I’ve been reading lots of magazines and Ebooks regarding model railroad layouts and I find pretty well all of them fantastic works of art, performed by true artisans. One thing that bugs me though is the closeness of buildings to tracks. I used to live by the tracks and the right-of-ways that train companies have are huge. I can see buildings like warehouses, railway stations (duh!), and buildings that service trains, close to the trains, but I can’t see any building with glass, like hotels, bakeries, general merchandise, or the like being any where nearby.
I often had to stay in a hotel that was beside a high speed freight train going through the mountains with 4 or 5 locomotives ganged together. Despite being 1/2 mile away, when that train went through town the hotel walls shook!
Some of the layouts I’ve seen had trains less than a “auto-car length” between the track and the sidewalk in front of a hotel. That isn’t realistic. I’d rather NOT HAVE the hotel than put it so close to the train.
Then you may have to do mostly a scenic layout if you just like to watch trains run with out much operations. There are many nice layouts that have it this way.
Since mine is mostly industrial and most of the buildings belong to rail served industries it works out just fine. The link at the bottom shows pictures of my layout and you can see the reasons I have them close. Though do not expect great genius modeling, but it works for me[:D]
Our model railroads are selectively scaled down versions of the real world. That means that we can pick and choose what parts are true to scale and what parts are more compressed. (called Selective Compression) I guess it would be possible to build a model RR accurately to scale, but you would have to have a lot or room to do it. Most of us don’t have that kind of space. Everything is usually compressed except the trains, automobiles, and people. A half mile works out to be about 30 feet in HO scale (if my figures are correct). Even a quarter mile is a vast distance that we can’t live with in our model world. Therefore the artist in us comes to the rescue when building our miniature world. What else can I say?
Given that a football field (including endzone) would scale out to 49.56" x 22" in HO, it’s hardly surprising that distances are compressed on layouts.
A 4x8 sheet of plywood scales out to the equivalent of 5.56 acres in HO scale. Just to represent a sqare mile of land would require a 3600 sq. ft room.
The run of Southern Pacific’s Coast Daylight was 470 miles. Convert that to HO and and you would need 5.4 actual miles (or about 28,500 actual feet) of track to represent than run in HO scale.
IIRC, when I was stationed at Cam Rahn Bay Airbas, Vietnam, the runway was 12,000 feet long (almost 138 feet in HO). Even a basement sized layout represents a massive compromise with fully scaled down reality.
I agree with the OP that some very improbable situations exist on models – the buildings closest to the tracks tend to be fairly gritty types. Having said that, when you take Amtrak into Chicago, some of those gritty buildings are converting to condo at a rapid rate. You feel pretty darn close, when you are on the train, to that expensive urban housing. We can model the feeling even if a tape measure would show we are ignoring the actual distances. But again we can and should avoid the most improbable situations.
Cam Rahn Bay the giant cockroach capital of the world.
You got that right. Most roaches will scurry away when you turn on the lights. The roaches in our hooch would turn on the lights at 0430, start banging on a garbage can lid and force us to do an hour of strenuous PT.
See that building on the right edge of the photo? Its one of three academic buildings at Carnegie Mellon within a few dozen feet of active tracks. Twice a day, the Capitol Limited crawls past them even.
Those are operating commercial properties smack next to tracks. Busy ones at that. Thinking a lot about growing up in Western PA there were lots and lots of businesses within 30-40 feet of tracks. The Burger King I frequently stopped at after school had a parking lot that shared drainage with a ROW.
Thanks all for all your comments, because all of you made good points. I’m just trying to understand it all, and like one of you said, a football field would STILL be huge in 1/87 scale. I have seen some industrial layouts that have an occasional building that is, to me, a scaled distance away. This is the type of layout I will be building. It’s true we can “selectively” scale what we want in order to get items on the layout but buildings too close to trains just don’t work for me.
In Des Plaines, Illinois, there are places where residential homes are maybe fifty or a hundred feet from heavily used (or used to be) railroads. And these are not run-down or “gritty” neighborhoods, either. My Cub Scout den mother lived in a ranch house only two doors down from a Canadian National line (former Soo LIne, former Wisconsin Central).
Actually, the apartment complex I live in is right next to that same line, about twenty miles or so north, and heavy freights and Metra trains go by all the time. The complex manager tells me there are tenants who been here for twenty years or so.
You’ll see similarly positioned buildings throughout Chicago, plus the “L” lines, which are often close enough to buildings that a passenger could reach out a window and touch them. And the “L” is a lot noisier than a standard railroad in my opinion.
I can assure you, buildings “with glass, like hotels, bakeries, general merchandise,” are sometimes quite close to heavily used rail lines.
I recall seeing an article a while ago in MRR where the modeler had boarded up trackside windows in structures that were close enough to the track to be hit by flying ballast. Obviously that doesn’t suit all the structures close to the tracks but it might be a way to ‘soften’ the compression in a few locations, and it would only really be applicable where trains would pass at higher speeds.
A model is simply, by definition, a representation of something.
Selective compression Also comes into play. Compressing details to fit into an area available.
Also, there ARE real life things/buildings/structures that are built real close to real RR tracks in real life that are NOT RR related structures or factories relying on rail deliveries. Two of a local grocery store chain’s stores are a stone’s throw from the tracks, one of them being about a rail car’s width away separated by a chainlink fence from the tracks. The other store has a little more room between it and the tracks. One is near a rail yard and a place to watch the trains play, the other has no fence and is a good place to watch the trains just go by.
There are other buildings downtown that back up to about one or two rail car widths fromt he tracks, again usually sperated by a chain link fence that do not use the railroads for service. so real life buildings ARE built very close to tracks…as close as the RR will allow.
I would have said much the same thing as that, however after having made a dozen trips into the
New England States, my mindset has changed. I saw many situations in regard to spacing and size that I would have said were not prototypical but were in fact. I also saw some situations in the Virginias as well.
I have learned not to be too firm minded on such things as as soon as you think it isn’t natural someone will show you a photo or you will discover it in real life . There is indeed a prototype for everything, as odd as it might seem.
Look at some of the street running that was so common in many areas where there was a density of population and terrain that forced the two together. You be surprised to see how close those big shaking locomotives were to storefronts.
It goes further than that as well, such as very narrow streets with only half a regular width sidewalk on one side of the street. Firehall doors that open right onto that same street. Think I’m kidding ? Take a drive through Worcester, Mass. Absolutly anything is possible.
Of course, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Model Railroad Planning 2011 shows a layout set in L.A. where two buildings were built with one of their walls curving so that a railroad line could run between them.
The high school I went to had the high school on one side of a railroad line, and the football and baseball fields on the other side. The back edge of the football field grandstand was right up close to the track.
On highway 29 in Peoria Heights, Illinois near the Illinois River narrows there are houses with the old Rock Island, now Iowa Interstate, with maybe eight to ten feet max from the front door to the rail. The River was in the back yard. Granted there were only 2 or 3 houses like that but I bet they are still there. There used to be at least 4 Rocket passenger trains and a number of freights there every day during the Rock Island era in the 1960’s. Just trying to show that nothing is too unusual on a well used rail line.
I used to live in a (rented) house in Abingdon VA that was so literally right beside the railroad tracks I could practically spit out the window and hit the train. Many’s the morning I’d wake up in the dawn hour and make my way to the side porch to sip a cup of coffee and watch the morning trains go by. In fact, lots of times they’d be parked there. Sometimes up to several hours. I reckon they were waiting for clearance to enter a track segment or something. Sometimes after watching them for awhile they’d start up and inch forward or backwards a few feet and then stop again. Occasionally I’d spot someone riding the rails in a gondola car or hanging out on a flat car. It was also fun in the evenings when the NS freights would roar through. You’d see 'em coming in the distance, under the bridge-- their headlight steady and their
Space away from the railroad is an era thing. In the second half of the 19th Century in the US, it was considered advantageous to have the rails running down Main Street - or at most one street off. While today, it might be considered better to route the rails around the outskirts of town, before 1930 rail service was a great convenience, and nobody wanted to be far from it. Towns built connecting short lines of their own when they got bypassed by the nearest major railroad. Interurbans and trolleys would fill in the major streets that the railroads ignored.
So depending on when the railroad was built, and what happened to the town center afterwards, it was not uncommon to have the rails very close to important buildings.
In the early '60s the elementary school I attended had the playground and grassy areas directly adjacent to the Washington & Old Dominion tracks. There was no fence to keep us away. It was a great delight to wave at the local freight if he happened to come through during recess. It was a special day if you got the engineer to blow the horn.
You must live very close to me somewhere. Not long ago I was taking my kids to the bike trail and showing them the old train depot and caboose… along the old W&OD mainline…