Running like the real railway

[The Black Hat]

Im curious about the whole idea of the constant movement thing. A part of the layout that Im designing has had an extra loop added to the bay and the sidings for the turntable area put in place to mean that engines would need to shunt in order to be serviced and give us the option of having areas to put extra engines that stand waiting for the next service during a "gala" weekend. Do people always think that a layout needs to have an area for activities to take place, like a shed, yard, goods shed, etc? Or can you just model a station as it is, or anything else for that manner?

[definate maybe]

Black hat, I think you can model anything you like and it will give interest but as the saying goes you cant please all of the people all of the time. In real life spending time at 1 location, no matter how interesting, will loose its appeal after a few days.

I live in Ipswich and work in Felixstowe so for me most of the services I see are freightliners so I take no notice. My dad went on a day trip spotting the other week and ended up in a conversation with someone on the Southern region who thought my dad was joking when he said Ipswich saw 20+ freights each day and this man said his next day out would be to Ipswich!

Back to your point and modelling a station only or a yard only can be interesting. A great many layouts these days are depots only and can be very entertaining but in reality these are fairly limited. Unusual visitors are rare, not alot moves for alot of the time. Alot of the activity is unseen (in the depot itself) or unmodelable (oil changes, safety checks, heavy maintenence) if the quality is there I think any layout is worth a 5 minutes of your time, after that its done to the operator!

[Glorious NSE]

Or can you just model a station as it is, or anything else for that manner?

 

This to my view is another danger of the "constant movement" fallacy, it would make most locations in the UK unmodelleable if you tried to apply such a criteria - even somewhere busy with movements like Ipswich (which even has a little loco stabling point just like a model railway!) does not have constant movement - the only places I can think of which would is standing on the platform end at Clapham Jcn or London Bridge - some (but not all) main termini throats or major junction stations might get close (Waterloo, Glasgow Central, Birmingham New St, Leeds maybe?) but even then I suspect there will be occasional lulls.

 

Or the other option would be to go the other way and have a "Thomas" oval.

 

I think modelling should be about recreating something that inspires you (and taking it to an exhibition is sharing that) not about being tied to modelling something busy enough to have something always happenning.

 

As an aside - speaking as a resident of intermodal-free Devon Ipswich/Felixstowe are superb BTW - from memory I think the current intermodal train count on the Felixstowe branch is 27 each way over 24 hours not counting light engines and the DMU...Awesome! B)

[definate maybe]

Glorious, just to clarify I brought up the Ipswich part in my previous post just to illustrate the fact that what I find boring and basically ignore alot of other people find thrilling. Ipswich can normally be found with 20-30 locos stabled on it on a weekend. There is no depot and the stabling point is opposite the platform so alot of people may find this thrilling, the yard is a two minute walk from the station and a park runs the whole length of it so you can easily have a wander and take it all in. I hardly give this a second glance, in my mind its more 66's, more 90's and more metal boxes!!

The idea of Exeter and the south west sounds alot more appealing to me! and my current personal love is the Far North line which sees 3 x 158 a day!!

As you say modelling is about that interests you. At the end of the day you spend hours building your own layout and getting it to how you want it to be. Most other people will give it 15 mins to half an hour at a show whilst trying to fit everything in.

[Glorious NSE]

Glorious, just to clarify I brought up the Ipswich part in my previous post just to illustrate the fact that what I find boring and basically ignore alot of other people find thrilling.

 

Absolutely, I was agreeing with you B)

 

Most other people will give it 15 mins to half an hour at a show whilst trying to fit everything in.

 

I think 15 minutes if you're lucky - i'd suggest more than half of show visitors will not give a layout more than a couple of seconds worth of glance unless it either has something a bit "showstopping" that catches their eye or is "their scene"

 

I don't mean that to detract from anyones modelling it's just an observation that "the public" are very fickle. There aren't many shows where I don't hear a dismissive "that's only another GWR branchline/modern image layout/foreign layout" or similar at some point during the day.

 

There are folk around who will look at all layouts and give them all a fair amount of time but i'm not sure they are in the majority.

 

Before I sound totally depressed to balance that you do then get those that come along, watch, ask questions and "get" what you are trying to acheive.

[Ray H]

I also wonder how many people can be put off from spending too much time observing a layout because they can't get close enough to it. I've frequently given layouts a miss because the crowd never seems to disperse.

 

Small may be compact, small may be beautiful but small can also mean that only a few people get close enough to the layout to do anything other than watch a continuous stream of moving trains over the heads of the few privileged people that are close up and can study it in more detail.

 

At least with a larger layout where each single train movement on the layout can consume several tens of seconds (and still qualify the layout for continually having something moving), more people can get close to the layout. And, for example, one train moving over a 16ft layout means that large parts of the layout can survive without a train movement (because the train is visible and moving elsewhere on the layout). This nearer to real life than the significantly higher number of train movements (and smaller time interval between those movements) that would be needed in a similar time period on, say, a 5ft long layout.

 

Our view of what the public wants maybe influenced by the size of the layout that we're working.

 

At least at home or in the club we can slow things down a bit.