Railway modelers – ‘Atmosphere modelers?’

I have been thinking recently about what makes the practice of railway modeling special and undoubtedly like many others I think ‘atmosphere’ is perhaps one of the most important elements to railway modeling certainly many of my interviewees have said so and is something that railway modellers’ think about a lot, both designing and experiencing them. For instance, to quote Barry Norman in his book ‘Designing a layout’ (1997, p.1) ‘(w)hen I modelled Lydham Heath I was attracted by the atmosphere of the station (…) something about the neglect and sadness of this frail railway struggling to exist in a beautiful part of Shropshire’. For Norman here, signs of ‘neglect’, and personal musings on its ‘struggling’ situation – coming together in a feeling of ‘sadness’ - created an ‘atmosphere’ that just had to be modelled - this model was to capture and arouse feeling, as he goes onto say - ‘I wasn’t just trying to model the station as it may have been; I wanted more than that. I also wanted to encapsulate the atmosphere of the place’ (ibid, p.1). Through my interview research I have had some difficultly in trying to explore this issue about model railways some of it my fault really but nonetheless atmosphere is so difficult to locate (fills a space with a certain tone of feeling like a haze), difficult to define and ultimately difficult to express on the spot.

Creating atmosphere is fundamental to modeling, like many other things such as interior decoration. I am interested to hear how;

• You may have been personally ‘caught up’ by an atmosphere that beckoned the inspiration, motivation for the model. This may be through experiencing the site first hand but also coming from looking at photographs which tell or suggest an atmosphere (I see MRJ have a ‘Real Atmosphere’ photograph in every issue) and personal memories and imaginations. Probably it is a medley of all these.
  

• If you had in mind an idea of a kind of ‘atmosphere’ that you wanted to create, for instance a gloomy loco scrapyard how did you go about trying to ‘capture’ or ‘engineer’ the atmosphere that you wanted to create/were inspired and motivated by. What kinds of modeling decisions essentially were related to atmosphere? For instance speaking with one modeler who had a loco scrapyard a feeling of sadness was exacerbated by a very gloomy sky that he painted specially to add to the sadness.
  

• If you have thought about atmosphere, what kind of atmosphere your layout give for you, this atmosphere might be for example a bringing back of memories of or imaginations of a hot summers day by the line side, peaceful and everything going ok.