In the indomitable quest for empire, it is all too easy for a modeler’s ambition to overreach his physical dominion and thus, strain credulity. Here at the world-renowned and internationally-acclaimed Philosophy Friday Pan-Galatic Headquarters, we care about model railroaders and don’t want them to strain anything other than freshly-cooked spaghetti. So to help out in this decidedly debatable debate, we’re presenting a survey in the form of a simple question or two and asking:
- How many miles would a modeler model if a modeler could model miles?
My Questions For Today:
– If a train leaves Los Angeles at 3:00 heading for Chicago, while simultaneously a train departs New York bound for Topeka… all on the same layout… how long will it take the viewer to go “yeah, right.” ???
– What do you think the maximum distance is a layout can span before its premise strains credulity? (Hint: There may be more than one answer, or the answer might vary according to circumstances… which are…??)
As always, I’m looking forward to your opinions and comments, and photos too if you got 'em!
OK John, I’ll bite on this one, since I’m actually here at home today.
For me, with 800 plus sq feet, two decks, and about 8 scale miles of double track, as you know since you have a copy of part of the track plan, my goal is to give the impression of about 40-50 miles either side of a subdivision terminal - or about 100 miles total.
This is partly based on operational considerations since in steam days 100 miles was the typical “turn” for a crew here in the east. I use the helix between levels to “stretch out” the perceived distance between both ends of the line. And both “ends” meet in the same staging yard, partly hidden.
Based on my experiances and other large layouts I have seen and operated on, much father than this seems to really stretch things.
One modeler in our group is only modeling the PRR as it passes through Baltimore, a distance along the minline of not more than about 20-25 miles. And his layout fills a 26 x 45 basement and will be 3 levels when completed - and still not mile for mile duplication, but he does have a full sized model of Baltimore’s Penn Station.
Obviously other layout goals and chosen prototype have a big effect on this question, but depending on space, goals and prototype, anything less than 100 miles is likely to be very believable in my view.
I am not sure what size of a layout you are talking about, but an average sized layout, spanning all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific will not evoke any “yeah, right” comments. There is just too much “in between” which cries for being covered. I have seen a number of show layouts where you could move from the Alps to the Baltic Sea coast in a few moments, and the comments were mostly “well, yes…”. Lack of plausibility can ruin an otherwise good work.
2 question really gets me. If you take a look at the Miniatur Wunderland layout(s), I am inclined to say, you can span the world. But actually, those folks did not build one layout, it is a number of various layouts, each focused on a specific theme. There is a part depicting northern Germany, another one for southern Germany/Austria, Scandinavia, Switzerland, the US - more to come.
IMHO, you can do anything you like when building a toy layout. Talking about a model railroad, focusing on a single theme wins more credibility and does not strain the credulity of the viewer.
I think with staging you can cover any distance you want. You just won’t be modeling that distance. My layout only covers the immediate area around Mankato. It’s believable to the eye until you run any freight at all. You wouldn’t run freight from one area on the layout to another. That’s why I tend to run passenger equipment.
I think if I had enough room in a large enough space I would make a good effort to try to model the CSX line from home town of Douglas, Ga through Waycross and Folkston and on too Jacksonville Florida. It is about 120 mile and not very exciting but I would my MRR license and scale it down to abut 1200 feet of track and add in a few industries, a yard at the start which my home town does not have and maybe a few other smaller made up towns.
Mine’s about like Sheldon’s. I’ve got a division point yard, so the traffic comes from one staging yard, gets worked in the yard, then goes across the layout to the other staging yard. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.
The modeled portion represents a substantially compressed 150 miles, from Hagerstown and environs to Elkins, West Virginia. The Connellsville sub is represented less completely, terminating in staging.
The trouble with trying to model too many miles, is the trains themselves would change as substantially as the scenery. On the prototype, whole blocks of cars will come and go, and even road power will be changed out based on the demands of the particular divisions being crossed.
I think 100 to 200 miles is the max that can be represented (not actually modeled) to keep the ops plausible.
I model the C&S NG area around Como Colorado, but I tend to think of my layout as a collection of C&S vignettes, connected by a plausible mainline. I have a vignette for Kenosha, jefferson, Como, Fairplay, Boreas Pass, and even one for the Argo Tunnel. Totally implausible from a prototype perspective, but I think the layout will capture the “flavor” of the C&S.
– What do you think the maximum distance is a layout can span before its premise strains credulity?
It depends on how much the scenery changes.
The Vancouver waterfront is about 5 miles long. That would be a layout consisting of about 300’ in length if you were to model that to scale. It is the end of the line for the C.P.R. You would just have a giant switching layout if that is what you modeled. Other than coal trains tying into the mainline at Golden, the next stop is the other side of the Rockies over 700 miles away in Calgary. Of course the farther back in time you go the more RR based infrastructure there was along the way and the more stops. How many feet of HO track do I need between Vancouver and Calgary to make this believable?
I squeezed as much wilderness as I could between the two points on my layout that even resemble civilization. I am lucky enough to have enough space that I can have my trains completely in to their destinations to make it believable. I didn’t model Vancouver and Calgary because it was not believable in the least that these were the places they were suppose to be. I made one end a RR town with a small yard and service facilities located in the Rockies, and the other will be a one elevator prairie town with co-ops, fuel facilities and a small main street. Just enough switching for me. I like to sit back and see them snake through the mountains.
I think so many of us model what we grew up with and what we are familiar with. To me and in Canada that is the vast amounts of wilderness that lie between stops. Hundreds of miles sometimes.
Having one freight train in two towns at the same time is realistic to others as they live in places more populated. What’s believable is what ever you are comfortable believing. They say that sometimes less is more. Where I like to spend time watching trains and exploring RR ghost towns, less is all there is.
That’s me too. Each “vignette” is a town along the main line. My “longest distance traveled” covers about 550 miles in about a 144 foot linear run of modeled main line, and that’s not using any staging. I do have an open staging yard that represents both ends of my RR as two interchange yards, with a division point not quite in the middle of the run. Because of that, I can just run trains and rail-fan part of the layout if I want to.
My room size is 9x24 and the layout goes around the walls. (The main line goes twice around in a single line configuration passing through five towns, not including staging which just has RR names for both interchanges.)
That’s probably a pretty aggressive piece of real-estate to model, but I am free-lancing. One of my towns (Port Chesapeake) has a fictitious name, but the other town names are real for the area covered in the layout.
I’m with Sheldon in believing that the maximum believable length is a day’s run for a crew. As for the Say WHAT?? factor, that’s a function of the size of the layout, and how much of it can be seen from one spot:
4 x 8 - the CNJ Bronx terminal is believable, anything bigger is a ???
Shelf, one wall - a linear commercial district a few hundred yards in extent. Selective compression and imagineering might stretch that to about a mile.
A well-folded dogbone filling a double garage, where it’s impossible to see both ends at the same time and neither end can be seen from the middle - could model New York at one end, Chicago in the middle and Los Angeles at the far end, but no way could it be operated in a believable manner.
A 747 hangar and multi-megabucks - either a model of Rhode Island or the entire US selectively compressed. Operation wouldn’t be, Say WHAT?? It would be, Ho-hum.m.m.zzzzz.
Personally, I have that well-folded dogbone in a double garage. I’ve chosen to model about ten kilometers (2 stations) of the government monopoly (Class Zero?) and a thirteen kilometer shortline with four total stations, one of which is the interchange station shared with the monopoly. There’s no place where the entire layout can be seen, and no place where the entire modeled portion of either railroad can be seen at the same time. The entire business can be operated from a single location, but it requires a few steps, turning around and some neck stretching to do it.
OK…I’ll poke at this can of worms with something of a tape measure…my basement empire(HAH!!) is a round 3 walls and a peninsula up the middle…56’X35"X48’…and in N scale no less…oh…the middle peninsula is 59’…did I say I had a full basement all to mineself? MMMUUUUAAAAHHAAAAHHAAAA!!![:-,][(-D]
This is a point to point layout so it has two division points at either end plus a Y at one end…more in the middle for the peninsula. It has been a work in progress now for about 4 years and I see a finish sometime in about 2 more years…
As to the believability factor of its OP sessions…depending on the time of the year, let’s say here, it could be a slow session with myself and maybe Audrey mucking about or a full on session with about 8 operators on it…5 trains going at the same time…you see, I am operating something like a compressed shortline here…[:-^]
My layout is in a 20’ by 25’ area - all trains. I have staging, a yard, and 2 small towns along the mainline. There is also a branch line that departs the last small town and runs to an ‘end of the line’ terminal.
Like others have mentioned, the local jobs are a ‘days work’ - the mainline jobs basically run out of staging into the division yard and then run the length of the main line to staging. Other than an occasional ‘meet’, most of the time the main line trains complete their run quite fast. The local jobs can take a hour or more to complete. I have modeled about 20 miles of railroad in 120’ of HO track. Usually folks who claim they model ‘coast to coast’ are doing it on a 4’ by 8’ , and really have no idea what it takes to ‘operate’ . If someone built a very large railroad with 100 scale miles of mainline, I am certain they would get tired of the ‘hours’ it may take to get around the entire layout. I’ll take my 20 miles of SW Wisconsin - I can handle that!
My layout is basically three peninsulas – each one represents a different city. I have Cleveland, Chicago and Kansas City. Why? Because I couldn’t decide on a railroad. I love the PRR, CB&Q, CNW and CGW, so by modeling this much area, I can run them all. Each railroad (CNW and CGW share) has its own space and they interchange traffic to each other. The scenery is mainly all city and heavy industry and it all blends together.
Some people like modeling 25 miles in detail, just the way it was. I model half the United States requiring a big stretch of imagination. And both of us have fun, which is what it is all about.
There are times I’ve thought hypothetically about the issues related to modeling an entire railroad - let’s say it’s a short line serving 3 towns that are spaced 30 miles apart - what would the operating and viewing experience be like? This is what I imagine:
I’d spend an hour or so assembling a train in Town A and then my train would head off to Town B. I’d have a walk-around throttle so I could walk through my warehouse-sized building with my train. At 30 scale miles an hour, my train arrives at Town B an hour later and I have walked a little over 1/5 of a mile keeping up with it. At Town B I pick up and drop off a few cars and head off toward Town C. At Town C I disperse the cars and service the locomotive, assemble another train and head back toward Town B. Two+ hours later I’m back at Town A; my operating session has lasted a total of about 8 hours and I have walked nearly half a mile.
Besides the obvious challenges related to space and distance, when I think of it such an arrangement sounds fairly boring (4 hours of walking beside a tiny train). But that’s not how we really do things, and I think it’s not just because our train rooms are too small for 60 scale miles of track; I think we do it because you can only watch a train on open track for so long, then boredome sets in.
What we really do in our hobby is condense the distances so that the long stretches are left to imagination and we focus our attention on the really interesting stuff that happens at towns, logging camps, sawmills, factories, etc. My opinion is that we all accept this as part of what defines our hobby - we make railroads in room-sized boxes and consider them representations of the real thing. The 1:1 railroads never have to deal with the fact that there is a wall/water heater/furnace in the way. They have other issues, but they never run into the one that is most basic to us.
My layout is exactly the same distance if it was 1:1 scale, done in 1:160. At the bottom it comes from south of staging past the mine and South valley yard then winds its way around the valley and climbs out to head off to north staging.
At the south end off the layout is the industrial yard of South Valley that takes A/D for the local industries from the north and south staging. It is also the yard for interchange from BNSF.
I did it this way after reading the article in MRR about the AT&SF Argentine yard. I really liked the idea of having what you see is the portion of the RR being modeled.
Given how far apart towns and cities are in the real world I think you have two choices for the credulity you are referring to.
One is to model one place with as much of it as your space will allow fitting in whatever features are there. For most of us, this will probably be under 5 miles. Even a large basement will be hard pressed to do more than 25 miles even in one of the tiny scales.
Two is to model a series of vignettes as described earlier. The vignette motif can stretch as far as you want. For example you could model the NYC from New York to Chicago. One vignette is a part of New York, a second is a part of Chicago, with another one or two as intermediate towns for your 20th Century limited to roar through.
I think where layouts get in trouble is in not sufficiently separating the vignettes. Ideally your train completely leaves one scene before it enters the next. Having your engine at Point of Rocks while your caboose is beneath the St Louis Arch kind of blows credulity out the window. The intervals can either be unsceniced or have very generic scenery.
I suspect for most of us, at least for me, we do it imperfectly so as to include all the stuff we want. In my case, I just won’t have enough distance between the towns. But by putting them on different sides of the aisle it should work well enough.
When I was 11, Dad was completing a 24 foot by 6 foot Lionel layout. We took a vacation trip from Texas to California to see grandparents and Disneyland, and I got to experience a cross-section of the West. Back in Texas, I painted the middle six feet of the 24-foot layout length a sandy-beige color. That was the desertlands of New Mexico and Arizona. The right ten feet of the layout was Texas and the left eight feet was Southern California. Dad let me do it, as long as I didn’t mess with the track or wiring. Now, I am not so sure it was convincing. Or plausible.
I remember a two-level layout. One level represented several towns in Kansas, the other some scenes in Arizona. Both parts were very credible- when considered separately. I am glad the modeler had a chance toi build both scenes. But running a train through Kansas and five minutes later, the same train, same consist, going through Arizona-- well, it strained credibility.
Thirty years ago, I had an idea for a dream layout-- all the interesting scenes and topographies within 50 miles all directions of Houston, Texas. Big cosmopolitan city with multiple districts, blackland river valley farm town with some German Lutheran heritage, East Texas piney woods town with forest industries and some of the culture of the edge of the South, coastal plains riceland, a refining center and a medium-sized city at an island seaport.
Would have taken a 30 foot square “train palace” building even in N scale…and a lot of selective compression. I wanted SOME relatively open space between towns and between different types of scenes-- at least a train length. But my train length could be compressed- 25 cars + motive power for N scale. Real trains are longer but that is about as much as a viewer can grasp. And that would be a "s
I like the idea of modeling a larger urban area-- perhaps a “large” small town / small “big” city-- so that most of the operations occur in and around the city. And then model a few towns out beyond the city, and perhaps a connecting branch line to the next larger city or something. So instead of trying to model huge distances, it’d be more of concentrating on operations in and around the city, and servicing the local run to the next city. That seems like a much more reasonable and plausible proposition (to me at least). And it could offer lots of operational possibilities and interesting industries to work with.
I also like the idea of “vignettes” which are strung together to represent various locations along a larger route. That seems like a very sensible way of modeling larger distances and yet still keeping it reasonable and manageable. It also makes it easier for a visitor to enjoy it without being overwhelmed (or else maybe bored) at a large expanse.
I’d wager that there is kind of a “sweet spot” for operational distance between towns on a model railroad-- typical “constraining” factors notwithstanding. Meaning that if a modeler had “unlimited” space and budget and could build anything he wanted to play with and operate-- there would probably still be some distance between towns that seemed “most right” before the run became monotonous or boring.
You guys are making a lot of good observations! I always enjoy reading the responses to the PF posts!
If a train leaves Los Angeles at 3:00 heading for Chicago, while simultaneously a train departs New York bound for Topeka… all on the same layout… how long will it take the viewer to go “yeah, right.” ???
Without staging as soon as the owner opens his bean hopper.Staging can make it believable because the trains is arriving from point A from the West and point B from the East which is “off” layout.
What do you think the maximum distance is a layout can span before its premise strains credulity?
With staging none with a close loop—well—Its hard to fool the eye or mind.
Now then, in all cases imagination plays a major roll since we know the trains came from staging or x many laps(miles) between point A and Point B on a loop layout.
I think Larry said it pretty well, “in all cases imagination plays a major roll.”
I’ve seen one N scale layout that had a helix on both ends of a continuous loop. The layout is a single level, but terraced so that the track at the rear of the layout is about a foot higher than the track near the front. The helices are hidden inside tunnels, so the train disappears into a tunnel and it’s gone for quite a while (the helices have lots of laps), then it emerges some distance away and at a different elevation. Having watched this layout a few times, I can say it is very effective in creating the illusion that the train has gone a long way.
In HO scale, such a layout would be tough to pull off, because helices must be so large, but in N scale or Z scale it seems to be an effective strategy.
