presumption: Bollocks!  These great models give me a head start, so the real challenge will be for my abilities as a modeler to take them to a new level of realism as models.  Although Mr. Sellios would never admit to it, John Allen likely would be blown away at the FSM if he were alive to see it.  Had John Allen lived longer, it stands to reason that the Gorre and Dephetid would have evolved way beyond what it was.

The point here is that modeling never occurs in a vacuum.  Technology inevitably changes the hobby, and that change starts at perception.  There will never be another Gorre and Dephetid or FSM, and that is a great thing for the hobby.  These are masterpieces.  New hobbyists will find ways to create newer masterpieces with all of the new resources available to them - and to us - in the hobby today that were not available to our predecessors.  Far from lamenting what we may have lost, I am excited to watch and participate in that future of model railroads unfolding.  

For now and the limited time I have to build such an ambitious railroad model, I need to get better at making choices about the models that make up the Overland Terminal Railway.  It's about 'making it count' (Jack Dawson), about making wise choices on the modeling elements that will have the highest impact for the time I have to invest in them.  My frustration on the bridges is in re-inventing what is already done for me elsewhere and not having the foresight to move on to the next level of the model with the time I have spent on them.  Soran was right.  Just as he used technology to alter the galaxy to cheat time, I draw on technology to speed up what I can do in my limited time. 

Taking time - the most precious commodity in this hobby - to build something from scratch that is already commercially available is the best definition of lunacy I can imagine.