Should we whitewash history on our layouts?

[F-UnitMad]

4 hours ago, Andymsa said:

At this rate even a plain board of 8x4 chipboard is going to offend someone 😂

Far too late, sorry. The "sacred sheet" is already detested....

https://www.layoutvision.com/why-waste-the-space-on-a-4x8

 

🤣🤣😁👍

[RJS1977]

6 minutes ago, F-UnitMad said:

Far too late, sorry. The "sacred sheet" is already detested....

https://www.layoutvision.com/why-waste-the-space-on-a-4x8

 

🤣🤣😁👍

 

All comments Cyril Freezer was making about the 6x4 nearly sixty years ago...

 

Interesting that the writer of the linked article never considered having an access hole or operating well in it though.

[JZ]

18 hours ago, RJS1977 said:

With regards to Jimmy Saville adverts - I personally do not find these offensive, but I would not put them on an exhibition layout as I would not want to cause distress to any of his victims who may attend a show. (Likewise I would have no personal qualm of listening to a recording of Clement Freud on Just A Minute, but I can also fully appreciate why the BBC will no longer repeat any episodes in which he was featured).

Although I didn't mention this, it is one area I would censor. I was sexually abused by someone as a child, between the age of 11 and 14, by a member of the church, England, not catholic. In my early 30s I went to his funeral and watched with a great deal of satisfaction as his coffin slipped behind the curtains in the crematorium, knowing that he would never do it to others. Any adverts featuring Saville, Harris, Hastings, Freud, etc would never find a place on any layout of mine. These people are the lowest of the low and rank, in my mind, alongside the worst despots in history.

[2E Sub Shed]

4 hours ago, HonestTom said:

I did encounter an advert in a BR internal publication from I think the 70s on goods handling that depicted an entirely uncensored, entirely naked woman with the caption, "If [our boxes] looked like this, you'd handle them with more care." Don't remember the actual brand, so I guess the advert wasn't as effective as the client hoped, but good golly you could not get away with an advert like that today.

Or the 1st 2 mins of this BR training film  "Manhandling" from 1962 ?

 

 

[whart57]

There is one genre of model railway that I think is in dubious taste and that is the World War 1 trench supply layout. Unfortunately they seem to be popular, and strip away the context they are interesting purely from a railway point of view. But guys, model that and the only thing you can be certain of is that every one of your figures is having a sh.. time and would long to be somewhere else.

 

I remember doing Remembrance Day jobs for BL branches back in the 1970s when there were still a fair few WW1 veterans around. The WW2 and post war vets generally had a good booze up and backslapping time once the service and the wreath laying was done but the older guys, the WW1 vets, were always at a table in a group just quietly talking amongst themselves. The only other group I ever encountered who were also reluctant to down loads of pints and exchange tall stories were the vets of the war with Japan.

 

I don't want to say a WW1 trench layout is offensive, but I do feel less comfortable with them than with, say, Marlborough Man riding on a poster.

Edited August 16, 2022 by whart57

[Calnefoxile]

46 minutes ago, JZ said:

Although I didn't mention this, it is one area I would censor. I was sexually abused by someone as a child, between the age of 11 and 14, by a member of the church, England, not catholic. In my early 30s I went to his funeral and watched with a great deal of satisfaction as his coffin slipped behind the curtains in the crematorium, knowing that he would never do it to others. Any adverts featuring Saville, Harris, Hastings, Freud, etc would never find a place on any layout of mine. These people are the lowest of the low and rank, in my mind, alongside the worst despots in history.

 

JZ I feel really sorry that you were abused as a child, and it is abhorrent that you were treated as such.

 

But where does the line get drawn?? You said that the abuser was a member of a Church, so therefore do you object to people putting Churches on their layouts?? You probably don't, but hopefully you get my drift and it's not a dig at you personally.

 

My point is, is that there is a very fine wavy line between what is historically accurate and what os percieved to be offensive by some people?? I know Al, the chap who built Bridge at Remagen, spent a lot of time deliberating about whether to put Swastikas on any of his locos and military vehicles on the layout, in the end he decided not to, that's his choice, would I have done it?? Don't know actually, historically accurate for sure, but in the realms of offensiveness pretty high probably .

 

Regards

 

Neal.

[Nearholmer]

I think if I was creating a ‘documentary’ model, one showing a particular place, at a particular time, I would include everything visible, and that I was capable of representing, in the scale to which I was working, modern sensibilities notwithstanding. Copenhagen Fields might be the sort of layout I’m thinking of, even if it is about a million miles beyond my capability.

 

What I wouldn’t personally do is to choose to model a deeply painful to many time or place in that way, because doing that is for museums, with surrounding interpretation.

 

But, I guess most of us are in a better place to ‘edit’, because we aren’t producing ‘documentaries’; personally, these days if I manage to produce anything at all it’s very stylised, definitely evocation, not document.

 

Despite having gone through the Airfix kit WW2 plans, tanks, bombs etc phase that all boys did “back then”, I now find myself scratching my head a bit at all ‘military modelling’, well certainly anything C20th, and more still C21st. It doesn’t sit comfortably with me as an adult who has some faint conception of what war actually is.

[H2O]

1 hour ago, 2E Sub Shed said:

Or the 1st 2 mins of this BR training film  "Manhandling" from 1962 ?

 

 

I think that is Joan Rhodes, glamorous strong woman and actress. If so it was not that different to her iron bar bending act and similar to circus and stage performances over a long period.

[Bernard Lamb]

1 hour ago, whart57 said:

There is one genre of model railway that I think is in dubious taste and that is the World War 1 trench supply layout. Unfortunately they seem to be popular, and strip away the context they are interesting purely from a railway point of view. But guys, model that and the only thing you can be certain of is that every one of your figures is having a sh.. time and would long to be somewhere else.

 

I remember doing Remembrance Day jobs for BL branches back in the 1970s when there were still a fair few WW1 veterans around. The WW2 and post war vets generally had a good booze up and backslapping time once the service and the wreath laying was done but the older guys, the WW1 vets, were always at a table in a group just quietly talking amongst themselves. The only other group I ever encountered who were also reluctant to down loads of pints and exchange tall stories were the vets of the war with Japan.

 

I don't want to say a WW1 trench layout is offensive, but I do feel less comfortable with them than with, say, Marlborough Man riding on a poster.

There are several reasons for that. Firstly they were under orders not to talk about their experiences. Secondly, as dad said:- "The people who talked about it never saw the worst of it." He did talk about certain things much later and I have checked various points since some material became available at TNA Kew about ten years ago, however their is still much that will not be released until all of that generation and the next are dead. More a case of burying history rather than whitewashing it.

Bernard

[johnofwessex]

Firstly thanks to The Johnster for his description of life in The Valleys

 

It seems to me that the bigger risk might be if 'The Hobby' became identified with a particular view.

 

If, for example I model 80's BR and and up with a Glitter/Savile advert and explain that thats how it was in that period, then that I think is fine, what however might be problematic is when either it is done unthinkingly OR worse still any suggestion that those who show these things actually support them 'Jimmy Savile, great bloke, dont know what it was all about etc.

 

 

[whart57]

25 minutes ago, Bernard Lamb said:

There are several reasons for that. Firstly they were under orders not to talk about their experiences. Secondly, as dad said:- "The people who talked about it never saw the worst of it." He did talk about certain things much later and I have checked various points since some material became available at TNA Kew about ten years ago, however their is still much that will not be released until all of that generation and the next are dead. More a case of burying history rather than whitewashing it.

Bernard

 

Are you referring to the WW1 vets? I have the Lyn MacDonald books based on first hand accounts, they are worth reading.

[whart57]

16 minutes ago, johnofwessex said:

If, for example I model 80's BR and and up with a Glitter/Savile advert and explain that thats how it was in that period, then that I think is fine, what however might be problematic is when either it is done unthinkingly OR worse still any suggestion that those who show these things actually support them 'Jimmy Savile, great bloke, dont know what it was all about etc.

 

Since you'd have to go out of your way to stick up a Savile ad, they weren't at all common as posters, it would be the latter I'm afraid.

 

The problematic ones IMO from that period were the women's underwear ones, the notorious "Hello Boys" one in particular. They were common yet I don't think you'd get away with a "there really was that ad on that billboard in 1990" explanation though.

[Nearholmer]

The closer to the present the model represents, the more difficult these things become, I think, because they touch still-raw nerves, and aren’t yet in that ‘ancient curiosity’ bracket, where it’s possible to say that ‘that’s how things were in the olden-days’, as if talking of Neolithic times.
 

Depictions of Victorian of Edwardian era, stations, with all their racist and misogynistic advertising in place, I think would be understood as ‘ancient’, possibly, although I’m not sure, the interwar period too, but any time thereafter becomes seriously problematic in a ‘public hobby’ setting, because, as noted above, it might come across as endorsement, or fond reminiscence. 
 

 

[wombatofludham]

This debate has reminded me of a potential problem we encountered when producing the Microsoft Train Simulator (1) route add on covering the Dublin to Belfast route, namely the residual visual evidence of "the Troubles" in and around Belfast, including painted kerbstones, flags, murals and re-enforced police establishments ( I don't think the route came anywhere near the "Peace Wall").  In the end, we were pushing the envelope of available computer tech and the game architecture so much the lack of ability for the game to handle multiple graphical files without crashing meant we avoided the issue, but we did take soundings from people in the North and south of Ireland who were helping us, and came from both communities, what their views were.  All, without question said if they can be included, they should - and as we know, the murals have in themselves become a tourist attraction, promoted vigorously.  Which made me think are we guilty of sometimes over thinking these things?

In my view, developing a layout for public consumption to deliberately provoke a reaction to the politics of the time isn't what the hobby should be about.  Even if your main railway passion is the railways of the Third Reich and want to build an exhibition layout of that period, it would come down to whether it was deliberately designed to offend or prod reaction in some kind of political gesture.  Model railway shows, and videos on YouTube of model railways, shouldn't become like a shock-jock radio or TV programme.  But by the same token, if I wanted to model Northern Ireland Railways in the 1970s and 1980s, I wouldn't be able to avoid references to that period which to some eyes might be provocative.  Would a model of Drogheda in the 1950s and 60s, with customs post, create an unwanted debate about the Northern Ireland protocol and hard borders?  Or would it just be seen as an interesting model of an interesting period in Irish railway history? However, I wouldn't be so crass as to have a Red Cross refugee assistance team on the station which appeared for a brief period during the worst days of sectarian violence when CIE would run special refugee services for families made homeless in the north.  Airbrushing history - or just being sensitive to a dark period in recent history?

One final thing.  When I exhibited "King's Oak" eventually I extended the layout to include a model of "Crossroads", the name of the layout having been taken from the TV series of the same name.  Not being someone who considers model railways to be anything other than fun and a bit of a laugh, I scoured the ends of the Earth (well, Germany actually) for figures to represent actors and camera crew.  Eventually I found some which, if you squinted, could have been the characters of Meg Richardson (or the ghost of, she'd died in the series by the era I was running) and Barbara and David Hunter, surrounded by cameras and sound men, with a director and runner off scene.  The car park was filled with an Outside Broadcast unit (repurposed Oxford Horsebox) and sundry extras lolled about in the garden on loungers next to a refreshment van.  Finally the "motel" had signage facing the front of the layout.  Inevitably, I had to point out the scene to those old enough to remember the TV series as they hadn't noticed a film crew on the layout.

Which does rather suggest for the public exhibition, something reflecting a troubled bit of history, discretely modelled in a way that isn't intended to shock or prod, might not be as badly received as we might think.

[newbryford]

2 hours ago, whart57 said:

 

Since you'd have to go out of your way to stick up a Savile ad, they weren't at all common as posters, it would be the latter I'm afraid.

 

The problematic ones IMO from that period were the women's underwear ones, the notorious "Hello Boys" one in particular. They were common yet I don't think you'd get away with a "there really was that ad on that billboard in 1990" explanation though.

 

A bit like this?

 

 

[rob D2]

4 minutes ago, newbryford said:

 

A bit like this?

 

 

Even the 90s was a bit different . I remember lots of young guys reading FHM, which was basically soft porn with some articles on fitness and cars.

[009 micro modeller]

21 hours ago, DavidB-AU said:

Sometimes you can go too far in whitewashing history, e.g. a model of Hull Paragon (can't remember when it was built) which deliberately left out a a visible legacy of the 1927 accident. The accident occurred in the station throat right next to the Hull Royal Infirmary and a hole was knocked through the wall to carry the injured. The repair used different colour bricks and could be seen from passing trains until the building was demolished in 2011. But the builders concluded that modelling this accurately would be disrespectful to the victims. I would argue that ignoring it was disrespectful.

I agree, but I think the reason people sometimes don’t include these things is because they don’t want to bring back traumatic memories for those who were personally or closely involved and who might see the layout. I would apply this logic if it was something like Great Heck, for example, or the Stonehaven derailment from a couple of years ago, as these are recent enough accidents that the survivors, friends or immediate families of victims are still around. However, this seems an odd rationale when the accident concerned happened several decades ago (although possibly if the layout you mention was built before about 1975-1980 a similar justification would apply). On the other hand, the phrase ‘conspicuous by its absence’ springs to mind.

 

Of course, there is a (completely reasonable and understandable IMHO) argument that survivors or victims’ relatives of any rail accident could be similarly affected even by having to look at a depiction of an unrelated or fictional accident, but it sounds like the brickwork example you mention is too specific to a particular incident to have that problem.

 

11 hours ago, Steven B said:

The Auschwitz diorama at the IWM and the O Gauge one depicting the aftermath of the Great Train Robbery both did a good job in telling a story. The impact of either would have been less (and in very bad taste) had either functioned.

I was going to say something similar. There’s something about them being static dioramas that somehow makes it feel OK, whereas I think as working layouts the effect would be quite different. I can’t quite put my finger on it. It could be that the slightly unrealistic or uncanny movement of some model railway rolling stock diminishes the gravitas of the scene and somehow makes it less serious. Equally, it could be something about the idea of re-enacting the events concerned, which you’d effectively have to do on a moving layout and which is perhaps in poor taste. I’m still not sure either explanation really makes sense though…

[Craigw]

9 hours ago, Calnefoxile said:

 

 

My point is, is that there is a very fine wavy line between what is historically accurate and what os percieved to be offensive by some people?? I know Al, the chap who built Bridge at Remagen, spent a lot of time deliberating about whether to put Swastikas on any of his locos and military vehicles on the layout, in the end he decided not to, that's his choice, would I have done it?? Don't know actually, historically accurate for sure, but in the realms of offensiveness pretty high probably .

 

Regards

 

Neal.

 

By the period that Remagen is set in, very few military vehicles wore a swastika.  The swastika was very rarely painted on any ground vehicles, the normal way it was shown was with a flag tied on for aerial identification. the Balkenkreuz (cross)  in black with white outline, white outline only or black with red outline was the standard ground force identification. 

 

If someone had a  model with AFVs plastered with swastikas I would suggest they need to look at the real thing a little more. I am not sure if I would consider that to be in bad taste or just historically ignorant.

 

Craig W

 

 

[DavidB-AU]

5 hours ago, 009 micro modeller said:

I agree, but I think the reason people sometimes don’t include these things is because they don’t want to bring back traumatic memories for those who were personally or closely involved and who might see the layout.

 

The layout was built within the last 20 years or so. The chances of anyone who was personally or closely involved with the 1927 accident still being alive was astronomically small. For comparison, the last known survivor or witness of Quintinshill died in 1988.

[kevinlms]

On 15/08/2022 at 15:14, Chris M said:

I guess a layout representing the current era should have homeless people hanging around the station. Something not really seen in earlier periods.

 

So where were the homeless people? They existed, but perhaps not around stations.

[kevinlms]

On 15/08/2022 at 19:54, Right Away said:

Makes you wonder how those responsible for the awful daubing on bridge girders do not succumb to falls or risk being chopped up by a passing train.

A club layout featured (for a short time) someone hanging from a bridge, having supposedly I assume lost his footing. I insisted that it be removed, because professional railway people & emergency service personnel have to deal with that sort of thing. The last thing they want, is to see such a scene at a model railway exhibition.

Years later, you could still see the glue marks, where the hands had been.

Edited August 17, 2022 by kevinlms

[Johann Marsbar]

I thought I'd read something about complaints about a scene on a US based layout recently - This was last month.....

https://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article263445213.html

[kevinlms]

On 15/08/2022 at 18:16, Morello Cherry said:

 

Which was the first thing I said. It is your train set and you can do what you like.

Unless you take it to somewhere public, where it might be deemed as unsuitable.

[kevinlms]

19 hours ago, IWCR said:

Tobacco  brand  advertising  posters  are  now  illegal.

Yes  commonplace  in  the past  and  a  historic  feature  of  many  railway  stations  and  streetscenes.  The  advice  for  preserved  railways / museums  etc  is  that  advertising  for  currently  available  brands  would  fall under  this  but  that  obsolete  brand  adverts  are  acceptable.  Possibly  the  same  principle  to  use  for  a  publically  displayed  model?.  At  home  do  whatever  you  want.

 

Pete

Great, so it's a requirement to research on which brands are obsolete? Sorry better things to do with my time!

[009 micro modeller]

1 hour ago, DavidB-AU said:

 

The layout was built within the last 20 years or so. The chances of anyone who was personally or closely involved with the 1927 accident still being alive was astronomically small. For comparison, the last known survivor or witness of Quintinshill died in 1988.

OK. So in that case it does seem a slightly odd choice. Like I said, I could understand if it was a recent accident but in this case it doesn’t make as much sense.