On page 48 of the current MR, a modeler is devoting his entire layout, which is a decent size, to modeling his hometown back in the day. I’ve seen other articles and layouts, one in a recent RMC that model’s a town on the M&StL, that have the same theme. The trains really don’t go from place to place, despite having the space to do so, but rather the space is devoted entirely to one place. Yes, modules and LDE’s have been around a while, but these layouts are like LDE’s on steriods.
Is this becoming a new trend in layout design, or have I been just slow to notice? (probably both)
The concept has been around for a long time, since nearly the beginning of the hobby. It’s quite common in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. US and international layouts of this type have been in the commercial press many times. Certainly not a new trend, in my opinion.
It’s a personal preference whether that’s boring or not, I suppose.
Many times I think modeling a single place and doing it well, is more realistic than trying to crame ten towns and a hundred miles into the space available. Just as much operating potential if you pick the right place.
Been in this hobby since 1958, can’t say it like it, the concept makes the train pretty much a static display, not an operating railroad. But to each his own.
Don´t know whether this is a trend, but most likely the individual answer to rising cost of the hobby, space and time limitations.
Actually, there are some fine layouts, which focus on “one” place. Take a look at Jon Grant´s “Sweet Home Chicago” and “Sweet Home Alabama” or Lance Mindheim´s “East Rail” - small layouts, packed with detail, atmosphere and lots of operation.
I don’t see how you get to that. In my town, you’d have had significant through traffic of northbound coal and southbound iron ore moving through the town layout. There was a junction between PRR-B&O-B&LE and an industrial district around the junction area. And endless strings of new rolling stock being pulled out of the Pullman-Standard plant by the B&LE and handed off to the PRR.
Its not like these layouts that show up of one town are like “my town had a passing siding and a station” and nothing else where a train just loops its way in and out of staging.
I think if one picks the right prototype, or uses common sense on freelance, modeling one town can be quite interesting. For me, while I do plan to have a large double decker later, starting with one city can keep me busy and happy for years to come.
For a rough idea of what I’m working one, check out the map in Trains from a couple months ago where they show tracks in Cleveland Ohio. The inset in the lower right was quite handy for me. Sure I’ll need lots of staging but that’s no problem.
Chuck Hitchcock’s Argentine switching layout is an awesome example. As for not going “place to place” what does that mean? Even the Magrac steel layout on 4x8 has loads and empties moving from place to place and no staging. If you want passenger trains you likely have to go town to town but freight or traction can all be local moves.
The example is good, I live in Kansas City also, and know his railroad quite well. I operated many tmes on his prior layout featuring passenger train operations. But, the thing I miss with Chuck’s current layout is moving from town to town, instead of moving from switching district to switching district. I think like many other facets of model railroading, the hobby has expanded to many idealogical directions. For example, I was always a fan of David Barrows first layouts, but the minimumalist (sp) approach he moved to turned me clear off.
If I was to try the town approach, it would have to be a large city, many yards, trains moving in and out from various staging areas to be terminated or switched, and then I would also be faced with creating cityscapes, which I have no real interest in doing. I think the hobby has become very broad in what we model or what are interests are, and not everyone is going to like or enjoy or follow suit on all the ideas.
But, as I have stated many times, how what model, what we model, when we model, if we model is left up to the individual and while I may not like all the types of layouts, I can still appreciate the modeling and effort that goes into the laout.
How does this apply if, like the layout featured in MR, the layout fills an intire basement - 800-1200 sq ft?
I have a friend, who for some time now, has been working on his layout which only depicts the PRR as it passes through the city of Baltimore Maryland. It fills a 1200 sq ft space and has three decks!
It has a full size model of Baltimore’s Penn Station. Baltimore is a big enough place that in addition to trains comming and going, freight traffic in particular needed to be “switched” around the citiy on a large scale, especially back in its industrial heyday, which is the period this modeler is modeling - 1947.
Even without being complete, his layout provides very challenging and interesting operating sessions. He has done tremedous research into the day to day operations of the PRR in Baltimore during that era.
My layout concept is similar - I model ONE division point of a large fictional class one railroad. On my lower level, spread out for easy operation is one big freight yard, one large engine terminal, one large passenger terminal, one large piggyback yard, a number of industries, some of them large, all in the same “city”.
The upper level has very few industries or switching and does represent some of the rural countryside both east and west of this division point “city”. It includes some major “junctions” and “interchanges” but no other large “terminals” are modeled - all major destinations are “off stage” in the staging yards - and the staging is thru staging to allow lots of action on the mainline and good display running.
The industrial areas are completely seperated from the mainline for the most part on an “industrial belt line” much like most major cities here in the east. So industries are work
This is exactly what my friend has done in modeling the PRR in Baltimore, many different yards, large freight terminals, branch lines, etc, all with staging to simulate all the typical train movements.
He has created his city scape with picture backdrops of the actual locations (he is a graphic desginer by trade) and his shelves/levels are shallow - 14" -18" deep.
Maybe different things are being meant by “just one place.” I model the city I grew up in (South Milwaukee WI) and there was enough work there to keep the local switcher busy most of the day, as well as the Bucyrus Erie factory’s industrial railroad, which often had two locomotives going. There was in addition a fairly robust passenger train schedule on the C&NW double track main (they no longer stopped in South Milwaukee in my era), and a few freights were routed through what was regarded as the old or “passenger” main.
Sidings to be switched: about 10 (not every day). Industries served: at least 13 (not every day). That is enough work to keep the crew of the local busy for an entire operating session. Staging yards at either end send the passenger and freight trains through the scene.
So – am I modeling “just one place?” Or am I modeling about a dozen places? South Milwaukee is about four miles long end to end (that would be 240 feet in HO), and I am selectively compressing it to model the entire length of the city in HO, in something close to 80 feet of main line. That is not a bad ratio of compression, and I am taking care not to just eliminate the stretches of pure track in between points of interest.
As a practical matter if I said that was four towns with 3 industries each rather than one city` with 13 industries, I am not sure it would make any difference in terms of operating density or even visual appearance other than perhaps to add more depots to make clear it was a new town.
Very few depots are located so close to each other as we tend to have on model railroads.
My ideal goal would be if someone from South Milwaukee actually could recognize their city if they visited my layout. I think the goal of a recognizable scene might explain
I agree and think it is just another way of looking at railroading, on a local level. My layout is a little more spread out, but not much! I have an 8 track live staging yard (Everett), go up a 3 1/2 tier helix to a town. I was fortunate to be able to get the GN track plan of the town from 1945, and am replicating it pretty well in a 7 1/2 footx27 foot closed in front porch. The town is Monroe, WA and has 7 industries plus a 3 track interchange with Milwaukee Road. It was a busy place back then. My south siding is 17 feet long! I am kitbashing the depot as it was then. altogether it is a fun project for operations. Future extension will go through the Cascades to a reverse loop 4 track staging area (Wenatchee) at the top. So I have through trains, some that drop off/pick up cars and some local turns that switch the town and go back down to Everett. I also have a through and a local passenger train, one each way per dayI am in OpSIG and setting this up for operations. John.
you´ve got a point there. Most of the layouts featured in MR are of the bigger kind. I guess because this is what we all want, even if only in our dreams. There have been features on smaller layouts as well, but that´s certainly not as spectacular. Still I wish I could see a feature by Jon Grant “How I build Sweet Home Chicago” (no, not in 10 easy steps!)
My phrase of “just one place” was meant to mean a town, an industrial district, or a classification yard/engine servicing facility, etc. It could have a different meaning for others.
Everyone:
My fascination with the concept is the size of these layouts. I think there have always been smaller layouts have been built with the “one place” concept in mind, since cramming many destinations into a small space tends to look less realistic, but it now seems even larger layouts are being devoted to “one place”. This is something I hadn’t noticed so much in the 80’s and 90’s.
And to answer my own question: No I don’t think a layout like that would be boring.
Maybe it has to do with an availability of information. For years, the fantasy basement filling “I won the powerball” super-layout for me was a freelanced version of my hometown in the 1990s. I knew what it looked like, where stuff was, what could be added, what could be deleted and so on. If I needed to know what something was, I went and looked at it and took a picture. Track arrangements in certain places could be gleaned from (out of date) topographic maps.
Then when I was doing research for my current layout, I noticed a plant with one spur looked like it may have had as many as six at one point. To make a long story short, thanks to libraries making things easier to find, sort, and acquire via the Internet, I have almost as much information about a certain neighborhood of Pittsburgh in 1936 than I have about my own town that I actually lived in during the prospective modeling period. And this area would have more activity in 150 acres than my entire home town.
A light just went off in my head. If you’re attempting to reproduce a specific area, it would grow in size rather quickly. You’re trying to fit things in without being willing to sacrifice as much for “other places.” My Pittsburgh fantasy would be a monster, despite being quite small in the real world (literally 150 acres, maybe even closer to 100 once I trimmed it down and reshaped it to fit so everything is reachable). Just to make the trackwork fit and the sidings usable, things start to creep ever closer to
I don’t know that it’s a trend. Most layouts don’t do this today, but this has always been an option that some have followed. There was an article in MR (in the early 90’s IIRC) on doing this sort of thing with different “off stage” options.
I think it could be a really interesting option for a pre WWI / pre truck era. You can have cross town shipments.
I completely disagree. Single-location layouts can have just as much trackage and operational potential as a layout modeling multiple locations but with less unrealistic compression.
Modeling both the origination and destination of a shipment on a layout is unrealistic and unnecessary in the vast majority of instances. Reference an earlier thread on paired industries.
I have seen several layouts that were intended to model. “Just one place,” in a prototypically believable manner. They ranged in size from an L-shaped shelf in a spare bedroom to a 20 x 60 in a former chicken house. In each case, the place was busy - concentrate industrial district on the shelf layout, San Bernardino selectively compressed in the chicken house. And then there was the layout that consisted only of a single track winding along the Feather River at the bottom of a canyon…
In each case, the modeler(s) had chosen a single, consistent theme - and stuck with it. The San Bernardino effort was a club layout. [I didn’t join because it WAS prototype - Southern California prototype, with no slack cut for people who didn’t model UP, ATSF (pre-BNSF) or SP.] The themes also varied, the extreme being the purely-railfan WP layout (“Hey, there’s a train down there,” which quickly vanished from sight after simply running through the scene.)
My own model railroad is meant to be a single, rather limited geographical area. Granted, there are two visible JNR stations on this version, but my last before this one had only one. The master plan has the entire area represented, including a half-dozen other stations that my available space has relegated to the Netherworld. If I had 2500 square feet (and a much bigger hobby budget) I could stretch the visible part of the JNR main line - but it would simply push back the visible border of the same place.
As for being a new trend, my personal master plan has been set in stone for 46 years - and mine was not the first.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - since September, 1964)