All layouts are dioramas. Only the trains have life. It is always 2:00 in the afternoon regardless of how much the trains move around and do their assigned work.
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The guy never walks into the hardware store. The city bus never pulls away from the passenger shelter. That dog never moves away from the fire hydrant. The police offcier has had the same car pulled over in the same spot for as long as anyone can remember.
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Just because the electric trains move around, that does not change anything else. Even those crazy masterpieces of animated “train layouts” that we see in YouTube videos from Europe, are still just dioramas with a bit more animation.
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The leaves will never turn brown and fall to the ground. Snow will never come, turn to slush, freeze into ice, then melt away. New flowers will never bloom.
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My railroad exists right at a point where it was perfect. Nothing will ever age any further and rust away. Rails will never be torn up when the businesses close, and no one will ever move away for a brighter future in a bigger city.
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2:00 PM, Tuesday, August 3rd, 1954 in the township of Willoughby on the SGRR mainline.
To decide what particular year and/or season is “best” you need fairly specific prototype interests. For example, I wanted to model Santa Fe in Oklahoma, and picked May/June 1964. That year, ATSF had a good mix of 1st and 2nd generation diesels I liked and was still running not only passenger trains with headend mail/express but also outright mail trains - which really interested me. The season, meanwhile, coincides with the wheat harvest and seasonal stock moves, so provides for a bit more local industry traffic than other times of the year (rail livestock traffic was almost, but not quite, done by '64).
If your interests aren’t quite that particular, then I agree with others that you might be better off modeling a range rather than one particular year. For freight, you’ve got the same problem of long cars being at least reasonably common (on mainlines at least) throughout your entire '61-'73 range. But for passenger operations, as others have pointed out, you really have two very different worlds: before and after the post office contract cancellation in fall 1967. Not only were there fewer passenger trains after that, but the survivors looked very different, with virtually no head-end cars other than maybe a single baggage car for checked luggage.
So, if you want passenger trains, I’d suggest picking a narrower range either before or after that big change. In the earlier era, you get to use interesting stuff like RPOs, converted troop sleeper express boxcars, and so on, while in the later era you can have fun mingling passenger equipment painted for various roads as well as Amtrak all in one train, which was totally the norm in the early Amtrak years.
I can run longer cars successfully, and after significant research I find many people with limited space have to ignore the overhang of long cars as long as you can get them to run reliably. And after reviewing a bunch of youtube videos and pictures I think you really have to get beyond something like 40" radius before anything really starts to have any kind of realism anyway. And as it’s my railroad, I think I can live with the toylike appearance in favor of having the rest of my givens and druthers. That said longer cars will still likely be limited in use. Even though this probably means a bit less 40’ cars I can still keep the 60’s to a minimum with just enough to give it a bit of credibility.
So far I think this discussion has led me toward modeling a time about 1966-1971 as “my” era. Pretty much where I started. Toward the end of the era I can run a very eclectic groups of passneger cars as the beginning days of Amtrak if I so choose, which means I can pick up the odd car here and there when a deal can be had, instead of investing a large chunk of change for a complete high end set. Or if I do acquire a set, I can run an earlier year.
I can just run an occasional run through from staging to staging of an 89’ trailer train if I want, or even skip them altogether and just imagine they come through this stretch overnight when I’m not there.
In either case, a layout given is it is set in semi-fictional parts of the northeast, and although I started out and have collected some Pennsy equipment, I grew up around Erie-Lackawaana and am a bit partial to it. So as I contin
In the olden days, many model railroaders used what they called a “cut off year” to describe their layout, as in “I don’t like diesels, so my layout’s cut off year is 1929” or “I don’t like “Big Sky Blue”, so my GN layout’s cut off year is 1966” or something like that. Anything from the cutoff year or earlier was OK, but nothing after that year was allowed.
That is exactly what I did with my N scale “Dream House” layout. My cut off year was 1968. Anything with a build date 1969 or later was not considered, but I gave little worry to what could have been gone by 1968 that was manuafactured earlier. I had no steam locomotives, so any anachronism there was avoided.
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My current roster-building is about the same. I might have equipment that would not have still been around in 1954, but nothing that has not been manufactured yet.
The Union Pacific models that Kato made I checked the years when the red sill was being replaced with yellow. In which looks awful and no brake between the yellow and grey on the bottom.
I also cutoff Conrail in 1989 because they switched the number boards from black to white and added the white sill with Conrail Quality logo.