Happy 2018! In this new year for the blog (yes, it is already a year old!), it is time to reflect on the guiding principles of my layout and this blog as a way of understanding them.
In the fifteen years since I have started collecting trains in earnest, I am reminded of what has kept me away from this hobby for as long as I did - namely, that trains can be an obsession, as noted in earlier posts. With any obsession, I could buy, buy, buy more and more trains, with each purchase having its own intentions - intentions almost always dissociated from the realities of building and operating a layout.
My hobbies have always been about making models: planes, trains and automobiles starting as a pre-teen, which graduated to ships. Always my fascination is with buildings and spaces - one that I have pursued my entire life through an education in architecture and history. Building models is a central feature of these intellectual passions. The very first layout I conceived 40 years ago this week was a city with traction, and all other concepts I have had are about cities.
Please bear with me here because understanding what great model railroads give to us is in their ability to stand apart from the insanity that is pervasive in the hobby of model trains.
Or so I thought. The reality is that gaining deep knowledge of the prototype is the double-edged sword of the model: while it helped me learn about railroading, it also tended to subordinate the creative process to the endless scope creep of possibilities that each new equipment purchase - particularly each new locomotive - brings with it. It is so easy to over-buy when the layout doesn't yet exist because one is living in the possibilities and not the reality of the model. In buying all those new engines and cars it was easy to lose sight of what I set out to do in the first place: build a model of urban railroading.
This is the biggest dilemma that shakes my model railroading reality. My goal always has been to build the model that goes way beyond the typical layout with its focus on running trains to create a believable scene in railroading history. In this quest to learn more about the prototypes that interest me, I inevitably fell into the trap of wanting to reproduce a prototype. Locomotives are the worst offenders in this problem because each road and type of power has a specific place in time. Following a prototype means that each locomotive dictates the type of place I have to build. Whenever I buy a new locomotive or consist, I start buying more trains to suit the prototype du jour and lose sight on the model I want to build. Insanity in model railroading, I learned, is the possibilities each new purchase arouses becoming a distraction from the purpose of the model itself as a place in time.
In my experience the biggest problem with loving trains is that I cannot stop buying them - more variety, more of the latest thing, and just more for the sake of having more. Thinking that getting deep knowledge of a specific prototype, far from being a cure, turned out to be part of the disease. Each prototype can have infinite possibilities. When buying trains, each purchase becomes its own, self-justifying reason for the purchase. In the end, one is left with so many more trains than could ever possibly be used in the pursuit of any good model.
How does this happen? This is precisely the pathology of consumerism. Each purchase can have its own reason and infinite possibility, but we seldom put that reason into a larger context of what we really want. Left unchecked, that purchasing runs amok, and I have over 170 locomotives, 400 passenger cars, 1400 freight cars to show for it. This is how consumerism trains us to buy things. The satisfaction is about the buying and spending and not in doing. At its root, consumerism endlessly delays satisfaction for the promise in what buying the next great thing can do for us. In the end, one has accumulated a lot of stuff but is still nowhere near being content.
Hmmmm . . .
Far from bragging about what I have, this is evidence of the problem that so many model railroaders have: Getting a little of everything yields a lot of nothing. That feeling of disappointment then turns into buying more and more, still thinking that spending more and buying more somehow will eventually fill the emptiness that buying all that other stuff created in the first place. Here are a few sobering lessons that brought me back into the real world of modeling.
In no way is this a criticism of prototype modeling; rather, the point is that purpose makes models great. Prototype modelers fastidiously study and reproduce every detail of the prototype in their models. Most of the prototype modelers I know model specific trains and create convincing models. Whether modeling specific trains with careful attention to their historical detail or creating a freelance model of a place, the guiding principle is the same one of creating a story-based reality that is convincing to the eye. There are fine examples of prototype modeling, and one of the finest I have seen is the La Mesa Club in Balboa Park, San Diego:
This model is impressive in both size and quality. Its builders, working meticulously from archival research, photographs, maps, specifications, and other resources, built a layout with a specific story. Whatever did not fit the story did not make it into the layout. This layout's size is deceptive: its fidelity to the prototype and its structuring story is saying NO on a grand scale. All the space with which they have to work could easily develop into scope creep, but it did not. The sheer vastness of the space and what it takes to conquer it is the point of this model:
My personal struggle with pure prototype modeling is that it is too difficult for me to carry it off in the space and design constraints it forces on the model. I have neither the space nor other resources to build a good prototype model like the La Mesa Club. So why even try? Instead, by taking an architectural approach, my model lets the space and its constraints tell me what is best to build. A freelance model creates the reality most suited to its space.
My layout is more a diorama than a layout for that reason. That's what this model is all about: creating a museum-quality diorama of a 1950s railroad town with all of its beauty and all of its problems: the white flight of automobile-enabled suburbs, old neighborhoods in decline with their problems of poverty, drug use and prostitution, and the transition of railroading that marked the urban landscape. In such a model, every scene is saturated with detail that tells a story about what is happening there. Trains, like the structures, the people, the automobiles, the signs and other details have a story to tell. In this model it is the story that matters most and everything in it has to contribute to its telling. If it does not contribute to the story, it does not belong on the layout. That goes for the trains as much as ANYTHING on the layout.
Finally, freelance is my art of saying NO in a model as the way to creating a work of art. Art is perspective, and it says at least as much in what it doesn't do as it does in what it is.
With all of the things going on in George Sellios' Franklin and South Manchester, John Allen's Gorre and Daphetid, Harry Brunk's Union Central and Northern and any of the fine model railroads I have seen, they all have a clear focus and achieve the best results by saying no to all of the distractions the hobby can create. My layout has a guiding story of urban railroading in the transition era of the 1950s. Because even that story can morph and grow, I have to keep bringing it back into clear perspective and purpose. Asking the questions posed in this essay's title are ways to stay focused on the ultimate aim of creating a believable world in miniature.
In the fifteen years since I have started collecting trains in earnest, I am reminded of what has kept me away from this hobby for as long as I did - namely, that trains can be an obsession, as noted in earlier posts. With any obsession, I could buy, buy, buy more and more trains, with each purchase having its own intentions - intentions almost always dissociated from the realities of building and operating a layout.
My hobbies have always been about making models: planes, trains and automobiles starting as a pre-teen, which graduated to ships. Always my fascination is with buildings and spaces - one that I have pursued my entire life through an education in architecture and history. Building models is a central feature of these intellectual passions. The very first layout I conceived 40 years ago this week was a city with traction, and all other concepts I have had are about cities.
Please bear with me here because understanding what great model railroads give to us is in their ability to stand apart from the insanity that is pervasive in the hobby of model trains.
And Then Insanity Crept In
Over the past 15 years I have studied railroads - their history, how they work, what types of equipment they have and why they have it, in the process building an impressive reference library around my favorite Western railroads: Union Pacific, Southern Pacific with some Western Pacific. My pursuit of becoming an expert on trains, though noble, ultimately proved to be a distraction. My purpose in building this library is clear: deeper knowledge of railroading builds a better model.Or so I thought. The reality is that gaining deep knowledge of the prototype is the double-edged sword of the model: while it helped me learn about railroading, it also tended to subordinate the creative process to the endless scope creep of possibilities that each new equipment purchase - particularly each new locomotive - brings with it. It is so easy to over-buy when the layout doesn't yet exist because one is living in the possibilities and not the reality of the model. In buying all those new engines and cars it was easy to lose sight of what I set out to do in the first place: build a model of urban railroading.
This is the biggest dilemma that shakes my model railroading reality. My goal always has been to build the model that goes way beyond the typical layout with its focus on running trains to create a believable scene in railroading history. In this quest to learn more about the prototypes that interest me, I inevitably fell into the trap of wanting to reproduce a prototype. Locomotives are the worst offenders in this problem because each road and type of power has a specific place in time. Following a prototype means that each locomotive dictates the type of place I have to build. Whenever I buy a new locomotive or consist, I start buying more trains to suit the prototype du jour and lose sight on the model I want to build. Insanity in model railroading, I learned, is the possibilities each new purchase arouses becoming a distraction from the purpose of the model itself as a place in time.
In my experience the biggest problem with loving trains is that I cannot stop buying them - more variety, more of the latest thing, and just more for the sake of having more. Thinking that getting deep knowledge of a specific prototype, far from being a cure, turned out to be part of the disease. Each prototype can have infinite possibilities. When buying trains, each purchase becomes its own, self-justifying reason for the purchase. In the end, one is left with so many more trains than could ever possibly be used in the pursuit of any good model.
How does this happen? This is precisely the pathology of consumerism. Each purchase can have its own reason and infinite possibility, but we seldom put that reason into a larger context of what we really want. Left unchecked, that purchasing runs amok, and I have over 170 locomotives, 400 passenger cars, 1400 freight cars to show for it. This is how consumerism trains us to buy things. The satisfaction is about the buying and spending and not in doing. At its root, consumerism endlessly delays satisfaction for the promise in what buying the next great thing can do for us. In the end, one has accumulated a lot of stuff but is still nowhere near being content.
Hmmmm . . .
Far from bragging about what I have, this is evidence of the problem that so many model railroaders have: Getting a little of everything yields a lot of nothing. That feeling of disappointment then turns into buying more and more, still thinking that spending more and buying more somehow will eventually fill the emptiness that buying all that other stuff created in the first place. Here are a few sobering lessons that brought me back into the real world of modeling.
Focus is the Key to Successful Modeling
Good model railroading, I have learned the hard way, is the art of saying NO. It is saying no to most everything one sees in order to focus on what one really wants to achieve in the model:Create a story and stick to it:
Before spending a nickel building a layout and buying things for it, write out a clear story for it and what you want to get out of doing it: when, where, why and how the model takes place. The more specific the story is, the more discipline it imposes on what to buy and what to build for the layout. This focus alone can save a lot of time and money that can be invested into building a good layout. It is so easy to get tempted by all of the things available, but without a governing purpose to what gets bought and why, one can easily turn the hobby into a shopping spree without end. Good modelers, I have observed, are great story tellers who use the modeling as the medium. Lesson for me: let the story drive my buying and building - not the other way around!
Learn the art of NO:
Given all of the quality models available coming out every day, it is so easy, as I have experienced, to get pulled into the temptation to buy the latest things. In doing so, I end up with a lot of things and few results. Good modelers only buy what they need to build their model. They have a kind of frugality - one could say stinginess - about what they buy and do. I have often ridiculed this approach, but I now see its merits. Good models are built on the art of saying NO to possibilities in order to focus on what realistically can be achieved with the resources - time, space, money - the modeler has to spend. All resources are finite, and success is the art of maximizing these constraints, rather than trying to cheat them.
Stay stingy with the story
As hard as it is for any model railroader to do or even consider, imagine keeping the trains in the role of characters on the stage. When buying a locomotive or a car, it is so easy to create a story around the individual item that justifies spending the money on that one thing. But a layout can only do so much, and buying lots of trains for their own sake is modeling schizophrenia. When the layout has a specific story and purpose that governs purchases, it is easier to see why the latest thing is not needed because it is cool or nice. If it does not fit the concept, don't buy it! If anything, a story and purpose for a layout makes it easier to say NO in order to achieve the YES (clear focus and purpose) that leads to a successful model. Freedom is in the 'no.'
Once I ran the first train around my layout I felt a profound disappointment, and it took me a while to understand why. Once I could run trains I learned all over again that running trains is not THE purpose of the layout - creating a model is the purpose. Being able to run trains, I realized, was only the beginning of the model and not the goal. Now that I can run trains on it, I can begin to build my layout. Once I could run anything I wanted, I suddenly realized that I didn't want most of what I bought over the years. What I wanted to run were switchers and first-generation diesels with specific types of freight and passenger trains - namely, a busy West Coast city with a passenger terminal and a number of local industries moving freight. 95% of what I bought over the years was not relevant to what I actually want to model.
With that experience-borne knowledge I turn to the larger point of this essay: how great model railroads happen. The answer to that question for me is in the work of the model railroads I most admire. In my mind there are modelers who have achieved this effect: John Allen, George Sellios, Harry Brunk are the most important. In their models, the trains fit the scene and give life to it, rather than complete for attention. And their models demonstrate great skill and the continual process of learning how to improve on what they have. This is the standard for which I strive to meet.
What George Sellios and John Allen Did
George Sellios' Franklin and South Manchester is a masterpiece of model railroading. Set in a New England coastal city in 1935, it has a general look of decay and deferred maintenance that clearly shows life and railroading in the Great Depression. His scenes use super-detailing and weathering to achieve its remarkable effects, and every space has a story to tell in its details. Paramount in Sellios' masterpiece is its simple guiding principle of telling a story. Here is a glimpse of what George Sellios has built:
Founder of the gold standard of craftsman model railroad kits, Fine Scale Miniatures, George Sellios built the Franklin and South Manchester in part because he always wanted to build a layout and more importantly to show the kind of settings in which he imagined his kits belong. This type of imagination, and the discipline acquired to turn it into a model are rare in the hobby, and the FSM is the wonderful result. In this layout it is the layout itself - the structures, the details, the scenes with their stories to tell - that are the star. Trains are cast members, just as the figures are, on a spectacular stage.
When asked about what he has achieved in the FSM, George Sellios will answer in his shy and modest way that it is following the lead set by the true master of model railroading: John Allen. Allen, starting in the 1940s, built the layout that really started model railroading as a distinct discipline from model trains. Though lost in a fire shortly after his death in 1973, John Allen's Gorre and Dephetid opened my eyes, and certainly George Sellios', to what model railroading could be.
Allen Keller's series on George Sellios for the Model Railroad Academy is comprehensive and an excellent record of how a model goes beyond the railroad to create a spectacular show:
Model Railroad Academy on George Sellios
Model Railroad Academy on George Sellios
Throughout this series, George Sellios shows his indebtedness to the Master of Model Railroading, John Allen. He credits Allen both with getting him hooked on model railroading and teaching him how to model. The difference is this: Anyone can copy a prototype and build a layout around it, but it takes a completely different point of view - an eye, a passion for learning, a vision - to create a model. Rather than try to recapture something in a prototype, a model tells its own story, creates its own reality. It is in modeling where the craftsmanship of model railroading is materialized.
John Allen, in Sellios' view, is the Master of Model Railroading, but I would argue that Sellios is the living Master. He perfected Allen's ideas and techniques to create a true masterpiece. The analogy to art is apt here: in art the masterpiece is the work to show the master that the artist-student can legitimately claim to be a peer of the master. Some documentation of Allen's Gorre and Dephetid still survives, and here are a few glimpses into what he accomplished more than 50 years ago:
John Allen is the inventor of modern model railroading and has taken the hobby from toy trains to modeling. Pioneering many techniques that are now standard, John Allen transformed basic materials into fine art - in fact, invented the art of model railroading. Allen and Sellios set the standard that I follow because they approach model railroading as an art form and not just a place to run trains. Others have created beautiful model railroads by adopting a similar point of view. Among them, in my view, is Harry Brunk. His Union Central and Northern Layout is a work of art, and I have had the great pleasure of having seen it up close in its permanent home at the Cheyenne Depot Museum in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
These men are modelers and show in their work the differences between the art of modeling versus building layouts to run trains. Isn't the purpose of a passion to create something original, unique and capable of surviving us? In my view, creating a legacy is the point of fine modeling; running trains is just spending time. These modelers have achieved that transcendence, and I see them as my teachers.
How I Approach the Overland Terminal Railway
The Overland Terminal Railway is a fiction, the storyboard that I use to build a model of a city. Although my model seeks to provide a prototypically correct railroad operation, on which I continue to conduct extensive research, its overarching purpose is to create a space that pulls its visitors into another world so real they can feel it but so original they are not tempted to compare it to their views of a prototype. As a trained architect and historian, I draw on this education to shape my perspective on, and approach to this model. Unlike most layouts I have seen, the trains are not the star; rather, they are actors on a spectacular stage of life in a moment in a place.
Guiding my model is 'what would Sellios do.' Admitting its similarity to the religious cliches, there is an intention here worth noting. Every layout has guiding questions, and mine is how a modeler create the space and its desired effect of a particular realism and its reality. Like me, George Sellios loves structures. Trains are architecture to me, as are structures. If the trains fit into the setting, rather than stand out from it, my goals for the Overland Terminal Railway will have been achieved.
Here is an example to illustrate my point:
When I first saw Harry Brunk's Union Central and Northern in the May 1989 issue of Model Railroader I saw what model railroading means to me. Like the Franklin and South Manchester, this model had such an attention to detail, scale (both dimensional and eye scale), and composition of scene to create a sense that one actually can be drawn into it. Here the trains are part of the landscape, and everything in this scratch-built model has the same attention to detail. That is modeling. Modeling creates a space that looks and feels natural and real and in many ways resists the temptation to compare it to a prototype.
Here is a very important distinction between modeling and building layouts. A model creates its own reality, while a layout typically attempts to copy one. Generally, model railroaders are not architects or artists; rather, they are train enthusiasts who see their layout as secondary to running trains. They like trains and treat the layout as the backdrop to make their train operations more believable. And this is the problem. Ever catch yourself going into criticism mode whenever you see a layout? This impulse comes directly from perceiving the infidelity between the model and its prototype. Whenever I get this feeling, the layout is a failure. By inserting visual cues from the prototype, the builder immediately sets an expectation of realism. The criticism arises precisely out of the layout's failure to meet the expectations it sets. I know I could never make a successful copy of a prototype, so why try?
There is a difference between seeking to reproduce a prototype and interpreting a prototype to create a model. It is the interpretation of reality where modeling occurs. My model works from a different set of expectations, which are the standard set for me by John Allen, George Sellios and Harry Brunk. That standard is to create a reality, not to copy one. Hence, my guiding questions are:
- What is the purpose of this place as a scene?
- What scale determines the most convincing relationships among elements in this scene?
- What building practices determine the structure's purpose and construction?
- What is the right texture and color of the elements that gives them realism?
- What details are needed to make the scene real?
In my view, the trains are elements on equal footing with the other elements that define the scene. Trains are not the star and everything else just background. In the pictures of Harry Brunk's masterpiece, as with Sellios' Franklin and South Manchester, one is first pulled into the scene and then into the trains. The trains are part of the landscape, not above it. My modeling creates the scene and seeks to convince the viewer that it is real.
 |
| This scene from the La Mesa Club layout shows a excellence in prototype modeling. Faithfully reproducing the Tehachapi Loop in the 1950s, everything in this scene is perfectly in scale and belongs in it. The scene is not cluttered with track or trains but draws you into its sublime space. The Santa Fe mail train is the only railroading in the scene and an excellent example of the prototype modeling of real historical trains meticulously researched, assembled, detailed and weathered by Victor Yoder. The La Mesa Club layout is a standout example of excellent prototype modeling in part because of the efforts of its club members as meticulous modelers and in part to having ample space to do justice to the place it is modeling. |
My personal struggle with pure prototype modeling is that it is too difficult for me to carry it off in the space and design constraints it forces on the model. I have neither the space nor other resources to build a good prototype model like the La Mesa Club. So why even try? Instead, by taking an architectural approach, my model lets the space and its constraints tell me what is best to build. A freelance model creates the reality most suited to its space.
My layout is more a diorama than a layout for that reason. That's what this model is all about: creating a museum-quality diorama of a 1950s railroad town with all of its beauty and all of its problems: the white flight of automobile-enabled suburbs, old neighborhoods in decline with their problems of poverty, drug use and prostitution, and the transition of railroading that marked the urban landscape. In such a model, every scene is saturated with detail that tells a story about what is happening there. Trains, like the structures, the people, the automobiles, the signs and other details have a story to tell. In this model it is the story that matters most and everything in it has to contribute to its telling. If it does not contribute to the story, it does not belong on the layout. That goes for the trains as much as ANYTHING on the layout.
Finally, freelance is my art of saying NO in a model as the way to creating a work of art. Art is perspective, and it says at least as much in what it doesn't do as it does in what it is.
With all of the things going on in George Sellios' Franklin and South Manchester, John Allen's Gorre and Daphetid, Harry Brunk's Union Central and Northern and any of the fine model railroads I have seen, they all have a clear focus and achieve the best results by saying no to all of the distractions the hobby can create. My layout has a guiding story of urban railroading in the transition era of the 1950s. Because even that story can morph and grow, I have to keep bringing it back into clear perspective and purpose. Asking the questions posed in this essay's title are ways to stay focused on the ultimate aim of creating a believable world in miniature.
Comments
Post a Comment