Selective Compression

Model Railroader Layouts and layout building
1

It’s been a while since I was on the forums so I don’t know if/when this subject has come up.

When planning a prototype layout, how do you determine what and how much to selectively compress? If you have a 30 stall round house or a large Passenger Depot measuring 400 feet long, how do you selectively compress it and still maintain it’s visual integrity? If the depot has 16 tracks with butterfly sheds and platforms, how do you determine how many to model?

I don’t have a layout size at this time but I am trying to design “Layout Design Elements” per Tony Koester, for a future layout. Your suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks.

2

Welcome back.

I think selective compression is really up to the builder. You have to determine what can be left out or made smaller and still keep the flavor of the scene you are looking to duplicatel

I have plans to scratch build a feed store that my grandfather used to take me to. I will shorten the building one section (it had 3 loading doors, I’ll do 2) to keep it smaller.

When you have multiple tracks usually folks don’t go out and count how many, just reduce your number. For stalls in a roundhouse, look at the other features in the structure that are specific and need to be modeled to keep the flavor of the building and put in fewer stalls. If you are doing a yard or industrial area, pick out the most prominent buildings, industries or scenic elements (bridge, odd rock formations and the like) that make the area unique. Use those elements and leave out the less noticible features. You can also make each of the structures a little smaller, make them not as long, shorten a story or two, leave out several rows of silos or bins.

You have to look at the overall scene. What is outstanding and makes it unique to you? Take those elements, shrink them a little and hopefully you will get the flavor of the area you are looking for.

I have seen posts where folks have said that they have even moved elements to another location in the scene (other side of the tracks or other end of the yard) and still presented the scene to their satisfaction.

Good luck,

Richard

3

This is excellent advice. [bow]

4

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. I guess it is up to you to determine how much “compression” you can live with. There is no hard and fast rule or ratio. If you have trouble “imagineering” the reduced structure, you could build a cardboard mock up to see if you have the proportions correct. Layout builder Lance Mindheim does a lot of this on his HO layout that has been featured in several MR articles. You can see how he does it on his web site.

http://www.lancemindheim.com/progress_photos.htm

I am designing a prototype freelance layout that will utilize a number of LDEs. For guidelines to doing the compression, I looked at the use, size, amount of rail traffic, and how the reduction would affect operation. the idea is to leave the operational characteristics intact, albeit with reduced capacities.

An example of what I did to one LDE was how to compress the railroad’s freight house at a terminal. The prototype freight house had five tracks within the confines of the area. Each track held 10 40’ cars. The end of the facility had a three story brick and limestone building across the ends of the five tracks. Along one side was the inbound freight shed and on the other side was the outbound shed, thus forming a U shaped facility. Due to space limitations, I reduced the operation to three tracks holding 4 40’ cars each. In order to keep the brick building in proportion, I reduced it from three stories to two. I will keep the same architecture, and details, but the proportions (length, width, and height) will look very close to the prototype. I think that anyone who knows what the original looked like will recognize the model even in its reduced form. That’s what you should strive for. Fortunately, I have several pictures of the prototype before it was demolished.

5

If you want a huge roundhouse but don’t have the room for it, you can push it up against a wall or into a corner. Many of the stalls won’t be usable, but you can just keep the doors closed on those stalls. See pic below…

Steve S

6

Some good advice already. Here’s a simple rule.

You have a roundhouse to compress. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to make it half as tall. That wouldn’t solve the problem of it taking up too much floorspace, your locos wouldn’t fit, and it would look, well, weird. Instead, you cut the number of stalls, but preserve other elements of the structure that are needed to give you the look of a big roundhouse, without its size.

So there’s a pretty simple rule – Will it look right when it’s done?

A way to help with this is to make cardboard or foam-board mockups. They’re easy and cheap and you won’t have a great deal committed if things don’t look right, then you bash it until it does look right.

Here are several tricks I’ve used recently on my layout.

Modeled a large mill (Gold Prince at Animas Forks, CO), but left out several levels and jogs in the walls, but inlcuded enough of both for it to look right. I did use similar window arrangements and preserved the tram house that stuck up in the center at the top. It’s probably a tenth the size of the actual mill, but still looks huge on my layout.

Modeled another mill (Sunnyside at Eureka, CO), similar issues, but with a twist. The railroad wove its way through the facility in a big S-curve, but I didn’t have room for that. Instead, I angled the sidings off my straight-through main. And I didn’t have as much depth here, either. So the mill isn’t very deep, but I did include multiple steps in the roof/walls so it looks right, along with the various spurs angling off.

There will be a short tramway that goes over the mountain ridge from the Sunnyside (buckets and towers coming in HO from Anvil Mountain Models this spring). In this case, it will have only one tower visible as it goes over the ridge and out of sight. On the other side of the mountain, the tramway continues, but looks like it’s going up the mountain to the very same tram tower! So, two tramways modeled with a single tower. That’s darn serious compression,

7

I like what Richard said about keeping the flavour of a scene. Except for me it is about keeping the flavour of a particular RR. I have poked around the CPR, CN, BCR and a couple of others over the years. If I was blindfolded and plopped down in a remote yard of one of the above railroads I think I could quickly tell who’s it was.

When I started back into the hobby, like many I had big plans as in modeling the entire Vancouver waterfront. Google Earth showed me it was five miles long. Oops! So as I started looking at selective compression I didn’t like what I saw. Then I got a good look at some layouts where small towns were modeled to scale and I had found the look I wanted. The town was perfect with a run into the wilderness and back that also had the flavour of the region.

So instead of modeling half a building or a scaled down freight house. I found through photo’s in online Archives, photo’s of CPR pusher stations with small Rocky Mountain towns attached. The other end of my folded dogbone had a small prairie one elevator town.

By not modeling large centres I can have small stations, freight houses, a six stall roundhouse that looks like it belongs instead of a big city one with two thirds of it chopped off to fit. I would rather have something that belongs and is complete to proper size, as in a small town version, instead of a modified copy.

I have seen more photo’s of famous passenger trains taken at the tiny station of Banff or Jasper, Alberta and other small towns than I have in the big cities of Canada.

I have seen layouts where a large ship at the wharf had the middle cut out of it to fit the space. I would have preferred a smaller ship or maybe a bunch of properly scaled Tug’s or fishing boats tied up to the wharf instead.

Just my [2c]

Brent[C):-)]

8

Here’s another example I have been wrestling with. A rail served business I want to use is a large lumber yard. The prototype property was over 800 feet long and 70 feet wide and it was next to the main track. It had lumber buildings lining the property on both sides with a rail spur running down the middle. The property was paved completely, so trucks could load from the various buildings. I have done 3D models of this with my CAD program and no matter how I condense it, it just doesn’t look right. I looks like I just don’t have enough “real estate” on the planned layout to accommodate it. I may have to substitute another industry in that spot, if I want a switching opportunity there.

9

Is it the 800 feet or the 70 feet that’s giving you fits fitting?

[:)]

Not much you can do about the 800 feet, I suppose.

But if you have the full 70 feet of width, then here’s what I’d suggest. How many lumber racks or boxcars need to fit to have it look good? Two at least, but more than three is a luxury would be how I’d see it. That should be around 250 feet at most, but could be as little as 100 feet if you’re talking just two boxcars. The rest should fit OK, i.e. track, aprons, and sheds width wise, and look right with trucks and rolling stock side by side on the property.

But if you need the extra length for it to look right, then you are kind of stuck.

10

You are getting excellent advice, let me give you 2 more with examples for illustration. Round house and engine terminal, 30 stalls were mentioned. 30 stalls may equate to about a third to one half of a circle in the prototype. The turntable maybe over 100 feet in length in the prototype. If for example you wanted to accommodate large articulated locomotives or 2-10-4s you could not shorten the turntable and still use it, so another avenue would need to be pursued. If you were to use the Walthers’ 130 foot table and round house 9 to 12 stalls may provide the visual impact you desire, but they are much less than the 30 that were mentioned. Large structures can be built as 3 dimensional flats, modeled as photographs on a back drop, or built on a bias against the back drop so a larger industry is suggested than is actually built. Also Art Curren used a series of several buildings that were one industry on two sides of a building and a different industry on the other two sides and placed the building in the center of the peninsula so in essence two industries were actually depicted in the space of one, and if compression in depth of the structure is considered 2 industries are depicted in less than the space of one.

Going to the website and looking at MRs last project railroad the MRT employee layout will demonstrate the building on a bias as will the previous layout the beer line which gives some excelent examples of selective compression.

11

Hi Mike: That’s the point I was trying to make. Sometimes, selective compression just doesn’t work.No, it’s not the width that is the issue. I can compress it just a bit and not lose the functionality of the business. The length is the issue I’m having. I have about 130 scale feet for the length of the property. I can easily fit two 40’ cars inside the fence surrounding the business. I doubt the place ever received more than two cars at a time anyway. The era is late 30’s. You could limit rail traffic to one car at a time, but it still doesn’t look right to me. Here’s the point I’m trying to make. On the layout plan, which I have drawn with XTrakCad, the compressed facility looks just fine. However, when I drew the buildings in 3D using TuroCAD 3D, it just looks too small to be serviced by rail in the compressed state. The place is mostly low structures and a boxcar seems to dwarf the place. I may be making a mountain out of a molehill, and I may get over the looks in time. Operation is a big deal to me and having this lumber yard on the layout provides a different business to switch, even though the traffic will be flat cars and box cars.

12

Mmm - so are the structures up against a backdrop, so it looks like they are just one wall of a larger facility, or are they out in the open, where you see the structure in 3D, and sees that it doesn’t have much volume compared to the RR cars ?

An example, from MC Fijuwara’s excellent N scale switching layout “Port Henderson” (heavily inspired by Byron Henderson’s Alameda track plan):

The structure is one car length long. But because he used background flats on the backdrop behind the not very deep and not very long structure, it appears to be part of a larger industry.

Two more shots, showing two stages of a different industry:

Mind you - MC is a true artist at this. But the principle applies - the structure doesn’t necessarily have to be all that big to look big.

Smile,
Stein

13

Hey, that layout looks familiar… :wink:
Thanks, Stein for deeming it worthy of using as an example.

Being a 1’x6’ shelf layout (that can fold up into a box), there just isn’t that much room for the actual industries, so we had to “fake it” and use a lot of tricks to make the layout seem larger than it is.

In addition to the low-relief flats & photos, another way to create the illusion of space is to angle buildings and just hint at depth.

Doolittle Freight (in front) seems like a decent-sized building:

But really it’s just a triangle on the side of the space for the power pack:

We had to sacrifice a baby (food boxcar), chopped off the last 1/4th, and then glued it in place to make it appear like it was “inside.”

[To give credit, most of the buildings in these shots were painted and weathered by my 9-year-old daughter, as this is our father-daughter project]

Paul Dolkos showed a bunch of these techniques in the “How to Plan and Build an Urban Scene” article in the October 2001 issue of Model Railroader.

John Pryke’s Building City Scenery For Your Model Railroad (Kalmbach, 2000) is also an excellent resource for tricks to make your layout bigger than it really is.

Hope this helps.

14

Jim,

Yeah, if looking down that long track is part of the scene you want to create, then you’re stuck. Stein’s point illustrated with M.C.'s layout doesn’t help here, because the direction you’re trying to depict is perpendicular to the direction that would work in.

Now, if it was the case where you could do one of the mirror tricks? That would extend the length, but this only works where the perspective is set up right.

15

This is a tough part about this one. The prototype lumber yard was positioned between the main track of the railroad and an old canal that later became a road. Thus the long narrow property. It is the same location on the model, except I have less length to work with. So, this one is out in the open. The area is viewable from the side (aisle) and lengthwise (end of the shelf). Again, this is where selective compression may not work, given the amount of real estate. Like a lot of modeling, it will take some creative thought to work out the issues. I guess there will be more time in the procelain library to come up with a solution.

16

Mmm - the core issue here is that you are trying to reduce things in both visible directions (both depth and length) at the same time, making apparent volume for the buildings too small.

130 scale feet in H0 would be about - umm - 17-18" or so or length, right? How much width do you have?

You are in H0 scale? That just seems like way too little space for a reasonable industry, including a turnout into the industry and one or more buildings.

To make a somewhat plausible looking 3-D one story building for unloading a couple of boxcars, I would have looked for a footprint of 10+ times the footprint of a 40’ boxcar - which is about 1.5 x 5.5" = about 8 square inches. So say around 80 square inch footprint - dimensions in 2" increments - so around 4" x 20-22" or 6" x 14-16".

On the left in this image is a kitbash of two pikestuff warehouses - building dimensions is 22" x 4":

17

I think I owe the OP a bit of an apology. I certainly didn’t intend to hijack his tread. I was only trying to give some examples of selective compression in real life. Because of the questions about my lumberyard example, I have gone back to revisit that area of the layout. I have made some adjustments, but I don’t have an answer on how to compress it so that it looks decent and has an operational quality. I will re-post on this thread when I have resolved my issues with this facility. Thanks for all of your help.

18

Here’s what I have done to finalize this model for future building. Based on what others have posted on this thread, I think it’s pretty clear that there is no single definitive answer, but this is the way I approached this one.

A single train track enters at one end of the property and runs the length of the yard in the center of the property. It takes up 10 feet 10 inches of width (the width of a rail car including handrails). For design purposes, 11 feet is a good nominal measurement.

Prototype Lumber Yard Dimensions:

Property is 800 feet long by 70 feet wide.

Sheds varied from 150 to 200 feet long by 20 feet wide by 15 feet high at the eaves.

This leaves 9 ½ feet of workroom between the sheds on each side of a freight car on the track.

HO Model Lumber Yard Dimensions:

Property is 152 scale feet long by 48 scale feet wide.

Sheds are 32 scale feet long by 12 scale feet wide by 15 scale feet high at the eaves. This leaves 6 1/2 scale feet of workroom between the sheds on each side of a freight car on the track.