A couple years back I was taken to see a layout that was set around 1900. It was just a bit smaller than my current layout, but seemed so much larger than mine. It was at as close to completion as a layout could be with the smallest of details all included. It was based and closely modeled on the area known as the kootenays in British Columbia.
Mining, logging, towns with wooden sidewalks and those funny looking bicycles with the big wheels and two very early paddle wheelers like the one in the photo below. He had many photo’s like the one below all over his walls and had closely modeled some of the scenes.
While I was there he had a couple of 4-4-0s each pulling a train. One was a three coach passenger train and the other was a five car freight. He had logging trains he could run up short spurs to the camps where he had all the rigging to pull the logs up the mountain side.
I recently found out this man passed away and parts of his layout have been given to some local small town museums who will make dioramas out of them.
I have not been able to get that era out of my mind ever since I saw his layout. I think what has made me model the transition era is nothing more than the lack of equipment available for the 1900 era.
Those small engines pulling those small cars almost looked like a different scale. I kept looking closely to make sure it was HO. A 4-4-0 with three coaches compared to two big diesels pulling fifty cars around a layout is like seeing a Sopwith Camel parked next to a Boeing 747. Or it would take twelve minutes to do a lap around my layout at a realistic speed, compared to five with more modern equipment.
To get on with my questions. Do you think running a 4-4-0 at 20MPH with two or three old time passenger cars, or a five car freight would make a layout appear larger , just because of the size of that equipment and the speed it travels? Or was it just all the detail on this particular layout?
The layout would perhaps appear larger as the equipment like turn-of-the-century or late 1800’s locos and passenger cars were indeed smaller than today’s equipment.
I have an N scale 4-4-0 that looks like a “toy” on my under-the-xmas-tree-layout compared to my N scale 2-8-8-2 or even my N scale GP40!!! {I like to change eras for variety}
The first steam engines were tiny. Then came monsters designed by the B&O and other USA roads because the tiny first British tea kettles were not designed for hauling the heavy tonnages over the Blue Ridge and Smokies that the American roads were faced with doing to keep in the black. Those monsters gave way to 10 wheelers designed and built in the 1890’s, engines that dwarfed the earlier monsters. By the time the first Berkshire came on line, we were into truly big engines. But then came the Duplexes from the Pennsy and B&O, and by then the UP had 25 year old 4-12-2’s…monsters. Oh, and by then the Yellowstones and Big Boys had been running for maybe 10 years.
It’s all relative to capacity and need at the time. In 1900 the train-using population in USA was maybe 70 million? In 30 years it had swelled to 120 million. That’s a lot of calico, corn, and coal! And it didn’t go by plane or truck. So it fell to larger trains pulled by larger engines.
I don’t believe a human observing a given layout where first a ten-wheeler trundles by with four smaller shorties behind it, and then sees a UP FEF with 12 heavyweights behind it will assume the layout has suddenly gotten smaller. Instead, humans use other references to judge size, not the least of which is arc angle between the two eyes as they adjust to focus on objects of different sizes. We know when something is smaller than something else because the trees haven’t shrunk, nor has the depot.
Except for Roundhouse, the major manufacturers think railroads were invented about the end of WW1 and pretty much ignore the 1st 100 years of railroading. The major manufacturers haven’t brought out a new plastic model of a pre-1910 wood car in about 35 years. The good news is that thanks to resin casting the small run turn of the century car kit is a alive and well. There are dozens of wood and resin car kits available. Check out the Early Rail Yahoo Group and Art Griffin Decals. Between Art Griffin and Clover House there are well over a thousand lettering sets for pre-WW1 cars.
Engines are the sticking point, they are harder to come by. but Roundhouse and Bachmann engines can be worked to come up with acceptable engines unless you are going for pre-1880 and then you have to rely on the 4-4-0’s by IHC, Bachmann and Pocher (which are basically 20-30 year old designs.).
The slower speeds (45 mph for passenger, 25 max mph for freight) have a real effect. For the same length run they will take longer to get across the RR, making it seem larger. The size is mostly an illusion, sorta. Since the trains are shorter, the sidings are shorter.
If there is a 16x24 ft room it probably has a layout with a 100 ft main line. If you run 12 ft trains and allow 1 train length between sidings you can have about 4 sidings. If you go to 1900 era, with 6 ft trains and change to 6 ft sidings, those same 4 sidings are now 3 train lengths apart, creating the illusion of traveling further because you have to go “further” to get to the next siding. The run is still only 100 ft, but you notice that you spend more time running between stations with the shorter train.
This speaks volumes to me. Thanks for posting Bob. I think watching these two go around a layout would be interesting to watch as a comparison. The American would need a water stop at each end of old UP 4000.[:)] I think if they were both going around at 25MPH the visual effect would be that the Bigboy would seem to have taken less time.
It works with more ‘modern’ small steam, too. I’ve got a couple of little 2-8-0’s and a 4-6-0 on my Yuba River Sub (yes, GASP! I DO have smaller steam, LOL! [:P]}. My 4-6-0 hauls about 3 60-foot Harriman coaches (The “Yuba River Express”) and the 2-8-0’s usually haul short ‘turns’ of about five to eight cars. And believe me, the minute I start running those ‘little’ trains, the Yuba River Sub suddenly looks about TWICE as big as it actually is. The locomotives represent steam power that my MR might have acquired new about 1908 or so and are about half the length of any of my articulateds. Running at about 20–25SMPH, it seems that they take twice as long to get around the layout as any of my more ‘modern’ era WWII freight or passenger trains.
In fact, one of them took so long to go thorugh my longest tunnel once that I almost forgot it was there, LOL!
But yes,smaller locos and shorter trains really DO make your layout look larger. I think it’s a combination of size, perspective and a lot of imagination. [:-^]
UncBob, remember that the Pocher Inyo and Reno are larger than HO, scaling closer to British OO, so the size comparisons would be even more dramatic if they were to scale. A Big Boy could probably have squashed both of them and never noticed. [B)]
People running large, modern equipment usually operate it at present-day track speed (if not more…) If you were to operate a 1950s coal branch at prototypical speed (10, 15 mph) it would seem to be much longer than if it was being operated at 50mph. Whether the motive power was a 2-8-0 or a 2-8-8-2, the effect would be very similar.
Where short trains make a difference is in extending the apparent length of the railroad. The total length of my short line’s first track is about the same as the length of one modern Powder River unit train. Needless to say, my trains are much shorter. They also operate at slow speed. As a result, the Tomikawa Tani Tetsudo seems much longer than it is.
I think, it is a question of size and speed. Slow speeds makes you require more time to cover the distance from A to B, but a Big Boy or Challenger just dwarfs everything in its surrounding. Put a Big boy on a 4´by 8´ layout and will look out of place, whereas that 4-6-0 or 2-8-0 fits nicely.
IIRC, they are anywhere between 1/80 and 1/82 - like Fleischmann used to be. The reason for them being slightly oversized, is simple - at the time they were designed, there were no motors available that could fit into the boiler or the tender. With today´s sub-miniature motors, it would not be a problem to build an exact-to-scale 4-4-0 of the 1880´s, but apparently the manufacturers don´t thnk, that the market is big enough tp pay for the tooling - what a pity!
Bob, the fact of the matter is that nearly all of the pre-1900’s locomotive models offered supposedly as of HO 1:87 scale during the post-war period are actually significantly over-sized relative to HO, many of them being in the order of 1:76 , or even 1:72 . Mantua was perhaps the worst offender in this respect, with its Rogers, Belle and related models dramatically out of scale with HO. Actually, a number of S scale hobbyists have modestly kitbashed (mainly regarding the cab) the Mantua models to create Sn3 locomotive models to 1:64 scale!
More in line with the OP’s question, the fact that large locomotives and overly long trains make a layout look smaller has been a well known axiom for decades and the reason you don’t see really long trains on the layouts of more experienced hobbyists unless they happen to have truly large layouts with long runs.
Even more of a pity is the fact that with today’s technology they could put the motor in the engine rather than in the tender --I hate that bar going from the tender to the engine
