What if the prototype town on your layout really did have these?
A) Pickle factory
D) Candy factory
I give you Holland, Michigan. There is a Heinz plant that has been there for decades and was a Lifesavers plant there for many years. (The plant gave off a very sweet smell.)
After I read the article, I had much the same thougths, though not the pickle/candy factory. For example, in Fig 3, they show several Victorians and a haunted house (same picture as the pickle factory) as incorrect, but several one story white worker houses as correct. In fact, both are correct, just depends on where you are in town. Many southern towns, such as the one I live in now, have a row of Victorian “mansions” right across the tracks near the depot. And depending on the era being modeled, at least one is likely run down and “haunted” (though for a modern layout perhaps it needs some workers and a TV crew shooting the next episode of a TV show). And to add insult to injury, along that stretch of track there was a propane dealor that looks like it’s right out of Walters catalog; a grocery wholesaler that was barely bigger than the box and reefers that served it; a warehouse; a billet factor; and a tannery. And across the road is a small downtown park with a bandstand right next to a bar.
Just trying to say that both examples can be correct, but what you wouldn’t see is Victorians and small worker houses intermingled with one another, mostly, though there are exceptions.
jim
I live in a “Victorian” house who’s property once backed up to the now gone Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad. The 1914 Ma & Pa station still stands a block away (it is a model train store, at least for awhile longer, the owner is retiring), and our little village of Forest Hill which dates to 1859 is full of Victorian houses like mine:
For twenty three years I have taken my children and grandchildren to a waterfront park in Havre de Grace, MD, a city which the old PRR northeast corridor mainline cuts right though. That park has a classic gazebo bandstand…this is the house I just restored for a client, right across the street from the bandstand:
This house is just eight or ten blocks from the tracks, which cut thought the town on a mostly elevated embankment just before they cross the Susquahanna River. The town is full of houses like this, many in clear sight of the tracks…and the town is full of 100 year old “working class” housing as well…
In fact, the way the tracks cut through the town, is like a something you expect to see on a simple layout, tracks raised on a fill mound, and a series of bridges at each city street…
We have a homemade candy factory just down the road a few miles that has been in business for nearly 70 years…
Lance and Neil can model what they think is “realistic”, I will model the places where I live which are “realistic”.
Part of Lance’s problem is that he is a “shelf” guy, only modeling what is right near the tracks…that’s where he gets this kind of thinking. Some of us want to capture more than the 150’ on each side of the tracks…my house was only about 400’ from the tracks…
Sheldon
I don’t think Neil and Lance’s point was to argue that the examples given couldn’t happen. Instead, they argued that such examples are often over-represnted in what is modeled.
Not only those type of industries but,many others like scrap yards,lumber companies,coal mines and large storage tanks.
This may be mind boggling to some but,those industries I mention may not even be rail served.
And the points made by myself and others above are that over represented is a matter of opinion, and highly dependant on what, where and when you choose to model, not a matter of realism.
I’ll tell you what is over represented, Union Pacfic Big Boys, any 4-8-4 (considering there were only about 700 of them in all of North America) and a bunch of other high image, low quantity of prototype locomotives cranked out by the manufacturers. That is just my opinion.
But, that is apparently what the people want…or at least what they settle for…
There is great layout not too far from me that models the N&W in great detail. A large section of the town of Luray Va is modeled accurately house for house, too many cute turn of the century houses to be realistic? But it is not a shelf layout, the scene is more than 5 feet deep at that point. It is one of the most realistic layouts I have ever seen.
Just my view, Lance is welcome to his.
Sheldon
I’ve seen shelf layouts with more realistic detail in that 5 feet then some basement filling layouts had in all its size.
Attention to detail is what makes a great layout not the size.
Personally I would rather have one highly detailed and fully believable shelf layout then a basement filling layout that lacks detail and believability…If one choose to look the majority of those basement fillers suffers from “Here a track,there a track everywhere a track” planning.
Larry,
LOL…I agree. [Y]
Take Care! [:D]
Frank
The point is that it attracts attention. Sure they are attractive houses, but is that where you want the attention to be.
Once upon a time, when I ran freight cars on the layout, I wouold only allow 40’ brown cars. The train looks longer that way since the eye cannot focus on one point in the train, but continually sweeps up and down making the train look longer. You go and put abright RED or Green box car on that train and the eye locks on to it and you only see that car and ignore the rest of the train. Ergo, the train seems shorter: Is that all there is?
ROAR
I really don’t think Neil’s point was to keep things to near trackside, though that may be Lance’s approach. What I think Neil is on about is hitting up 10 different layouts and every one has that same haunted house kit on it. Or the house on fire kit. I’m sure you could find examples where there’s one old Victorian standing in a 50’s tract house development, but that would be rare and odd. Equally odd would be the opposite, modeling a Victorian era town and then throwing in a 70’s modern house in the middle (though perhaps more likely - not all those glorious old Victorians are properly maintained). You might spill this over to the ‘cutesy’ industries and names - does everyone’s model town need a Dewey, Cheatham & Howe law office? How big IS that firm anyway if they are all over the country?
I think the editorial was about being more realistic - so if you are modeling a town that DID have a pickle plant - well, the realistic thing is to include the pickle plant. Just randomly throwing different industries on to have industries, without regard for what makes sense for the area you are modeling - that’s the sort of thing I feel he was talking about.
–Randy
I am not really sure what we are actually discussing here. It seems to me that this is more of an “art pour l´art” discussion, as there is a prototype for just about anything we can imagine for our layouts. A street with a row of Victorian houses next to factories and simple worker´s homes - not unlikely. A Swiss chalet style house next to a cement loading facility - not unreal in Switzerland.
If you like it, than it´s probably OK.
OTOH, Sheldon´s post with those beautiful Victorian homes reminded me once again, how young a nation the US are. The earliest found settlement on the place I live in dates back to about 500BC, townhood was granted at the time of the crusades, the right to hold court was granted in the early 17th centure - 5 years before the Mayflower sailed off - yet we don´t have homes as pretty as the ones shown.
Not the case with the layout I’m refering to. Readers from this area likely know the layout. It is actually an example of my thinking, large but simple in terms of track, lots of scenery, deep, well detailed scenes.
And I don’t consider a 5’ deep scene a “shelf” layout. Shelf layouts have 2’ deep scenes, or less.
Sheldon
One guy’s whimsy is another guy’s silly. I for one agree with Lance that believability, not necessarily realism, is achieved by modeling the ordinary. OTOH, I also agree with the most overused quote/excuse on this forum… “It’s your railroad…”
BTW, the idea of modeling the ordinary is not new.
Completely agreed. I’m real big on modeling “ordinary”, but ordinary is very different from one area to another.
100 year old houses are rather common here in the Mid Atlantic, some well cared for, some not. And many are near railroad tracks given the nature of transportation in 1900.
Sheldon
In a way, this thread makes a case in point for scratch building, or kit bashing at the least. I think Neil’s point is accurate in that one can place more emphasis on the “actors”, i. e. the trains themselves, and not enough attention to the “Set”, i. e. the scenic details, which, in my opinion, are what make the trains more interesting, as well as portraying a purpose for that model railroad. In the work that I’ve seen of Lance Mindheim’s, he portrays that very well. At the same time, he keeps the track configuration very simple, leaving more room for those scenic details.
Tom,
You are expressing my thoughts on many a layout I have seen in my “career” of 53 years in this hobby. Quite often too much emphasize is put on the track plan and too little attention to the scenery and the setting of the layout. Scenery and structures are there to fill the gaps in between the tracks, giving the layout a rather “fabricated” than natural look. This goes for the scenery as well as for the structures placed on the layout.
Whenever I see a layout my fellow German model railroaders have built, I seem to have a deja vu - I have seen it before. No, of course I have not, but I have seen all the buildings before on other layouts. Hardly a soul goes through the pain of creating a bespoke, scratchbuilt building for a particular scene. It´s all those Faller, Vollmer, Kibri, Auhagen buildings that make the layouts all look alike.
The British show us how to do it!
I think we can all agree that, at the very least, Neil met the primary goal of any editorial, which is to be thought provoking.
My reaction generally is that his editorial would have made its points stronger, oh, about 40, 50 or more years ago, when the comparatively limited selection of plastic structure kits and figures, and the strong resistance to kitbashing that some modelers expressed, did tend to result in the same cliches being seen on layout after layout. If you visited a layout, it was almost a matter of a checklist: “Atlas lumber yard? check. Revell interlocking tower? check. Plasticville signal bridge? check. LifeLike freight station? check. Atlas turntable? check. Mrs. Spumoni hanging laundry? check.”
Dave Nelson
In the backyard of the only residence on my layout, there are a couple of hunters field dressing a velociraptor hanging from an A frame hoist. I doubt they had a permit for it.
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Pickle factories and haunted houses make things fun. How does someone have the restraint to build a model railroad and not make it fun?
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-Kevin
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I agree, and that might have been what Neil was driving at. But it is a separate topic from what Lance was saying. Lance did not address the issue of over used “stock” commercial structures, he spoke specificly about bland vs interesting, about plan vs fancy, about less vs more.
For some the scenery/structures are an equal “player” with the trains, I wonder what Howard Zane might have to say…
Again, I am all for scratch or kit bashed structures to maintain originality, the question here is what kind?
Sheldon
Agreed!