This message from Charlie Getz is being shared in the craftsmen groups on Facebook:
“Just got notice from Jennifer Furlow that Malcolm Furlow passed away today from the effects of long Covid illness. Malcolm was known for his art and modeling including the seminal San Juan Central HOn3 project layout for MR back in the 1980’s, now part of the NMRA exhibit on Scale Model Railroading at the CSRM in Sacramento…
Sad news. He was a character but an inspiration to many with a distinct modeling style.
Charlie Getz”
That is terrible news! My thoughts are with Jennifer and the family, and his many friends. I always enjoyed his articles and his videos. The hobby has lost another great. RIP Malcolm.
Sad news. I always enjoyed his articles. He obviously enjoyed what he was doing and was able to inject a light-heartedness into each.
I never understood the pro or con arguments about his work. I thought it was outstanding but not what I wanted for myself. I still enjoyed it, though, and he was definitely an amazing artist.
We are sorry to hear of Mr. Furlow’s passing. I followed his MR articles “back when” and also visited his gallery/showing in Taos NM.
I too, never understood the debate of whether he was a real MR or not. He was an artist at heart, and built a wonderful layout from an artist’s point of view (IMO). And the result was absolutely outstanding!
While model railroading was not his “life’s endeavor”, his layout accomplishments sure makes him a “real” model railroader to me.
Furlow was one of my heroes. I have always strived to match the level of detail in his works. To hear it was from Covid strikes me personally as anyone who got the damn thing badly would understand. I was vaxxed and boosted and it still at 60 knocked me flat on my can for two weeks. It can be a truly miserable experience and long Covid is just horrible horrible horrible. RIP Malcolm, I’ll have to dedicate a section of my next layout to him. []
He was a breath of fresh air and fortunately his early fame in the hobby coincided with the time when Model Railroader began to consistently reproduce color photos with real clarity and sparkle. I think he was a real beneficiary of that.
In an earlier era circa 1960 two other modelers, Francis Lee Jacques and Paul Detlefsen, anticipated many of the things Furlow became famous for, but their work was in a time of lower quality of reproduced photos in MR. One common theme to those two modelers, shared with John Allen, to a certain extent John Armstrong, and then Malcom Furlow, was the deliberate creation of portions of a layout which right from the start were built as stages for great photography opportunities of specific scenes. (Armstrong even called his area “Photographer’s Curve”).
I was not aware of how disliked his version of exaggerated reality was in some quarters until I began to read it in the early years of these Forums, and Sam Posey kind of used Furlow as the oppposite of Tony Koester in his book “Playing With Trains,” more perhaps to make points of his own about what kind of modeler he (Posey) was. Furlow and Koester were in fact friends. There was never a question about Furlow’s skills as a craftsman, layout builder, or photographer. But the prototype modeling movement wing of the hobby had and has other priorities.
Now and then MR and others would dangle in front of us the news that Furlow was getting interested in model trains again. I am sorry to learn that we won’t be seeing the results of that renewed interest.
The first time I heard anything really spiteful about Furlow was right on these forums.
I was on the receiving end of the same thing back in the mid 1990s. The local model railroad club elite took my view on “Complete Freelancing” as absurd. This was during the time when “Protolancing” was becoming a more common term.
Sad to hear about Malcom’s passing, he was a tallented artist.
Model trains is a big tent - sometimes too big for people on one side of the tent to have a clear view of the other side of the tent.
OR, maybe the people on one side of the tent are happy where they are, and feel a little put upon when someone from the other side of the tent runs over and says “look at this, Bobby did this, isn’t this great!, you should try this”.
And it is the last of those comments that often stirs up trouble - “you should try this”.
The media is known to present new things in exactly that light.
Malcom moved back toward “casual whimsy” at a time when the hobby was headed in the opposite direction.
Personally, like all of us, I have my own views and tastes about modeling. They don’t really include Malcom’s work or George Sellios work - One is a fun caricature, the other is a depressing caricature.
Yet I do like the “idyllic Chirstmas Garden” type modeling as much as I like more realistic styles. My own style is somewhere in between those two.
I really enjoyed the work of Malcom Furlow, and was inspired by his articles and photos from the 80’s. Recently I visited the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento and made it a point to visit the NMRA exhibit upstairs. Here are 4 photos I shot of the San Juan Central layout when I was there:
I love the turntable hand crank on the last photo. R.I.P Malcolm, your model railroading skills and artistic vision were great.
dknelson
I was not aware of how disliked his version of exaggerated reality was in some quarters until I began to read it in the early years of these Forums.
Same here.
The first time I heard anything really spiteful about Furlow was right on these forums.
I was on the receiving end of the same thing back in the mid 1990s. The local model railroad club elite took my view on “Complete Freelancing” as absurd. This was during the time when “Protolancing” was becoming a more common term.
-Kevin
Sad to hear about Malcom’s passing, he was a tallented artist.
Model trains is a big tent - sometimes too big for people on one side of the tent to have a clear view of the other side of the tent.
OR, maybe the people on one side of the tent are happy where they are, and feel a little put upon when someone from the other side of the tent runs over and says “look at this, Bobby did this, isn’t this great!, you should try this”.
And it is the last of those comments that often stirs up trouble - “you should try this”.
The media is known to present new things in exactly that light.
Malcom moved back toward “casual whimsy” at a time when the hobby was headed in the opposite direction.
Personally, like all of us, I have my own views and tastes about modeling. They don’t really include Malcom’s work or George Sellios work - One is a fun caricatu
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