New plans...

How things change! Since I last posted on this blog, I've relocated out of state to a new job, moved into a rental for the time being, (because we haven't sold our old house yet, so we can't afford to buy another one! Plus, we didn't want to feel rushed in buying a house in a new area that we didn't know yet) and my plans, vague as they were, to actually start modeling anything are obviously put on hold a couple more years. I can't start a model railroad in a rental house! That said, I'm still pretty interested in getting into this hobby when I do have time and space... space being a more important limiter than time at the current time; I need a house with a room that I can use as combination train room and workshop. I guess maybe I can use a garage as a workshop, since my current location is a more clement climate than the one that I'm vacating. But also more humid, and hot during the summer. Blegh! 

I'm still convinced that the way to go is to use the same basic idea as John Olsen's famous Jerome & Southwestern project railroad from the early 80s (originally Model Railroader articles, but then combined in book format in the mid-80s; I've had the book since then). It's a 4x8 railroad in a rough and tumble barely post-cowboy Arizona mining mountain-desert town, with a 2x6 urban waterfront expansion. I actually have no intention of changing the track plan other than to possibly extend the 2x6 into 2x7 or 2x8 to allow me to create arcs where the tracks can connect to another 4x8 trackplan from another older source called the Nantahala & Smokey Mountain Gorge RR. I can't remember the source; I just found a jpg of the trackplan in pretty stylized form. With just a minor bit of change to get the two 4x8s to connect via the 2x6 (or so) spur, I've got a potentially interesting plan, although I'll need a relatively large room to put it in. On its longest edge, the railroad is 12 feet long, and looks something like this: orange being the original J&S, green being the BA&W connector and brown being the N&SMG trackplans.

However, of course, I'm going to retheme all three sections. The orange section won't be in and around Jerome Arizona, it'll be a Ruritanian Trans-Pecos Texas. That's still desert/mountain, but it will look significantly different, with dagger yuccas, pinyon/juniper stuff going on in the mountains, and instead of saguaro cactus, it'll have prickly pear and cholla. All of which I need to figure out how to model still, by the way, although the yuccas seem the easiest to come up with a solution for. I'll also need to figure out how to do backdrops. I'll probably have to convert some photographs. Maybe I'll reach out to the guy who made this one and see if I can get a high resolution version, and cut off or cover the road...

I've taken my own picture of this mountain, but neither the time of year nor the time of day was right. Maybe I just need to get a decent camera and spend a day or two in the area in the late fall and take my own pictures. Hopefully I get sunnier days than this one; although I like the dramatic cloud shadows as an artistic touch, it's less appealing for a backdrop. This is up at higher elevation, so it's a bit less deserty, lacking cactus or other spiny desert plants. I'll still have the same two towns, although renamed to Jefferson and Davis from Clarksdale and Dos Hermanos, and I'll still have a copper mine in the mountains. Jefferson will also be a west Texas town with some stock pens and oil tanks as little businesses in town.

The green section will be a bayou, with Spanish moss, cypress trees (including the knees) and all that jazz. However, the section that abuts the desert will first be the town of Mirabeau, allowing for a compressed transition from desert to bayou. This is where the railroad headquarters will be, including the only modeled locomotive services (other than water towers in both Jefferson and Davis) although keep in mind that in my alternative history Ruritanian version of this part of America, there's no corporatized and consolidated railroad or other businesses run by robber barons or hugely wealthy magnates. That never came to pass in Ruritania, which is a fairly autonomous extension of the Republic of Texas which never joined the Union in my version of reality; smaller "mom & pop" businesses, including local refineries, distributors and even the railroad itself are the order of the day, so I've got pretty laid-back and ad hoc shipping stuff; lots of LCL docks and combined trains, with a single passenger car and a few freight cars of various sorts (mining hoppers, stock cars, box cars, tank cars) all in small 30' or so sizes, making up small trains of rarely more than 4-5 cars per train, pulled by a little 0-4-0, 0-6-0 or geared locomotive like a Heisler or Climax.

The brown 4x8 will be Rocky Mountains style, with mining, logging and more of the LCL type stuff going on. I'll also have lumber as an industry that complements the logging, although again with a small mom & pop sawmill, not a big corporatized large one. One key element that John Olsen got very right on his railroad is that in order to facilitate the compression needed to make a landscape seem big and extensive when it is, in fact, quite small, is that everything has to be small. There can't be large buildings, large locomotives, large cars or long trains. Most building are little more than tiny shacks in reality, or equally modest little one-room saloons, tiny depot docks, stockyards that only hold half a dozen animals, etc. and trains need to be very short, made up of smaller, old-fashioned cars, and pulled by tiny little locomotives. Not only do I prefer this anyway for many reasons, but it also makes the whole thing pull together better. Anyway, the Rocky Mountain plan is the least developed, but I've got lots of other classic railroads I can look at for inspiration on what kinds of business to include, including the San Juan Central, which is another project railroad who's book I have, and even the Gorre & Daphetid itself (the pride and joy of my model RR books; although the binding is terrible.)

To save on cost and complexity, I'm actually thinking about not worrying about DCC, and just going with good old fashioned DC. As long as I don't have more than a train or two at a time on the railroad, which I wouldn't really need to except maybe for an occasional photo op, it shouldn't be too hard. Although if I can find DCC onboard locos of the type I want that I don't have to convert by adding my own decoders, then I guess maybe I'll be OK with DCC.

Also, unlike any other description I've ever seen, although probably actually more like the real situation with the J&S, I want to have removable or prop-uppable backdrops, so I can take photos or video of any section of the model railroad while working to make it look realistic and not have "the real world" showing, like a lot of very amateurish youtube videos do. I'm quite impressed by what I read in the book A Treasury of Model Railroad Photos featuring four modelers, including Olsen (and Frary, Scoles and Furlow) that Olsen talked quite a bit about the idea that taking pictures of his layout was as much a part of his hobby as building it. Setting up scenes with temporary backdrops, temporary lighting, temporary figures and more to give it more life is a bit part of the whole deal. Frary was, if anything, even more extreme about setting up temporary "dioramas" to photograph on his layout. 

And, of course, John Allen was himself a professional photographer, and was the first to approach model railroading from a photographer's point of view.