I’m not exactly sure what defines a model railroad but… can it move itself? Can it go through a turnout? CAN IT LOVE?
I think not.
(sorry about the last bit, watched ‘I,Robot’ last night. sort of the same principal, just tiny trains instead of crazy,over-protective robots.)[:)]
One problem I see though. It can be misplaced easy![^]
It seems that it operates on a system much like the cable cars in San Francisco. I consider them to be one type of railroad. Rack railroads cannot go through turnouts, but they are railroads. I also wonder about purely static models like Keystone’s unpowered two-truck shay. It might be able to love, but the other stuff is out of the question, yet who among us would not call it a model?
In my mind, a model is a representation of something else - a copy to some degree. I can come up with no reason that this is not a model of a railroad. I even know a prototype railroad that has a circuit (out of round circle) for a main line - and it’s not in an amusement park. I do beleve that there is a prototype for everything.
Frankly, I can’t see myself paying $20 for this little thing and that’s only 10% of the asking price, but I admire the workmanship it represents.
I have been reading model railroading magazines for almost 46 years now and stunt photographs are part and parcel of the game - even John Allen and a five inch diameter penny got involved in it as an April Fool’s gag. You can buy “12 inch” rulers that are “24 inches” long and I once encountered an orange the size of a basketball. Anyone who has ever taken a course in Psychology has encountered the offset room that gives the optical illusion of a five footer appearing eight feet tall and vice versa.
I have seen a 1:400 air-driven layout and I understand that there is a modeling scale in that proportion that even has a name but the only place I believe that this is practiced as a model railroad scale is in Japan.
An interesting place to visit is: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scale_model_sizes