I don’t want no stinkin passengers in my trains. All they do is mess them up, eat all the food, and drink all the adult beverages. And they never know when to leave.
Dude! It’s 2015! Who’s running passenger trains?*
*Now gettaway from the tracks. The stack train passing just means a tank train’s coming.
It depends a little on era. If you’re running heavyweight cars with clear windows, not having passengers (or an interior) is more noticeable than with later streamlined cars, which usually used tinted windows.
That’s actually a important observation. Depending on the level of tinting, you might need only blobs (pins with putty bodies?) to represent people, or no figures at all (paricularly if you’re wrapping your transit equipment).
As mentioned before, with motor vehicles depicted as being driven or idling (vs. parked), you really do need figures in them, as having a windshield tinted enough to obscure faces is almost always not street legal (side windows can be a different story).
As for figures looking toy-like, that’s not really correct either. Even the 1:100 overseas specials, if you touch up the paint some (especially the head/hair) and dullcoat, you’re good.
This, OTOH, is some toylike ‘figures’ in a model passenger car.
BTW, wouldn’t most ground level bathroom windows be “Frosted” or otherwise obscured, especially in a public location like a restaurant, by the 1990s, Lone Wolf? I guess the cop is there to chase away peeping toms (who wouldn’t really have to exert themsleves), but doesn’t seem like a valid long term solution to avoiding lawsuits and bad publicity…
OK, I will be a little more scientific. In HO three feet is 270 scale feet - at 270’ you cannot generally see the people, even in a heavyweight car, during the day time.
Look at any window from a distance during the day, it is a black hole.
Sheldon
I’m lucky, since most of my passenger service is lightly patronized mixed trains… saves a lot of work and money.
In my mostly scratchbuilt CNR combine #7377:
Steve Hunter
Now, here is a man who fails to understand the concept of model railroading.
Rich
Who has people in their passenger trains?
I do.
I guess I’m a weirdo, I want and try for maximum realism but I always end up with something very wrong somewhere. My layout is set in a rural very small mid 1950s era town in southern New Mexico in and around the Rocky Mountains. That said my Southern Pacific Daylight Passenger service is only somewhat close to prototype.
My passenger cars are all at maximum capacity as is my rural Passenger Station. When my SP Golden State pulls into the station every car is “full” of passengers and there are over 80 passengers mulling around the station. That’s probably more than the entire population of Susanville, my rural town.
Like I said I’m a strange one but I like having figures doing things and also having vehicles everywhere. I feel that having people or figures everywhere really adds depth to my model railroad even though it blows the prototype realism to pieces. I think I got that from John Allen’s G&D, he was and still is my model railroad mentor.
My thing is more the building on my layout than running my trains, I do want realism as well as perfect train operation but I often
I have some, after I finally got the roofs off my passenger cars.
All my passenger trains are filled with passengers (1:100) because all my passenger trains are lighted and I really like seeing passengers inside my passenger cars. Especially nice to see in diners, domes and open observation ends. It´s the passengers and lighting (and in some cases the interiors) that make a passenger train a really expensive project sometimes. Hate the total price but the result is nice!
I was thinking about this thread last night as, coming home from a dinner with friends, I was stopped at a LIRR grade crossing about 4 auto-lengths back, and as the train passed by (yes, the interior was lit), I could clearly see the passengers in the train, maybe not the icons on their smartphone or the style of rings they wore, but hair/faces/skin color/clothing - they weren’t shillouttes, and don’t give me this “stay 3 feet back, covering your eyes and looking at the floor and you can’t tell the difference” nonsense - you can see interior passengers even at reasonable modeling distances.
BTW poster ‘LensCapOn’, this was indeed in June 2015 unless I fell into a time warp again (I hate when that happens).
You must mean the cost of the interiors, because on Amazon you can get 100 seated 1:100 figures (painted, but they do need touch up and dullcoating) for $8.00; two packs ($16.00) of overseas specials judiciously placed could readily imply a crowded 4-car commuter train. You probably could do even better with prices if you hunt around. Heck, if you are not going to light up the interior, in the areas where the view is somewhat obstructed you can go all “John Allen” with painted blobs of shaped putty on sprues.
Cheap packs of 100 1:100 seated figures? “No excuses anymore” - Alice In Chains
(There’s also 1:200 figures for true N-Scale, but not sure if seated figures are available)
I take care to match the colors of the clothing to the time modelled: the bright colors of the seventies look strange in 2000 or even more in 1920.
That is a problem with the chinese figures… no one ever clothed in those colors!
sebamat
All my passenger cars have people in them. I even have a white coated waiter in the dining cars. I thought I had some pics, but can’t find them right now.
Apropos of nothing, the July 2015 Walthers flyer arrived in the mail today. In the pages for the current Walthers Name train, the 1960s version of the Pennsylvania Broadway Limited, the ‘Deluxe Edition’ set includes “90+ Preiser passengers and crew figures installed throughout the train”, so clearly Walthers thinks model passenger figures are a selling point.
Speaking of figures, Walthers really has to dial back the spotty black wash weathering of their figures - the family figures in front of the Dairy Queen on the flyer cover look like they just came from filming an action sequence in a muddy swamp…
Oh I understand the concept all right. Just offering a different view.
A standing joke is I’m going to mount “YOU ARE NOW LEAVING REALITY” in the train room. (mostly for rivet-counters) Mine is contemporary, with 'bends", yours can be 1942 (with passenger trains).
Hey I even like passenger trains, and am not beyond having a steam engine or two. (need to blank out the Norfolk And Western)