A while back Tony Koester had written an article entitled Modeling the mundane in I believe his trains of thought column. Recalling the article now that I am planning on ahead for some scenery work on my railroad for later on this winter. Many of us fill out layouts with tons of action, many industries compressed into an area far more then one would ever see in may prototype situations. No before you jump all over me this isn’t always a bad thing. There is a lot to be said for a busy railroad with lots of interesting industries, ports, coal mines, cement plant, grain elevators and the list could go on and on, basically a lot of the Walthers catalog stuffed into some relatively small spaces. Not looking to split hairs but from what I’ve observed this isn’t always the case in the real world. A few days a go I was sitting in traffic not far from my house while waiting for a wrecker to clear a traffic accident and i was fortunate enough to be stopped right by a crossing of an old PRR line now owned by N&W/CSX line that now only serves as a lead in track for several small industries near Naval Air Station Lakehurst. I noticed as I looked down the line the “nothingness” if you will. a few fences from back yards but other then that nothing but trees and a field so all in all pretty bla from a model railroading perspective. I got to thinking that as boring or mundane as this may look it is the real world.
So I’m throwing this one out you guys, do you have any mundane or nothing scenes on your layout? So what do you have other then industries, towns etc.or do you feel it’s just a waste of time and valuable real estate to model nothing so to speak?
I find even the most mundane scenery interesting, and it’s certainly challenging to model. I really do think it’s harder to do convincing scenery of mundane terrain than it is to model spectacular gorges, for example. Not that I have anything against spectacular gorges. Many’s the time I wish I had some on my layout.
I, like many others, am facinated by busy high speed multi-track mainlines running through and between industrialized urban areas, but as I have aged my tastes have changed. I have concluded that building such a layout convincingly, is too costly and time (and space) consuming for my maturing tastes.
I personally think that a single track branch meandering through long stretches of rural scenery, has a certain amount of charm. If a layout has a purpose, an industry or two to be served along it’s route, and at it’s terminus, it can still be very interesting from an operating standpoint. Add a junction that requires switching chores, and a second (or third) train and passing tracks can be justified. If we just look around, I think we can find enough detail, even in an otherwise mundane world, that could be modeled on such a layout to make it visiually interesting. Short trains traversing long distances through bucolic settings, can be modeled very convincingly, and still display a great deal of railroading style!
Many years after I finished it, this still remains one of my favorite scenes:
I think it’s the mundane details that we all take for granted in real life that make this work. The mailbox, traffic light, fire hydrant and the fat guy stepping off the curb aren’t from the front cover of the Walthers catalog, but they add a tremendous amount to the image.
Mr. B, Love that scene and your absolutely right in that it’s all the little details that make any scene in my O/P I concur with the others as well sometimes the “simple” scenes are much harder to model then the complex one’s with a lot of industry or action etc.Where we are drawn to the structures and their details or whats happening in or around the industry, hoppers being loaded, cars being shuttled around a steel mill, live stock being unloaded at the meat packing plant etc. Where in the mundane it’s the rocks and grass and weeds that make the scene So your correct in that the “simple” mundane scenes can be more difficult to make look believable I have to admit I would love to have the real estate to have a long scene of a train just rambling through the countryside or working it’s way through the mountains where the focus is entirely on the train. It’s been said by many experts that the scenery is there to enhance the trains but I think we’ve now seen the pendulum swing the other way. many have fantastic scenes, highly detailed and very very believable with a train running through it. Sorta like our version of the chicken or the egg question,what came first the trains or the scenery.
This is often misquoted on this forum. The more-often-used and more accurate phrase is “Modeling the typical”, which may or may not be “mundane”. This has been championed by Layout Design SIG founder Doug Gurin, among others.
In my humble opinion, it is the opportunity to blend into a layout the ordinary details that then establish the layout as representing either a real or a"might well be real" place. A layout that only has larger than life characteristics tends might impress at first glance, but then suffers from not having any way to draw viewers and operators into the scenes that are created. My dear bride, who supports, but does not model anything, gets quickly bored when I bribe her into following me around train shows, gets quickly bored by the big stuff, yet can spend quite a long time looking at a module full of small details. She keeps describing those modules as “unique” and delightful.
That which is mundane in one place in space-time is utterly atypical if arbitrarily moved to another. In the 1950s, I saw places in and near New York City where the rail-served industries occupied every square foot of real estate for miles. More recently, I have seen places where some single industry stands in lonely splendor, surrounded by miles and miles of seared landscape. And in my present home town I can go to a couple of industrial areas that look (on Google maps) as if they were laid out as shelf switching schemes.
My ‘in progress’ model railroad has one stretch of single track, about thirty total feet (on a layout where a long train, prototypically correct, stretches about seven feet) which won’t even have a single turnout. It will represent, and be modeled as, the part of the Upper Kiso Valley where the railroad clings to a cliff by its fingernails - short tunnels, short bridges and one impressive curved viaduct lifted bodily from the now-unused part of the O-me Sen beyond Okutama in the wilds of Tokyo-to. That will be my railfanning zone, relief from the hectic comings and goings at my main engine change / subdivision station.
I’ve got a 30 foot run of single track, sans any turnouts. It represents a major growing area, you’ll find acres devoted to citrus groves and commercial flower harvesting. Even in populated areas tsimilar groves encroach upon civilization and dicatate all other scenery aspecs.
Personally, I love when people model the “typical”, especially if it is ugly and trashy, such as dead trees, weeds, grey skies, dirty factories, urban decay. From what I’ve seen of his work, mikelhh is a master of this. This looks real, and in many ways is more beautiful than bright blue skies, puffy clouds, clean streets and green grass, etc.
Kinda like this? This is a Mathew Hicks photo, but it was posted on this forum a couple of years ago and I look at it often. He has many photos on Railpictures.net.
It is scenes like this that make me constantly return to the Canadian Rockies and explore all along the C.P. mainline. To me devoting my MRR real estate to modeling a breathtaking scene like this is better than towns and industry. I am not into switching and this is where I want to be in real life and on my MRR.
I have managed about 60’ between turnouts for what I hope will be a respectable representation of the Rogers Pass. We will see, but it was the most important thing that had to be on my layout.
Mundane? I guess that depends on your point of view, but I think mother nature out does even our most spectacular structures.
Batman you nailed it right there with that pic but agreed it’s more spectacular then mundane thats for sure. I visited a very large home layout a few years back if memory serves me correctly about 2500 sq. ft and when you walked down the basement stairs into the train room the first thing you saw was a very large mountain covered with pine trees of every shape and size and a track mainline cutting through several rock cuts leading out to a spactacular curved wooden trestle not even a single road or structure in sight so you had no choice but to see the 80 car freight and nothing else. When I complimented the owner on how great a job he had done he asked do you have favorite scene. I said if i had to choose it would be the one i just described and he agreed and said it was one of his favorites as well for the exact reason as soon as the train came into view you were immediately drawn to it. I guess in a perfect model railroading world it would be nice to have enough space to model as many variations of “the real world” as we could. I guess it’s some what of a modelers curse if you will to be limited by the bounds of the basement walls
A sleepy branchline running through woods, around rolling hills, and over fields is exactly what I plan to model in N scale. A few rail served businesses at first, eventually expanded to include enough rail traffic to support a short line. What you may call mundane is the basis for my entire layout plans. No monster industries crammed into a few square feet, just a few small towns separated by woods and creeks and enough room for a couple of trains between them.
A frustration I feel as a modern era builder, is a desire to model what isn’t there any more. Its so tempting to build the empty shell of a multi-story brick factory or a shattered industrial brownfield crisscrossed with foundations and concrete pads. Sadly it takes up too much space to have runarounds turned into switchbacks, double tracked bridges for single track mains, and overgrown spurs with forgotten boxcars.
I might be saying the same thing, but I think the absence of too many cliches is important. Things like the blond driving the convertible pulled over by the police officer, the staged auto wreck, the carnival, the “working” (i.e. moving) log loader which doesn’t really do any work, etc.
The fact is, the real world is as chock a block with lonely tracks running through nothing as our layouts are full of bridges, crossings, switches and curves. Taking the space to capture even a little of that effect seems counterintuitive to many of us, but there have been numerous examples of layouts that really pull the viewer in as a result of this negative space.
I’m stuck with a relatively small layout space, and I really like a complex operating scheme, so my layout doesn’t do justice to this element of railroading. At least not in person. I’m trying to include some vignettes that offer the feel of “nothing” at least in my photographs…
As I think about it more I feel I need to chim in more on this subject. i haven’t modeled anything yet, but I am kind of a scenery guy. I will be limited to a very small layout in N gauge, so I was looking at hollow core doors and foam board but this last issue of MR featured the paper shell scenery technique and I honestly feel I need to build with this, so I’m chaning my thinking on layout construction.
Also, I grew up in a small sleepy town next to a lake in central WIS. Area is surrounded by narrow rivers, small creeks, and tree’s on hills beyond eye site. I know live NE WIS so pretty much the same but more flatter terrain, and my wife has family in the North Woods. So for me, if a feature doesn’t include some rolling hills, a creek or river, fields, and 5 lbs of trees in a 10 lb bag, it doesn’t seam realistic.
On the same hand I also recognize that someone who grew up in say Arizona or Nevada would say the same about what I think, and feel that a layout doesn’t seem ‘realistic’ unless its flat, tan, and sandy; while someone who grew up in big city life like Chicago would say the same about sleepy little towns and only huge, tall, sprawling urban settings being the most realistic.
I guess it comes down to what pretty much every modeler says on the forums. It’s all about what you want, not someone else.
The problem is most modelers, (me included) tend to over-populate our scenes,People working, walking,etc,or too many industries on a stretch of layout.Too busy. Maybe we need to look at the real world to some extent. Maybe put a gas station with one car in a bay and a few cars parked outside,but no one pumping gas,checking oil,etc, the people are indoors out of sight fixing the car. Or a factory with a loading dock without workers or pallets of materials,and a parking area with a half dozen cars,everything is indoors as expected.The same with station scenes, why have a dozen people always waiting for a train? Why not an empty platform and some parked cars, you get the same effect. The nice thing about boxcars,covered hoppers and tank cars is we can model them empty or full, so trains parked or moving give the illusion of being used
I took a train ride a few years ago from Binghamton to Syracuse,except for going through the towns it was nothing but trees, fields and riverside, mundane.mh
