Cliches on layouts

[Peter Kazmierczak]

Don't know if these are cliches, but I've seen enough layouts exhibiting these features:

 

1. Lots and lots of identical little plastic fir trees on the hillside

 

2. Roads with no camber, overscale and roughly painted lane markings and no curved edges at road junctions - the roads meeting at 90 degrees to each other on the corners

[Oldddudders]

Don't know if these are cliches, but I've seen enough layouts exhibiting these features:

 

1. Lots and lots of identical little plastic fir trees on the hillside

 

2. Roads with no camber, overscale and roughly painted lane markings and no curved edges at road junctions - the roads meeting at 90 degrees to each other on the corners

Yes, but they are cliched bad modelling, that's all! Mass fir trees are a pain - if affordable, they don't look great in detail, if not affordable you don't buy many. Cambering roads needs a lot of art in my view to look right - and many concrete roads are just flat.

[Guest jim s-w]

Hi Peter

 

The thing with camber is it's less than 1mm over several inches (assuming the road is scale width). It shouldn't be noticeable in 4mm scale plus large vehicles tend to settle level. Vehicles leaning over is not something you usually see in the real world.

 

It's rare you ever see trees anything like scale size on a model. I wonder if it's because we feel we have to model the whole tree? We have to cut the back scene off at some point why not the tops of the trees?

 

Cheers

 

Jim

[Peter Kazmierczak]

Thanks Ian and Jim.

 

I see your point; I'll cross off the camber from my list.....

 

Perhaps the biggest cliche of all is people like me sitting at a keyboard on this forum, calling themselves "Railway Modellers", and not doing any blinking modelling.....

[Mikkel]

But to be honest I am not that clever. Some vehicles are modelled with their wheels turned as I have a corner in mind but the rest are just plonked and shuffled until I think it looks ok.

The process of "shuffling things until they look OK" is exactly where your kind of skill (and intuition) comes in and makes all the difference .

[Oldddudders]

Perhaps the biggest cliche of all is people like me sitting at a keyboard on this forum, calling themselves "Railway Modellers", and not doing any blinking modelling.....

No! If only 1% of our idle thoughts expressed here make others think about their own models - which may already be far better than mine - then we've "oiled the wheels" somewhere. When the muse strikes, your modelling will get going again, for sure. Today's excuse is a large orange cat on my lap, rendering typing difficult, and modelling impossible!

[Kris]

 

It's rare you ever see trees anything like scale size on a model. I wonder if it's because we feel we have to model the whole tree? We have to cut the back scene off at some point why not the tops of the trees?

 

 

Or is it more to do with a perception that they look too big when modelled to the correct size? It felt very strange putting in trees that were nearly twice as high as a coach is long.

 

 

 

[coachmann]

Road camber is there all right (at least on Welsh roads) and if anyone has ever driven one of the old double decker buses with a full load they'de know it was necessary to counteract for it otherwise the bus would be darned uncomfortable to steer. So yes the buses could lean quite a lot, especially the pre-war built 7' 6" wide buses that had weak springs by postwar years.

[mudmagnet]

Thanks Mikkel

 

But to be honest I am not that clever. Some vehicles are modelled with their wheels turned as I have a corner in mind but the rest are just plonked and shuffled until I think it looks ok.

 

This leads met to another cliche. How often have you seen it said that you should model road vehicles with their front wheels angled to look more realistic? Go and watch traffic for a bit and you soon see that wheels are kinda straight most of the time. Unless the vehicle is actually going round a corner drivers don't weave down the road. Also a lot of drivers straighten up when they park too. Parked vehicles with angled steering are the exception not the norm.

 

Cheers

 

Jim

 

Not forgetting that the bottom of the tyres should be flattened a little where there are in contact with the road! Not so noticable in 4mm, but necessary in 7mm and above.

[kevpeo]

 

1. Lots and lots of identical little plastic fir trees on the hillside.

 

Guilty! Well not identical, but nearly. kev.

[Coombe Barton]

Talkling of the height of trees, this is of Ashburton Engine Shed on 13 August 2010.

 

 

To 4mm scale these'll be about 1ft 4 in high. The engine shed comes in at just over 4 inches.

[Dave777]

With 1 it actually kinda makes some sense, the era when steam ended and diesel/electric kicked off is a really interesting period to model, but, when everyone does it, how does one layout stick out amongst the rest?

 

Two things I've rarely seen - steam under the wires (I think generally modellers only build catenary when they're planning to run electrics, it's not viewed as a purely scenery item) and steam alongside early blue diesels.

[trisonic]

Two things I've rarely seen - steam under the wires (I think generally modellers only build catenary when they're planning to run electrics, it's not viewed as a purely scenery item) and steam alongside blue diesels.

 

That's why I think the Shenfield area of the old GER mainline would make an interesting model. B17's and catenary! It took a while to extend the OHLE to Southend and Chelmsford (Shenfield is a junction).

 

Best, Pete.

 

 

 

[Oldddudders]

Two things I've rarely seen - steam under the wires (I think generally modellers only build catenary when they're planning to run electrics, it's not viewed as a purely scenery item) and steam alongside early blue diesels.

I think OHLE takes a great deal of modelling to look convincing, so only the most dedicated transition modeller is going to attempt it. Since it dominates the trackwork, it needs to be right to be worthwhile, and is thus not for the faint-hearted. It also needs to be the correct sort of kit for the early years of mainline electrification, too.

[Guest jim s-w]

Road camber is there all right (at least on Welsh roads) and if anyone has ever driven one of the old double decker buses with a full load they'de know it was necessary to counteract for it otherwise the bus would be darned uncomfortable to steer. So yes the buses could lean quite a lot, especially the pre-war built 7' 6" wide buses that had weak springs by postwar years.

 

That's just it Larry.

 

We know it's there and as you say on an older worn vehicle you can feel it's effect but when it's 76.2 times smaller can you actually see it?

 

Cheers

 

Jim

[Sailor Charon]

Not always near to the town or village though. Castle Cary, Lairg, Dent to name but three.

Colchester station is quite a way from the centre. And Thatcham station...

'Why didn't you build the station nearer the town?'

'We considered it... and then thought it was better to build it by the railway line."

[seriously, it's almost in the middle of nowhere.]

[Black Sheep]

Parked vehicles with angled steering are the exception not the norm.

 

Cheers

 

Jim

 

not on the street I live on!!!

 

have a mix of cars with wheels pointing all over the place, some cars a foot or more from the kerb, others tucked right up against it, some cars half on the kerb and often cars squeezed into a gap you wouldn't have thought possible.

 

so, anyone modeling a terraced street in modern times, pick a random mix of cars, vans and 4x4's, add a classic car to the mix, put a blindfold on and place them parked up each side of the street, the result will be quite realistic if my road is anything to go by!

[James]

I think OHLE takes a great deal of modelling to look convincing, so only the most dedicated transition modeller is going to attempt it. Since it dominates the trackwork, it needs to be right to be worthwhile, and is thus not for the faint-hearted. It also needs to be the correct sort of kit for the early years of mainline electrification, too.

I also think that to be convincing it requires long turnouts - with typical model-sized pointwork it can look rather toy like.

[NGT6 1315]

No, I don't think so - the blinds should read the same either end, i.e. the destination of the train the unit's working. After all, imagine going through the barrier at Hull and looking for the York train, and being confronted with a row of cabs all saying 'Hull'.

 

I say this as an ex dmu guard myself, but checked through a couple of albums of first generation dmus and in the majority of cases where a tail lamp is visible and the direction of travel is evident, the blind on the rear shows the train's destination (of course there may be cases where the crew forgot / didn't have time / couldn't be bothered / blind broken), yet every ready to run dmu model gets this wrong.

 

Here in Germany, what you said initially is just as true, though from my observation the are all kinds of cases where this is not the case. Units with rollsigns in particular can show all kinds of combinations, though to be fair, most drivers do take care to sign correctly. When you have two of these coupled, however, it's very common for the signs on the coupled ends to show whichever destination had been set the last time the unit had worked at either the head or end of its train. This of course can also apply to stock with electronic signs on which these displays are not connected. And even if they should normally be connected, it can, and does, still happen that not all displays in the set get the signal to reset. The latter is something I keep seeing on our double deck coaches.

 

Then there are special situations like the following: On the suburban network around Stuttgart, three of the six lines going through the trunk line under the city centre reverse in a subterranean loop right beyond the Schwabstraße stop. On the older class 420 sets where the displays are not connected, the usual practice is to only set the sign at the head of the train for the trip to Schwabstraße and leave the one at the rear blank, as the driver has no sensible way of accessing the rear cab while inside the loop. So, I guess it does at least partially depend on the vehicle type, and possibly the area you're modelling.

 

That being said, I would think having one sign or the other show a wrong destination would not be something I would mind terribly, given that such things do happen in reality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think OHLE takes a great deal of modelling to look convincing, so only the most dedicated transition modeller is going to attempt it. Since it dominates the trackwork, it needs to be right to be worthwhile, and is thus not for the faint-hearted. It also needs to be the correct sort of kit for the early years of mainline electrification, too.

 

True enough. As for the last part of what you wrote, it gets worse when there were different OHLE designs in different periods, or when a different kind of OHLE is used for HSLs, for example.

 

 

 

I also think that to be convincing it requires long turnouts - with typical model-sized pointwork it can look rather toy like.

 

 

I guess realistic pointwork is much dependent on space, too – the awfully narrow point radii you described being a direct consequence of standard producers having to allow for modellers with little space available.

[highpeak]

That's just it Larry.

 

We know it's there and as you say on an older worn vehicle you can feel it's effect but when it's 76.2 times smaller can you actually see it?

 

Cheers

 

Jim

That's a very good point, and it's one of those modelling conundrums. If you model it to dead scale, is it noticeable? If it's not noticeable, then does the apparent lack of it trouble the eye/mind? So is it then necessary to exaggerate it to satisfy the mind?

 

It works the other way too. There's that great picture of those tall trees a few posts ago. If you model those to scale, does the eye/mind scream that they're too big?

 

Bit off the topic of cliches, but I thought this point worth a ponder.

[Coombe Barton]

It works the other way too. There's that great picture of those tall trees a few posts ago. If you model those to scale, does the eye/mind scream that they're too big?

 

Thanks for the compliment - but they're only normal sized trees. Modelling them to 'real' hright is both a challenge in modelling and believability (and it may just hide the models you're trying to show off)

 

However I believe that trees of this size can and should be modelled to scale - It'll just take time and careful positioning so that they fit. and yes, they will dwarf the trains. But other prople build big warehouses, so why not?

 

[Edit] Trees are the biggest living thing on this planet.

[coachmann]

Jim SW :

We know it's there and as you say on an older worn vehicle you can feel it's effect but when it's 76.2 times smaller can you actually see it?

I think one can, in fact I felt quite guilty about not having a camber on the road up past Greenfield Station two layouts ago.

 

 

The thing is, camber is visible on photos and buses etc are often around 4mm scale or smaller on postcards. It was something I had to look out for when driving and was in fact a factor of the PSV driving test.

[Dagworth]

[Edit] Trees are the biggest living thing on this planet.

Afraid not Fungi take that position by a VERY large margin http://www.extremescience.com/zoom/index.php/largest-living-thing

 

Andi

[Julia]

 

[Edit] Trees are the biggest living thing on this planet.

 

 

Pedant mode: That title goes to a fungus somewhere in the US that is several hundred miles across...

 

Sorry, back to the topic in question.

 

J

 

 

[JZ]

Jim SW : I think one can, in fact I felt quite guilty about not having a camber on the road up past Greenfield Station two layouts ago.

 

 

The thing is, camber is visible on photos and buses etc are often around 4mm scale or smaller on postcards. It was something I had to look out for when driving and was in fact a factor of the PSV driving test.

 

It will show when you have taller vehicles on the road.