Hi All,
I am wondering if you think your layout has an atmosphere? If you think so what is this atmosphere? Did you have a go at creating an atmosphere when you started? Maybe you may have been personally ‘caught up’ by an atmosphere that beckoned the inspiration, motivation for the model. If you had in mind an idea of a kind of ‘atmosphere’ that you wanted to create, for instance a gloomy loco scrapyard how did you go about trying to ‘capture’ or ‘engineer’ the atmosphere that you wanted to create/were inspired and motivated by. What kinds of modeling decisions essentially were related to atmosphere? For instance speaking with one modeler who had a loco scrapyard a feeling of sadness was exacerbated by a very gloomy sky that he painted specially to add to the sadness.
My “someday” dream is to create a lively dog hole harbor scene where a logging schooner is being loaded/unloaded. Animation might include moving booms on the schooner lifting or swinging a load, sounds of blocks creaking and seagulls and sailors working the loads.
In the dream, the scene begins at first light with a salt air scented fog generated by an under the layout fog generator. The schooner and the railroad come to life as work begins with the accompanying background sounds. The fog dissipates and the scene grows brighter as the sun pokes through.
Another scene is on the cliffs above the port, where the logging and sawmil work force and families are taken by passenger and/or flat car to a small park for a Sunday picnic.
My idea is to give a picture of life in the logging towns and ports. Some of the companies specifically provided for families because it tended to bring in a more sober and less quarrelsome workforce.
Fred W
…modeling foggy coastal Oregon, where it’s always 1900…
About 21% oxygen, 78% nitrogen and the rest is trace gases.
The atmosphere I’m striving for is about 21% oxygen, 78% nitrogen, 1% other gases - largely cedar pheromenes, sometimes overpowered by coal or diesel combustion products.
As for mood, it’s a humid, hazy day (one of those, “Lazy, Hazy Days of Summer,” but without the beer - Rule G is enforced!) and people are going about their usual business. The little ‘cleanout’ mine is scruffy and there’s a pile of rusty machinery next to the crusher - but the miners are still making enough to live on. Up the valley, the big colliery is about as clean as a coal mine ever is - and loading over a thousand tons a day.
Business is booming on the main line, so a second track is being added. That’s why there’s a pile driver pounding pilings into the soft stuff at the bottom of one drainage, while a TBM gnaws its way through the next ridge. The new concrete ties are (mostly) in, but the CWR won’t be installed until the first weekend in October. (Translation - never. For the reason, check my signature.)
The schoolkids are taking PT in the bare space around the five-tiered pagoda, while the sumo team practices in the outdoor ring. No fancy robes; the referee is wearing tan slacks and a T-shirt. The school itself is out of sight on the other side of the knoll, hidden by cedars that were old when Meiji was young.
If you don’t understand the local language you may have a problem. None of the little people speak Ei-go. The only readable things on the layout are the station names on the big, flat platform signs - in romaji, between the kanji characters at the top and the phonetic hiragana across the bottom. The recorded station announcements won’t help, either. My wife recorded them in her native language.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with no rain in the forecast)
I don’t know and frankly don’t care. There are only two things I notice in the atmosphere in my layout room, tension and jubilee. Tension when I wonder if what I am doing is going to work and jubilee when it does.
Winter with grey skies, snow and bare trees seemed to me to be the way to portray the early days of Guilford which was the end for the Boston and Maine, Maine Central and Delaware and Hudson.
I avoid having strong colours in the landscape, and my backscenes have muted grey skies. I have lots of bare trees and shrubs. With evergreens such as pines I use only subdued green foliage, and the grasses are straw-coloured, never green.
I’ve studied hundreds, if not thousands of photos of wintry New England and the East coast of the USA, and that’s what I’ve come up with.
Mike
So, if I built my layout on the moon…would it have an atmosphere to it??? [:o)]
My NYC layout is based in the early 40s and is mostly rural. Since a few of the windows in my structures are open and the leaves are green on the trees, the layout would be appropriate for the warmer months - e.g. May thru September.
Having a servicing terminal allows crews (who aren’t working) to spend their off time at either the local diner or at the company house owned by the railroad. Although life is at a slower pace, it’s not stagnant. Coal, sand, and diesel fuel are delivered in hoppers and tankers and empties are loaded onto the departure track for pickup.
Tom
The atmosphere on my ISLs has always been industries if you want to call that a “atmosphere”.I don’t go out of my way trying to include “atmosphere”…
Now the “atmosphere” can get smelly at times when I pass bad air…[+o(]
I’m trying to model an “atmosphere” if you will more than a railroad. My goal, while still a long way off, is to recreate the feel of a southern mill town in the 50s. Early fall, the leaves are just starting to change, but the days are still hot and muggy. People shop in the single block of stores, and once in a while someone plans a trip to the big city – Spartanburg. That’s a trip that brings enough interest that neighbors ask you to pick something up for them. Trains still serve the cotton mills and the mills are still the center of a whole culture. Men still pay checkers at the barber shop and shoot the breeze at the gas station. Mrs Worthy serves the best hot dogs “all the way” you’ll ever eat in her cafe next to the tracks. People work hard, yet take care of one another. A little bit Hooterville, a little bit Peyton Place, and a whole lot of Mayberry rolled up into real life.
Known as “mill hills” these towns developed a culture all their own to the point where current day real modern day historians are trying to capture that history before it disappears just as if it were some native culture somewhere. I grew up in one of these towns. Today the mill is gone and the town is dying. Someone has coined the term “re-wilding” to represent the fact that an entire region is returning to a pre-industrial natural environment as forests reclaim what not so long ago were bustling towns, farms, industries, and homes.
A way of life that’s come and gone.
I started a 4x12 layout in the so called train room, and after seeing how much room I had leftover, I started to think about how I can expand it. I started to think about the atmoshere in the train room itself, not the layout. I wanted a place where me and my friends could sit and enjoy a few beers. Thats when it hit me to add a bar and some bar stools. Welcome to The Boxcar Tavern.
Aside from David Barrow´s “domino” layout, who solely focuses on operations, don´t we all build a layout to capture a certain atmosphere?
I have to admit though, that quite often, too much attention is given to the track plan and maybe not enough to scenery and “atmosphere”.
A excellent point…Less track and more scenery may be a good approach for “atmosphere”?
Of course a ISL main scenery must be industries while maintaining a realistic setting with a balance of track.
Here’s the final plan for Slate Creek…
As you can see the “atmosphere” is purely industrial.
I’m building a “dual-era” layout, where I can choose the 1930s or early 1960s by swapping out the locomotives, some of the rolling stock and the automobiles. The layout is set somewhere in the upper midwest, on a fictional body of water called Moose Bay. I guess I’d describe the atmosphere as “Rust Belt.”
Very little on my layout is bright and shiny. The trains, cars and buildings are weathered. Advertising painted on buildings is cracked and faded. The streets are narrow. I use incandescent bulbs, not LEDs, for my structure lighting and streetlamps. I run these 16-volt bulbs at 12 volts, which keeps them dim and gives off a warmer, more yellow glow. I prefer to run the layout with the room lights dimmed down.
Right now, I’m working on “Mooseport,” a small corner which services a carfloat terminal. I’ve used proper street-running track, girder rail, and cobblestone streets to create that “sub-atmosphere,” along with a dirty mill-era canal, a couple of seedy waterfront bars and some “business women” on the street. The engine that services the carfloat in 1930 is a small tank engine, no room for a sound decoder and speaker, so I installed a SoundBug in a building. I work with computers in my real job, and I’ve done a bit of work with sound decoders, so I hope to one day add seagulls and other waterfront sounds.
My atmosphere represents a bright sunny day in Colorado…mostly, and I’ll get to that in a minute. I have mountains that soar above your head, backdrops that set the place and give perspective for the 3D scenery in front of them, rivers and falls that provide a subtle burbling, rushing noise, pine-scented air…and a railroad runs through it.
Then when the sun goes down, the atmosphere changes again…
The Night Scene
What I was looking for was relatively wide open spaces–few structures (only one currently–a barn–the farmhouse would be off the layout)
I’ve tried to capture 3 different scenes: A winter snow scene that could be in the Sierras, An autumn scene with a pumpkin patch, autumn deciduous trees, and a cornfield, and basically a “summer” desert scene.
I have only a modest layout–but am still somehow trying to capture a sense of the open spaces out west.
An artist came in and painted a sunset backdrop on the cinderblock wall that fades into an evening moonlit sky at the other end of the wall. It’s a bit too bold, and my kids like it, which was important. However, because it’s so bold I don’t know that I’ll be showing any images of it here.
The other walls are nice natural cherry paneling, and I’m not sure I want to ruin that with backdrops, but am contemplating something removable since I found at least one site where I can get a good desert backdrop.
John
If my layout did NOT have an atmosphere, I would need to provide my operating crews with special equipment.
Musty with hints of mildew and a taste of bounce sheets with an aroma of dirty laundry trying to break through.
My trainroom itself doesn’t have much “atmosphere”. But I try to achieve that with my photos, by focusing on narrow scenes and cropping-out whatever doesn’t look right.
Since I model the steel industry, I try to make the surrounding area look like a so-called “bad neighborhood” - my town scene consists mostly of bars and fast food joints, places where off-duty steel mill workers might hang out on their way to or from the mill. On my old layout I shot some photos with store fronts in the foreground and the blast furnace towering in the background.
What I’m going to shoot for is a western washington state style feeling on one half and a southern part of washington where the SP&S ran “the north bank road.”
Dont foget the DUST! [:-^]