Is there less interest in pure free lanced model railroads? By pure I mean fictional railroad companys running through fictional towns. I don’t see as many free lanced model railroads as I used to.
What do you think?
I see plenty of free lanced layouts on layout tours but not so many in the magazines, which might tell us more about magazine editors than about what modelers are really doing .
dave nelson
I have to agree with Dave on this one. Most layouts I’ve had occasion to visit have been free lance. MR did one of its rather unscientific polls regarding this question not too long ago and, as I recall, better than half of those responding said they were free-lancers.
CNJ831
Me too, the editors of the magazines have tried ramming prototype, research, operating sessions, and narrow gauge logging down the readers throat and then they ask why they have a declining readership. Tell a lie long enough and people start to believe it? The rivet counters have taken over the media. FRED
No - mine is the “Wisconsin & Iowa Railroad Co.” (WIAR) and the towns I’ve
modelled are:
Wolverine, Wis.
St. Catherine, Iowa
Pumpkin Patch, Minn.
New Moscow, ND
Wautoma, Iowa
None of those towns exist (or at least not that I know of) and personally I think it’d take
a lot of the creativity out of the hobby if you confined yourself to modelling only
specific towns/cities/lines, etc. You’d spend all your time slaving over details that will
wear-out even the most ardent enthusiast and lose the real fun in the hobby.
I would say not. It just depends what you are into. Some people like doing research, etc. And others just want to have fun with it. But, I believe that a layout should have a “back story” as to why and how it developed. If you are following a prototype closely, the story is already there. If free-lancing, you have to make up the story, like Gordon Odegard, Linn Wescott, Frank Ellison did. It was made up, but the lines had a purpose and reason. Just stringing track all around the basement without some sort of plan may not end up being fun to play with in the end.
Certainly not mine! I even invented a whole new country called Dalreada with it’s capital city called Marcstadt, a busy seaport called Melmatt with a major winter sports resort called Royston. I have even written a travel brochure for visiting Dalreada. The railroad serving all of Dalreada is called Dalreada National Railways No, free-lancing is far from dead, it is just not heard of enough. Have fun.
That’s what in talking about. A back story, reason, etc. Al Kalmbach used to make brochures for his Great Gulch, Yahoo Valley & Northern in his spare time.
From my experience I feel most modelers, including myself, create free lanced railroads because they have more freedom to create their “ideal” railroad. You have so much freedom to create your own world, your own scenery, your own paint schemes, operate in your favorite era, etc., etc. I and many modelers like to call ourselves “prototype free lancers” meaning that we take all our modeling cues from the prototype and simply tweake them a bit to fit our fictional railroad. An excellent example of such a railroad I think would be the Allen McClelland’s Virginian & Ohio. He operates a fictional railroad that operates and looks quite a bit like the old B&O or C&O Railroads.
My Eastern Gully & Gorge RR is “pure” free lanced. I copy areas that I like and model equipment of several periods. In HO from the late 40’s when I started to some things of 2000. My layout is half done and will take several years to finnish. Dead NO. Just still working on it.
That word “pure” in front of “free lance” confuses the issue. My line is called “Prescott & Pacific”. Prescott is real, it’s the town I live in - but I’m not tryibg to model it as it is but as it might have been 50 to 100 years ago. Pacific is real, too. It’s the big ocean that 100 years ago every railroad’s name indicated that was where it was going. But it is pretty vague. Our Pacific coast is hundreds(maybe thousands) of miles long. I haven’t reached it yet, so I don’t know where it will be. Somewhere between San Diego and Seattle, probably. Is that “pure” enough, or does a real town bastardize it?
Long way from dead to my thinking and hopefully my own imagination will continue to satisfy my enjoyment. Don’t want to get too technical and exact to drive the hobby to perfection and take the real joy out of the creation. Wonderful to see in the magazine and capture some ideas but, too complicated to enjoy the hobby for me.
From the replies above I’d say “free” lancing is very much alive and well. As much as I"d like to “model” the Great Northen right down to the last rivet and pine cone it just ain’t gonna happen so in that regard I’m pretty happy to just see that goat slapped up on the side of a boxcar or loco and if my railroad serves a grain elevator that is actually in Missouri but on my layout is in North Dakota well then it is MY layout. All of which is to say that free-lancers are great and so are “purists”. The important thing is to just build that model railroad. Start tonight!
Far from it! The Bucolic & Ft. Nubbins is intended to compress maybe 250 miles of scenery changes into a couple of scale miles of track. This is going to take the rest of my life, and may remain forever unfinished. It is necessary because I don’t have a hundres acres under roof. tebo41
What’s nice is that freelanced model railroads seem to have elevated out of the “humorous name” and “fanciful paint” levels of 30+ years ago when I started. If you get out the venerable 101 Track Plans, any two words with an “&” between them were a railroad name. All of the names that have been posted above seem reasonable and possible, some give a geographic hint (if we didn’t know, where would we think CSX ran???) and some have mentioned that "my railroad isn’t real, but I run it as if it was.
More power to the guys and gals who model their prototype very accurately, but I bet the best of 'em can only get about 10 or 20 scale miles into their layout, even in HO or N.
I have fun not only doing “the backstory,” but managing my railroad in a fiscally responsible way – all EMD (one set of parts), four axle locos (simpler, SD’s not needed in the Midwest), no turbos (cheaper, simpler for the mechanics, simple paint (cheaper than fancy), as little deferred maintainance as possible (it’s easier to fix small problems) – so it seems unified and likely. Industries reflect the midwestern setting, even schedules are leisurely. This is not a high-intensity railroad.
While I honor friends with structure names, I keep the humor somewhat restrained or “coded” because even John Allen said he got tired of the “Gory and Defeated” pun fairly quickly, but by then it was famous. “Sam ‘n’ Ella’s Dinette” is about as bad as it gets…
This may not get it for others, but it’s just what I want.
Bill M
Well no, they’re certainly not dead. If so, George Selios and Allen McClelland would sure be surprised! I think there is definitely an increase in prototype layouts, and I’m not talking proto-freelanced, but layouts which are based on all the research now available which is easier to accompli***hese days with the internet and the plethora of historical societies out there. In other words, it’s just “easier” to do, so more people are doing it. On the other hand, I don’t think this automatically would mean a corresponding decline in “pure” free lanced layouts, but I really can’t say.
My layout is to be proto-freelanced - based on the CB&Q and it’s double track mainline between Chicago and Galesburg, Illinois as much as is do-able based on my current level of knowledge at the time I build, scenic, and detail the layout. Finding out this information and being able to implement it is just plain FUN to me. BUT, the rest of the railroad is a fictional branch line of the Burlington. So it will be typical but not proto-typical in a sense.
Early in the layout planning stage, I seriously considered trying to model a specific and strictly prototypical area of the Burlington. My thinking was, and in a way still is, that doing this sucessfully would be just plain cool and very satisfying. But I finally decided that it was way too limiting to how and what I wanted to see and operate on my layout. Therefore, I abandoned that idea and created my current plan and way of modeling the CB&Q.
This isn’t strictly an either/or question either. I say this because you can have the most prototypical layout in the world, but can still satisfy an urge to free lance just by adding a made up short line, belt railroad, etc. to your layout and interchanging it at some point with your “real” RR. Yeah, I know that adding an interchange to the prototype depiction isn’t prototypical then, but you get my drift.
Finally, I guess a “pure” free lanced model railroad won’t ever be dead unle
I guess how you define “pure free lanced”
My layout consists of a stretch of track somewhere in the US northeast.
It has no towns named after actual towns. It has no industries named after any actual industry. That’s freelanced
Sure I’m using CP livery locomotives but since on my layout, I own Canadian Pacific!
I guess I can call it freelanced.
Just my 2 cents
Gordon
Sadly, I have to agree with those who see the magazines having lost the focus. Freelance RRs still are popular, but the magazines have forgotten to write much to serve us. They’ve gone overboard on prototyping and therefore produce ever fewer articles I find useful.
When I first got into model railroading as a youth in 1978, free lanced railroads seemed to be the norm, based on what I saw in the magazines. I sure this is because there were so many years when there were so few models available. Modelers had to create free lanced railroads to justify running steam locomotives obviously based on Pennsylvania, Santa Fe and B&O prototypes (for example) together on one railroad. Even into the early nineties, both MR and RMC “pushed” free lance railroads on their readers - at least as much as they tend to push prototype layouts today.
Based on this influence, I spent several years planning a free lanced railroad with multiple branch lines radiating out of my hometown to some of my favorite nearby places. But by the time I was ready to start building a layout based on this free lanced line, it just didn’t make sense any longer. Instead, I found a prototype shortline that interchanged with three local railroads, had an interesting traffic mix, and a small stable of locomotives that I would enjoy running. I am now actively builing a layout based on this prototype and having a great time doing it.
I am sort of a stickler for details and when details don’t fit together it bugs me. So, it just didn’t work for me to create a free lanced railroad. When I first realized that free lancing didn’t work for me, I resented the magazine editors for making me feel that I “had to” create a free lanced railroad. But now I realize that by planning one, it gave me time to develop my interests and tastes, and learn that a prototype railroad works better for me.
Obviously there are still plenty of modelers who don’t sweat the small stuff, and build free lance railroads. I think that generic railroads, where you can run whatever you want in a non-specific setting, are probably equally popular, especially on club layouts. From my side of the prototype/free-lance debate, I think the tendency toward building and operating prototype-based layouts in the magaz