Philosophy Phriday

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

With each new venture in our lives, we learn something about ourselves…or ought to…if we’re reasonably ‘well-adjusted.’ I just answered some questions a person posted on another hobby forum about trains. The questions were about product design, and they asked what stumbling blocks are there in the hobby, or in the various products available.

My own answers got me to think for a minute about my own learning, my own realizations, or revelations brought by self-awareness and a desire to improve myself.

The late Scottish philosopher William Ross, who died mid-last century, proposed that there are seven ‘duties’:

Justice;

Fidelity;

Gratitude for favours;

Promise-keeping;

Beneficence;

Non-maleficence; and

Self-improvement.

My question to any of you who’d like to play is:

What have you learned about yourself in the context of model trains?

Thanks for engaging the topic if you do.

-Crandell

2

I was in my late fifties when I got back into the hobby 18 years ago. First, I learned that I can learn new tricks, as it was, in fact, a brave new world. And, I found out that I really could do better. My skills had not topped out, and I can still learn, practice and improve my modeling.

3

At my age, I’ve added some patience to my personality as I learned some Arduino basics. I’ve never had any computer or electronic background, but I thought I would breeze through the lessons. I didn’t. It took a lot of learning and patience, in spite of my attitude.

4

Oh are you opening up a can of worms. I have learned how pointless things are, that being said I have learned to carry on anyway and trainwise, things have gone in both directions as far detailing and complexity. We have the extreams in both directions. Used to be most wanted the best of everything from details to electronics, now just have many are trying for the other direction with things like Lego trains.

5

Thanks for your answers, gentlemen.

I had wondered if I should pony up and go first, but I worried that I might influence the discussion more than I have already with my question and preamble.

Regrettably, I have a temper. It used to be a problem now and then, mostly well-controlled. I have been known to break things, mostly by throwing them, when I got angry. Fortunately, it has been many years since I did that, and I have never done it in the setting of the train room. As a grandfather, I am more patient, maybe more resilient and tolerant of not having my way. In that sense, Ross would be pleased that I have improved myself in that respect.

Like most of you, I have learned that I can still learn relatively easily and master whatever I put my mind to. Motivation goes a long way, and I really do enjoy the subject of trains and their scale representations. Also, I can’t afford to throw anything against the wall on a fixed income. [(-D]

I still look for shortcuts. I can’t say it ever presented a problem for me, but everyone around me knew when I had given short shrift to an effort; it showed. Sometimes it shows up, still, in my trackwork and scenery. Somehow, I learned early that decent planning of a model train layout was going to be key to my success, and I have yet to short-change myself that way. Later, in getting it realized, I can sometimes be hasty or forgetful and get ahead of myself. It means fixing things that should have been done right the first time. Not often, but I have caught myself once or twice and regretted it. I need to find a way to curb that approach to getting to running trains.

One surprise, just this time around, is how much I enjoy building a layout. I ground the first three out in jig time. They were good, but I didn’t like repetitive tasks such as cutting track and making joints, or the ballasting…worst of all is rail painting. Oy.

6

Ooodles of this.

Terry

7

Well for me, I have learned to show gratitude for favors.

I have always willingly shared what I have learned, sometimes too willingly, but never expecting anything from anyone else.

So, at a certain point in my hobby “career”, which spans over five decades now, people started giving me stuff. As if they saw me as a good steward of these items they no longer had use of. And interestingly, they have often been items of value to my modeling efforts.

Things they could have easliy sold for a few dollars, or hung onto “just in case”.

At first it was hard to accept that people wanted to give me suff. But I came to realize it makes them feel good to trust that these items will be appreciated here, on the ATLANTIC CENTRAL.

And so I learned the importance of being a humble and gracious receiver of gifts, a skill I somewhat lacked in my day to day life.

I have never been one to like surprises, Christmas can actually being stressful from the standpoint of receiving gifts that I don’t need or want.

Now I’m better about all that…

Sheldon

8

I’ve gotten a little better at not getting daunted by the enormity of the task in front of me. It’s always been too easy to fall to the side and fret that I will never finish this project, but the fact is I will never finish this project. And that turns out to be a good thing. Every day I do a little of this and a little of that and (always keeping the Big Picture in mind) make a little positive progress. And I’m enjoying it.

Robert

9

Robert, good to hear from you. I’ve been a little quiet on here too, very busy here with work, family and the layout room prep.

I will be starting a new thread soon on the layout build - finally!

Your post here struck a note for me, I had to learn early on both in my work and in modeling to not be overwhelmed but the size of a task.

In my business of restoring old houses, some of them can seem very overwhelming. I met with a new client today. Later she sent me a message thanking me and expressing her relief about the large task that lays ahead to restore a 4,000 sq ft 1902 property her and her husband just purchased.

Sayings I tell my customers:

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Not EVERY question has to be answered in advance.

It is easier to lead the horse than to push the wagon.

And yes, the wonderful thing about this hobby - no deadlines imposed by others…

Sheldon

10

Cannot agree more…

11

Very thoughtful answers so far. Yes, that first board cut can seem like a very slow start. Benchwork, though, has always been a breeze for me…odd because I’ve never built anything remotely like it, or as durable, in my life. Same for soldering, DCC, scenery…all new 16 years ago, but my determination and interest helped me to get better at it.

The hobby is daunting because I think we all understand, soon if not at first, that it is a complex hobby. As I said in my response to the pollster on the other forum, it looks fun and easy, but it often is neither. Ideally, the bad times are just for fleeting instances like an electrical fault or an engine that just won’t run, a hand-crafted structure that is a lot more difficult to situate properly than it ought to be.

I can understand Sheldon’s point about being gracious in receipt of anything. At times it’s a compliment, at others its well-intentioned advice or criticism. As Sheldon alludes, I have been the beneficiary at least twice of items, and many times it was outright help, such as the kindness of two members who helped me with image improvement, digitally added skies, that sort of thing. The kindnesses of strangers. I can’t speak for Sheldon, but I have worked hard at passing on those kindnesses in the hobby, I think with some success. I’m sure Sheldon can number them in the scores.

12

I would consider the most important learning that has come to me is the necessity of having success that is definable, visible, readily exploitable. My career was in human services, hearing people’s problems and issues, offering advice and counsel occasionally, standing with people who are experiencing the worst of the human experience - loss, violence, neglect, abuse, prejudice. The human experience teeters on the brink between joy and sorrow, gain and loss, with more of the latter than we grew up thinking would ever come our way.

One does not get many successes in such endeavors, so you go home at night after the church meeting that just would not end and you feel like you haven’t accomplished anything worthwhile. Then you go down to the basement, power up the system, and run something until there’s an issue, electrical, mechanical, design, execution of the plan - and then you go find a way to fix that issue. All of the issues in the basement can eventually be fixed, and the train is running again. That is one true joy of the hobby - you get to either cover-up your mistakes with more scenery or you tear it out and re-do it. Good either way.

You analyze the problem, attempt to isolate it, break it down into components, identify what those electrons are or are not doing, what those numbers mean, where the breakdown falls.

Successes in the basement off-set, balance, moderate the no-successes in the office. And that’s enough to go upstairs to bed, wake up in the morning, and keep going back to the office. The world “out there” is grey and does not have a full complement of successes over which to rejoice. The world in the basement is for the most part black-and-white, either it works or it doesn’t, and if it’s not working, get busy and fix it.

Oh, and write things down, keep a record of which wire goes where and why, what color and brand of paint you used here, what the standards for your efforts are. And it’s a hob

13

Nice to see a truly meaningful question on the Forum…

I’ve been a train nut since the mid '50s and had a layout much of that time until a bit over a year ago. I’ve been mostly in HO, but also Lionel and a short stint in N.

During that time I improved/learned a lot of skills I likely would never have been exposed to - like artistic painting, weathering, setting up scenes, electricity and electronics, design, and modeling of rolling stock and structures. I really improved on woodworking skills, and found that there is a bit of an artist inside me.

And of course I learned patience, and with that the fact that I’m pretty anal about doing stuff “right” - at least in my view. There have been several layout dilemnas I couldn’t walk away from until they were fixed - to my satisfaction.

I’ve also reinforced my belief that a good hobby - like MR - is a great pacifier for the ills of life that we face every day.

I’ve been a member of this Forum for over 20 years. It (and its generous members), has taught me so much, helping me thru some difficult problems. And in turn, its given me the opportunity to try and help others. Being the “lone wolf” that I am, this alone has been huge!

As an aside, my last two layouts (room filling) taught me a bit about others. When I would show it to visitors - family, friends, tradespeople - their response was IMO pretty revealing.

Most (having never seen a big layout before) were amazed and had a ton of questions and seemed to really appreciate it. Several were pretty blaise about it, likely thinking - but not saying - what a waste of time and money. Have to say, I believe some were a bit jealous too.

And the few folks remaining, well they just didn’t hide their negativity - with one woman’s first comment being…“how much did all this cost?”

Thanks for the question, I’v

14

At one time but particularly when I was a teen, if something didn’t turn out the way I wanted, on the first try, I would get angry and the way I expressed that anger was to discard or intentionally destroy the offending project. I just didn’t want to see it or know that if I opened a box I could see it. That was pretty stupid - I discarded parts that still had value and I was turning a blind eye to efforts that could have been salvaged. Plus it meant I was not taking the time to really understand why and where I had gone wrong. Very foolish. It often resulted in making the same mistakes twice (or thrice)>.

Patience is a virtue for sure, but I would say that the ingredients of patience include self awareness and understanding and are independent virtues.

No matter what we do we can still learn and do better, and it is better rather than absolute perfection that needs to drive us. BUT even so there will always be someone who can do something better than you. Accepting that – not easy to do – is where self awareness comes in. And don’t confuse patience with procrastination. Your worst work is still better than the project you never even started.

Dave Nelson

15

Very true, reminds me of another construction/carpentry axiom:

It is not perfection, it is the illusion of perfection. If you achieve that, you are at the top of your craft.

Sheldon

16

Bump. Why does the server or software tell the viewer that the last post was two days ago? Look at the time stamp on Sheldon’s last, above.

[sigh]

17

On my computer, the time stamp on my post is March 26, 11.42 AM?

Sheldon

18

That is why I’m surprised the forum’s title page of threads has a statement saying the last post was two whole days ago! When you open the thread and look, yours was just over a day earlier. Must be a rounding error. [8-|]

19

I have descovored how incredibly well I am able to build amazing scenery from pieces of literal garbage. I was able to build a realistic layout from things I find in my recycling. I also found a passion for filmmaking.

20

Great question Crandell.

While not being the sharpest knife in the drawer I have glided through life with relative ease. Working on a layout is a lot like life, first, you need to decide what you want out of a layout or in your life. Education is the key, not formal education but education in the things that will help give you what you want in a layout or life.

For me, electronics is the toughest thing to understand, however, I have the discipline to get there when I want to. I can be a slow learner at times. Many things in our hobby do not just require an understanding but practice, practice, practice along the way to get better at what we are trying to accomplish, much like learning to play a musical instrument. If it is important to you, you will make it so, but, everything requires effort and failure.

Like Sheldon, I have trouble receiving gifts for favours done and I get a lot of gifts from people. On the other hand, I tend to give a lot of things I don’t need anymore away to people that can use them, so I guess it balances out.

I learned early on working on the layout that every issue has a solution and knowing that makes being patient easy. Sometimes we need to walk away and come back to it another day, but it will get fixed so don’t sweat it.

My kids are tremendously successful in life. If they came to me with a problem I would send them away to think of possible solutions and the consequences of each of those, then we would discuss it. At a young age, they stopped saying"I don’t know how to do that" to “I need to learn or find out how to do that”.

We have a large social circle and they have commented more than once on how they have never seen us mad or get upset over things that have happened to us. Our kids tell people that we have never ever yelled at them. I was good friends with my wife for