Telltales

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

He touched his nose, he’s got a full house.

I fold.

Nope, wrong sport.

We all try to build as real as we can, within the constraints of time and money, and since no layout is ever really finished, it’s hard to label any technique a “mistake”, but we all know that there are some things, big or little, that scream “toy train”. Sometimes they don’t scream, sometimes it’s a lot of tiny clues, unnoticable by themselves, that collectively add up to give you that “I’m not sure what’s wrong, but it just doesn’t look real to me” feeling.

Sure, horn hook couplers, train speeds that could qualify on the front row at the Indianapolis 500, jackrabbit neck-snapping starts and stops, but these are so basic as to not be worth mentioning. I’m looking for the next level, intermediate or even advanced things you look for or that grab your eyes, things that might be easily fixed or things nobody can do anything about, because you never, know, somebody, somewhere might just have a solution.

I’ll start it off, but this is by no means a complete list, and isn’t in any particular order.

  1. Trains or buildings throwing dark shadows onto the “sky” (backdrop).

  2. A large area or quantity of those little spiky peaks you get when something sticky is de-adhered to something else, like sloppily applied plaster or paint.

  3. Brush marks in “rock” (plaster).

  4. Flowing creeks and rivers that appear out of nowhere or disappear without explanation.

  5. Mountains or hills that stop or start without rhyme or reason, not a road cut, more like, “well I need a town here, end of mountain”.

  6. Bridges to nowhere. Bridges aren’t cheap, and I have yet to hear a civil engineer saying, “well we could grade this out, but a bridge would look prettier, let’s burn a couple million bucks”.

  7. Tunnels through mountains that aren’t big enough to have tunnels in them, essentially quonset huts made out of “rock”.

2

Model RR are like theatre… you have to “suspend disbelief” to some degree to enjoy the obviously false scene you are looking at.
This side of the pond (UK) we tend to go a lot more for modelling a small piece of railway to an extremely high level of detail. A well taken photo could easily have you looking hard to see whether the subjext is real or not. So, from where I look at it, a big part of the issue is to not try to get too much in to too small a space.

The issue is, however, what the modeller wants and what he/she is prepared to put up with. If you are content with 1:87 trains running in front of a 1:1000 Mount Shasta … well, it’s your RR… Good Luck.

There are also questions of time and cost. We might landscape that area of ply one day but there are a lot of things to get done first.

What might be really useful (and a rather more positive approach) is a list of ways of quickly and cheaply providing a temporary solution that looks good enough to get by without detracting too much from getting the final finished product.

[:P]

3

Cleanliness and neatness seem strange to me. Random mess is the fastest, cheapest and most effective way to add reality. The real artists can do organized mess, but that takes talent and time. Some of the posts show great skill at this, but just being random and a little careless does wonders.

4

Lately, it is plywood empires that have no possibility of any type of realistic landscape.

Unpainted plastic structures, especailly those with colors like orange, red and yellow that you can practacally see through.

EZ track. It is so hard to make look right.

5

Buildings should look like they are in the ground not on it, everything should have a degree of weathering, nothing kills a scene like shiny plastic.

6

Before heaving a rock at the old Lionel tinplate tunnel, be aware that it has a prototype!

The JNR Hachiko line crosses the approach path to the runway at Yokota AB in a shallow cut about half a kilometer beyond the end of the paved overrun. The 100 meters or so of track directly in line with the runway has been roofed over and bermed so that any aircraft that has a misadventure will not end up stacked up in the cut.

The Hachiko line has frequent passenger service (DMU cars in the 1960’s,) and didn’t have ABS. The intention was to prevent a crashing aircraft from adding the passengers of any passing train to the casualty count.

Chuck

7

Adding to TomikawaTT’s thread… many small airfields where the flight path crosses a rail line have trip wires that will put the approach signals to stop if a plane touches them. Similarly in locations where bad rock falls occur there have been trip wires and even trip fences… rocks hit the system and the signals go red until the line has been checked and they are re-set by hand. In Scotland this was even done very early with mechanical semaphore signals. In that case the trip fence held the signals “Off” so that when the fences was broken (it included weak links) the signals dropped to danger.

I believe that there was also a Swiss line that had no tunnel… so as not to be the odd one out it built a diversion through a short tunnel.

Again, in the UK, it wasn’t uncommon for the big landowners who received shares in place of cash for the land railways went through to demand that the line was in a cutting or tunnel through all of the route that was in sight of the big house. I don’t think that any of these were built up but there were certainly several where the tunnel seemed to be in an odd place unless you knew the history.
One thing that does make a difference with these tunnels is that they very soon blended into the lanscape. As has been said… buildings should be in the landscape not on it. That is unless they are brand new and / or miitary facilities where the troops are kept busy in slack periods cleaning out the corners between the buildings and the planet.

8

I like to see people who look like they belong there, not just plopped down and posed for a photo. Bob Grech is particularly adept at this, as is Cletus Waldman (cwaldman to us.) If you look at their work, you’ll see everyday folks going about their business.

9

Before this goes any further, I want to add that if someone likes a Lionel style tunnel, or painted plywood, or anything else which points up the non-prototype aspects of a layout, I’m fine with that. I have used cigarette packs and food item boxes as stand ins for buildings, scrap wood stood on end to simulate ridgelines, and still have bare plywood where the town is going to go.

The reason I posted this thread though, is so I can hopefully avoid simple mistakes that ruin the mood or prevent immersion when we are running the trains here.

Some good stuff so far. Buildings in the ground, check, and that solves a problem I was looking at, how to integrate terrain right up to a foundation. If real buildings have foundations, they are also at the very least, over dug, and at best finish graded with a swale away from the building to drain the foundation and to control runoff and prevent erosion. So natural grade has no need to intersect the foundation undisturbed, which makes it easier to get the foundation in the ground realistically.

Cheap plastic, check.

Strange looking tunnels ok next to runways, check. (Amusing story here, I used to work for an airline whose headquarters was very near to a place I had lived years earlier. While living there, I wanted to put up an antenna tower and called the FAA to find out what was legal, being so close to the approach and departure zone. The person I spoke with hemmed and hawed a bit and then said that when the trains passed on the embankment off the end of the runway, the tops of the boxcars were two inches up into controlled airspace, and that I could use that as a reference.

Much later, the network guy in our datacenter was looking to connect headquarters on one side of the tracks, with our hangar, over near the runway. We got well into negotiations with various companies looking at wireless solutions, microwave, terra-beams, etc. Then we realized that we would have to clear the trains on the embankment, or e

10

I want to mention that two of the three on my list are on my layout.

I am plywood free, but landscape has always been pretty obvious.

EZ Track–I spent 6 months not-running to fix EZ track–to make it look right and be the right height for freight docks and passenger stations.

Cheap plastic. My daughter mentions it every time she comes in the basement. “When you going to paint those doors?” I have big Round Tuit hanging on each of those suckers. I’m working my way West to East. They’ll each have thier day.

11

I am going to keep my eye on this post, as I can just imagine some of the upcoming responses, how about 50 unpainted plastic figures with square plastic around their feet milling about a corner store? and those Arizona rock cuts 8 inches above every foot of mainline regardless of where the layout is supposed to be. I think you are off to a good start.

12

interesting!

13

Going back to the basic title of this thread, for all who model eras prior to the banning of roof walks - where are the telltales?

When I was railfanning in the New York Metropolitan Area, about a half-century ago, there were telltales everywhere, warning unwary trainmen about tunnels, bridges, building entrances and even telephone lines. Yet, when I look at layout photos I never see those dangling rope ends. Granted they disappeared along with roof walks, but no road running steam should be without them.

Chuck

14

I didn’t even know that’s where the term originated, I picked it up playing poker. I can see the point though, getting clotheslined off the top of a fast freight by a tunnel entrance would smart.

In all the pics I’ve seen of the railroad we model (Silverton), I don’t think I’ve seen even one of the things you describe. No tunnels, at least on the prototype, but definitely bridges and telegraph wires. Since this was before the labor movement, I guess the RR just figured that safety was an individual choice.

15

What period are the photos? The ICC mandated the use of telltales fairly early on in the piece, so you’d expect to see them somewhere.

Cheers,

Mark.

16

The roofwalks on the tops of freight cars disappeared decades ago. For safety reasons, crews don’t walk on top of the cars anymore. So, we no longer need the telltales because no one is supposed to be up there on a moving train.

17

Context, Mr Beasley. I’m well aware that running boards disappeared, and why. Read Jeff’s post again. He mentions a period “before the labor movement”, presumably pre-1964, which is when the ICC mandated their removal.

Mark.

18

a huge pet peeve of mine is flat color in nature. tall and short grass, ground cover and trees. A little subtle color variation can make a huge difference…

19

I see we have two seperate topics here originating from the word “telltale” 1. telltale: a bar over tracks with ropes or small chains hanging down to tell someone on top of the car that a tower or tunnel is coming and to duck down or say goodbye. and 2.: telltale-look it up.

20

I thought the original post was clear: what gives away a photo of a layout that tells you if is not a natural 1:1 scale scene? I would like to know. If I ever get to the point where I do my darndest to fool most people with a photograph, what, short of digital manipulation, must I do?