And none of that will help him design industrial area since they take on a life form of their own to include trash roll offs filled with proper trash,broken pallet stacks and open air storage for old 55 gallon drums.
The “business” side of a industry doesn’t include a manicured lawn look with perfect ballast…
There are so many different ways to model railroad. It’s a great hobby.
Indeed it is… I know I have enjoyed my 60 years in the hobby even though I’ve always favored the rugged looks of a industrial area and switching…
I like both the down and gritty, and the sweeping vistas of country.
Mike.
Yes he nailed it. I grew up in central Nebraska and the names he uses for businesses suggest he visited the Grand Island/Gibbon area as his resource. Big double tracked-UP mainline and lots of long trains in the area (not to mention a lot of Danish heritage). The scenery might look generic to many, but it looked just like the surrounding area I grew up in. Its not exactly the same as other parts of the midwest.
Congrats to Pelle for that.
But it can, though, if you pick the right time and place. There’s plenty of industrial parks out there that have well groomed ballast and track running through immaculately kept landscaping. Not everything is a blasted crater in a brownfield.
This: https://goo.gl/maps/TRTuw8jSfpP2 is a spur in my neighborhood that went out of service in 2012 or 2013. It hasn’t changed at all since then, though. It goes through two parks and bypasses people’s yards. If I ever built an Alexandria VA ~2010 layout, I’d have to do manicured lawns and everything.
Take a closer look…That well maintain area is not in a industrial park and the ballast isn’t the type most modelers like to use since its thin and not well maintain like ballast on a busy main line… There is also a hiking or bike path next to the track.
The business side of any industry is pretty rugged looking.The pretty side always faces the public’s view but,when modeling a industrial area that’s the side we don’t model.
One of the important things we need to learn the industry’s siding beyond the derail or gate belongs to the industry not the serving railroad.
It’s amazing how the view that “it’s my railroad, I’ll do what I want” fails to translate into “it’s your railroad, you can do what you want”.
And therefore people woo and ahhh over Pelle’s layout when they can do the same or better by dumping that worn out saying “Its my railroad” which really means I can half step instead of putting my best foot foward…
Here’s what we should remember: Every great layout starts by the modeler taking extra steps toward believability and realism. A concept that isn’t hard to master and takes so little time to do…
This is abundantly clear by virtue of the frequency with which he presents new layouts in MR. He likes to paint, so-to-speak, but has no particular use for the painting except to place it in the window and hope somebody will drop in and offer to purchase it. I am actually very much in favour of his approach to the hobby if he finds that his free time is fulfilling and keeps him busy and contented. It’s not like his finished product is less than first class…the man knows what he’s doing.
To the topic, every one of us learns, often over three or four layouts, what he likes to do with it once it is operational. For my style of ops, I need the around-the-walls configuration so that I can stand in the central operating ‘pit’ and turn as the trains run through my scenery, backdrop providing its own contribution to the reality behind the trains. It’s not highly conducive to cramming a lot of tracks into the works without making it look busy and contrived, so I live with a yard, and one or two switchbacks offering access to at least two industries each. That suffices for me. Our OP needs to figure out what he needs from his track plan, and from there he must use his space to generate the best track plan he can craft for his needs. It’s not like we haven’t had a couple of well-established minimalists in the hobby whose work was greatly admired before Pelle’s (and I would not call him a minimalist at all in the same context).
Even where the spur ends at the warehouses was nice and clean, as is the power plant that was on the line too. Study the whole thing, not just my pic from one grade crossing
The big industrial park, with chemical plants, coal load out, cement plant, and steel fabricator in Leetsdale PA has tracks lined with bushes. The southeast is loaded with nice neat, clean industrial customers. It’s everywhere, if you look.
We have lots of neat, clean and well maintained industrial areas around here too.
Many of which are rail served…
And once again, there is a difference between functional clutter (stack of pallets, a few drums, etc), and normal weathering vs trash, neglect, deterioration, decay…
Sheldon
And location fits in…One tidy photo doesn’t paint the whole photo of industrialized areas…
I’ll have to say it’s a LOT cleaner than when I lived in the apartments across the tracks. Coal was piled everywhere and everything in the plant seemed to be covered in coal dust.
Paul