Editor’s Notebook
RTR - A Benefi t To Layout Creativity
I am 50 years old, and during
ATSF Geeps I used to spend a great deal of ti me building detailed models of specifi c locomoti ves. These were usually not commercially available or available only in brass. Now just about everything I ever built has been made commercially available. This allows me to spend more ti me on my railroad. A good thing in my opinion since a locomoti ve is really just a detail part. The front two geeps were heavily modifi ed from Front Range units while the rear unit is a R-T-R Athearn GP7. I am glad I don’t have to do this type of work anymore out of necessity.
my life, I can clearly remember older modelers spending most of their time building models — a particular station, freight car, or locomotive. These projects would often take months — sometimes years — to complete. In contrast, today’s modeler has hundreds, if not thousands, of ready-to-run or highly detailed or ready-to-assem- ble models that literally leap from the shelves of any hobby shop onto our layouts. Many of these R- T-R models or kits make even the best scratchbuilt or super-detailed models built more than a decade ago look primitive and simple. That’s scary stuff, and if you add in new technologies such as LED lighting and sound, then our mod- els of the past look downright depressing. Just a few years ago, I was reg-
ularly building oddities that I was certain would never be produced by the manufacturers who were at the time only tooling and pro- ducing common prototypes that shared components or standard
details. I built Santa Fe chopped- nose and Topeka-cabbed GP7s and 9s, SD26s, and SD39s. I be- lieved these models were safe from ever becoming commonplace in the hobby and added a layer of uniqueness to my railroad. Simply put, no one else had these locomo- tives, and that made my railroad special and distinct. Fast forward 15 years and all of those locomo- tives have been tooled and are available with newer technologies such as DCC and sound, super- seding my early achievements as a model maker. So the question here really is, can anyone with a healthy wallet buy himself a per- fect model railroad? Has our need to be creative and a good model builder become irrelevant? No way! The hobby focal points
have simply changed. Manufac- turers can produce the parts and pieces needed to create a basic model railroad — freight and pas- senger cars, trackwork, steam and diesel locomotives, structures, and so forth — but they cannot design, plan, and construct your model railroad. There is no place I can go today that can produce my model railroad: The St Louis Di- vision of the ATSF set in 1978. It is a struggle to find all the correct motive power, rolling stock, and structures to give me a good rep- resentation of that locale and era even in today’s market with all the R-T-R models. Even modelers who modeling branch lines or simple shelf layouts still need a high level of specialization and skill to make them work. A large part of model railroad-
ing is learning to adapt the models you can purchase to your planned layout, diorama, module, or other projects. This may mean kitbash- ing, or even scratchbuilding spe- cific structures or pieces of roll- ing stock. Learning to compress your wildest dreams into a work- able and affordable layout is an- other topic altogether, but we all must learn to compromise when it comes to layout construction. Even the biggest layouts I have come across bear signs of being altered so that they will function and yet provide a sense of reality to the viewer. It is this alteration and modification that makes mod- el railroading unique and always interesting. Constructing a model railroad is very similar to creat- ing a piece of art. Anyone can buy canvas, paint, and brushes, but only you can combine those into a masterpiece. The collection of R-T- R models is simply that, a collec- tion. Collecting is a hobby in itself; we all know modelers who have closets of locomotives and roll- ing stock that have never turned a wheel on a layout. For them, the joy is in collecting. For me, the joy is building and operating. I am continually amazed at how accu- rately prototype equipment can be modeled. Prototype modeler Brian Banna, for instance, creates amaz- ing reproductions of motive power. He recently finished a Missouri Pa- cific SD40–2 that simply blows my socks off! If you provided two different
10-year-olds with the exact parts to build a complete model rail- road, the two of them would create markedly different layouts. One modeler might choose to build a steam era Union Pacific layout; my son decided to follow Allen McClel- land’s Virginian & Ohio. Same pal- ette, very different picture. One of the first things we all
learn as model railroaders is how to compromise, not our morals but our model railroad dreams. We learn what we can live without as it
10 RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN
HEAD END
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