Modelling Pet Hates

[Pacific231G]

I'm glad we're all different, it makes life much more interesting, but I'm opposite to you! When I get round to actually modelling something it's going to be pretty much what you hate, rather untidy and unkempt (although probably not much graffiti and certainly no road accidents). Definitely bombed-out buildings though. How else can you model central London in the couple of decades after WW2? I want to model what was there, rather than what I'd like there to be. My girlfriend wants to do a model of the Paris suburbs, with graffiti everywhere. I said she'd be banned from exhibitions ...!

 

 

Your girlfriend is clearly a very wise lady. The Paris suburbs are definitely what should be modelled preferably with the PC running through them. Is she thinking Maigret era or modern? Nobody does urban decay as well as the French.

[bike2steam]

 Nobody does urban decay as well as the French.

I dunno, the Italians aren't far behind, especially near the Swiss/Austrian borders, where the change is very noticable  .

[C&WR]

Your girlfriend is clearly a very wise lady. The Paris suburbs are definitely what should be modelled preferably with the PC running through them. Is she thinking Maigret era or modern? Nobody does urban decay as well as the French.

 

 

I dunno, the Italians aren't far behind, especially near the Swiss/Austrian borders, where the change is very noticable  .

 

Try crossing from Bosnia into Croatia (or at least as it was about 10 years ago).  One one side of the border shell holes & a barely made up road full of jalopies and horse carts, on the other a shiny autobahn full or Mercs & Beemers.  

[hornbyandbf3fan]

My inability to do anything fiddly with my ten thumbs!

[Vanders]

Right at this moment, poorly cast whitemetal items: oil drums do not have scale 1ft+ ridges running across the top of them. 

 

EDIT: And 2mm scale waterslide transfers. Hnnnnggg.

[JCL]

I dunno, the Italians aren't far behind, especially near the Swiss/Austrian borders, where the change is very noticable  .

Wow I'd forgotten about that. We were staying in Chamonix once. We drove from France into Switzerland for lunch, then through the St Bernard Tunnel into Italy for dinner in Aosta (I think) I remember being shocked at the pot holes on the highway. That said, it's a drive I'd recommend to anyone, as you can basically drive back to Chamonix via the Mont Blanc Tunnel.

[DavidH]

Your girlfriend is clearly a very wise lady. The Paris suburbs are definitely what should be modelled preferably with the PC running through them. Is she thinking Maigret era or modern? Nobody does urban decay as well as the French.

She'll be unstoppable if I tell her you said that ...

 

... More recent times I think. 

 

Oh don't distract me ... I'm having enough trouble finalising plans for just one layout ...

[MarkSG]

Buildings that float above the baseboard. It's not difficult to make them at least look like they are actually grounded.

 

steve

 

Like this, you mean:

 

http://www.pendonmuseum.com/updates/resources/gm32-1-w640.jpg

[Dunsignalling]

In the original post, what I was trying to illustrate was the snootiness of the pratt who wouldn't accept there are other acceptable couplings than 3 link. My response was, effectively, saying that if he wasn't prepared to accept the compromise of tension lock couplings on stock, he must also be prepared to not accept the compromise of a motor in the firebox.

 

I personally use 3 links because I like them, but I don't expect everyone else to use them for any reason at all, I expect everyone else to use what they feel most happy with, be it tension lock, Spratt & Winkle etc.

 

It take all sorts to make the world go round (including couplings!) and that's my hate - bigots, know-it-alls etc. who believe everyone must kowtow to their opinions and beliefs. I have an answer for them, and it takes the form of two fingers stuck firmly in a V shape !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Phil

There is another problem with "scale" couplers. Layouts have to be designed with their use in mind so baseboards have to be narrow and platforms or stock stabled on adjacent roads really get in the way.

 

One of the most unintentionally hilarious things I ever saw involved a small prairie and a gangwayed van that the fiddle yard operator had added between it and the B-set. The overhang of the bunker was almost touching the gangway and the train had terminated in a bay platforn tight against the backscene. The poor guy trying to uncouple the loco couldn't have been stitched up more comprehensively by the Candid Camera team!

 

To my mind, 3-links are just not suitable unless you are modelling 'goods only' or a period before corridor coaches!

 

John

[Iain Popplewell]

Dear MarkSG.

  I found your posting of the work of the immortal J H Ahern amusing.However he made these models a very long time ago and even at this distance in time you have to admit they're not bad.J H Ahern virtually created  "modern" railway modelling single handed.The fact that we now earnestly decry buildings that "float" is a direct consequence of his advocacy of greater realism in modelling.Personally I think we can all safely overlook Aherns unfortunate lapse and just marvel at what he achieved.

[PhilJ W]

Dear MarkSG.

  I found your posting of the work of the immortal J H Ahern amusing.However he made these models a very long time ago and even at this distance in time you have to admit they're not bad.J H Ahern virtually created  "modern" railway modelling single handed.The fact that we now earnestly decry buildings that "float" is a direct consequence of his advocacy of greater realism in modelling.Personally I think we can all safely overlook Aherns unfortunate lapse and just marvel at what he achieved.

For a wood/cardboard building that is 50 to 60 years old thats pretty good.

[C&WR]

I must admit I thought the Pendon post was done as a joke, and thought the "floating" effect was because of the age of the models rather than JHA not thinking about bedding them in. In fact IIRC there is a whole chapter in the book about using low relief, painted abckscenes and false perspective to assist with that.

 

Something that cracked me up on another forum was when a rather pompous member who constantly bangs on about standards was hoist with his own petard. He gave a very negative critique of a loco build, including stating that the lettering was all wrong and too big. Even when presented with evidence in the form of a photograph of the real thing he wouldn't back down!

 

The best bit was when he laid into a rather lovely layout that is also shown here. Eventually the layout's owner found & posted some pictures of the critic's railway & how we howled with laughter at the Thomas the Tank Engine models going through an Alpine landscape with luminous green flock and toy-like buildings sitting on it. There was an awful lot of bluster about how it was a work in progress and the Sodor stuff was there to amuse the children...

As an aside the acid green Alps would have been fine if he could just have said "they give me pleasure" and not been so rude about other people's work...

[Iain Popplewell]

C&WR  you mention Aherns chapter on painting back-scenes, the cloud effects in the posted Pendon picture are remarkably effective and if painted by J H Ahern prove he really new what he was on about.Truly a remarkable man.

 

With regard to your posting above about" knocking "other peoples layouts, I once opened a Chinese fortune cooky and received the priceless advice to "Learn to laugh at yourself before others laugh at you".Advice we all ignore at our peril as our Alpine Sodor modeller demonstrates.

[Happy Hippo]

I no longer have pet hates about railway modelling:  They just cause too much inner grief.

 

However, I suppose my pet hate is not having the time and money to research and build all the various railway models in various scales and gauges that I wish to do.

 

Regards

 

Richard

[C&WR]

Actually, Happy Hippo I think you have hit the nail on the head.

 

I am finally a homeowner, with my own garden where I could achieve my boyhood ambition of an outdoor railway* and space for a shed to build something in, possibly linking to the outdoors as the shed space is lower than the level of the garden where I would run tracks. Only thing is that to get to this point I am in a job where I am away from home so much I wouldn't have time to do the work, and having bought the house will have no spare cash for a year or so to pay for is all. 

 

Ho-hum, at least I can go back to my old layout from time to time!

 

Edit to add the original footnote that I forgot to put in:

 

*I mentioned to the Aged Ps that I would have loved to have had a railway int he garden as a boy and my Mother said, "but why didn't you ask?"   Curses, I was sure i did so perhaps they thought I was joking. although I suspect we wouldn't have had the cash then either.

[MarkSG]

Dear MarkSG.

  I found your posting of the work of the immortal J H Ahern amusing.However he made these models a very long time ago and even at this distance in time you have to admit they're not bad.J H Ahern virtually created  "modern" railway modelling single handed.The fact that we now earnestly decry buildings that "float" is a direct consequence of his advocacy of greater realism in modelling.Personally I think we can all safely overlook Aherns unfortunate lapse and just marvel at what he achieved.

 

That was my point, really. The standards we consider acceptable have changed immensely over time. Looking carefully at photos of the work of more recent modelling legends, such as PD Hancock and Peter Denny, you can see flaws that we would now decry. I was flipping through my copy of "Narrow Gauge Adventure" the other day, some of the buildings in that are distinctly floaty if you look carefully!

 

Partly, that's a result of chances in technology making greater realism more achievable. When I started modelling as a teenager, brick paper was perfectly acceptable on layouts. These days, we demand the realism of embossed plasticard. Bright green flock to represent grass was OK, now the fashion is for static grass. Partly, too, it's a result of a general move from B&W to colour photography. Monochrome hides a multitude of sins, not just the obvious fact that it effectively obscures all but the most glaring colour deficiencies but also makes it harder to tell gitches from shadows. And, of course, the vastly improved quality of RTR models (and RTP buildings, which were practically unknown a generation ago) makes realism a whole lot easier to achieve.

 

I'm a bit ambivalent about all this. On the one hand, as an exhibition-going visitor and magazine reader, I enjoy looking at realistic models, and the more realistic the better. But, also, I'm a tad concerned that we're now in a situation where the average modeller finds it easier to achieve acceptable realism by using solely RTR products than by kit- or scratchbuilding. When I started modelling, the quality of most RTR was so low that it didn't take much skill as a kit-builder to improve on it. These days, it's a lot harder to do better than RTR. 

 

J H Ahern broke a lot more rules than the one about grounding buildings properly. But that's because when he was modelling, the "rules" had yet to be written. I think there was a freedom in that, that maybe we don't have now.

[C&WR]

To be honest, MarkSG, in OO I find brick paper far more realistic than anything embossed!

[bike2steam]

To be honest, MarkSG, in OO I find brick paper far more realistic than anything embossed!

Once you've mastered the art of dry-brushing you'll soon change your mind.

[C&WR]

Once you've mastered the art of dry-brushing you'll soon change your mind.

 

I'm not too bad at dry-brushing, although I say it myself, it's just for bricks I find the mortar courses a bit crude.  But anyway, my railway is really just a trainset for my boy & for which I have the pleasure of making things to decorate it

[Pacific231G]

Dear MarkSG.

  I found your posting of the work of the immortal J H Ahern amusing.However he made these models a very long time ago and even at this distance in time you have to admit they're not bad.J H Ahern virtually created  "modern" railway modelling single handed.The fact that we now earnestly decry buildings that "float" is a direct consequence of his advocacy of greater realism in modelling.Personally I think we can all safely overlook Aherns unfortunate lapse and just marvel at what he achieved.

I'm not sure whether I'd go along with JHA single handedly inventing modern railway modelling as that ignores the equally influential contributions of people like Bill Banwell and Frank Applegate, Edward Beal and maybe A.R.Walkley*. I am though a huge admirer of what he achieved in terms of adding artistic impression to what had, up till then, been a fairly technical branch of modelling and have to admit that, whenever I got to Pendon, I'm a friend,  I still seem to spend as long enjoying the Madder Valley as the rest of the museum. 

 

Once 00 gauge started to be widely used one or two others had already started to go down the railway in its landscape or townscape route but nobody - at least nobody who got published- had taken it as far as John Ahern before the first appearance of Madderport as a layout at the end of 1941. If I could visit any imaginary modelled scene in reality it would definitely be Madderport and it's not so much the modelling quality of the individual buildings, though they were very and still are pretty good, but the way he put them together to create an impressionistic portrait of an idyllic small English port and its hinterland that so appeals. 

I find it interesting that John Ahern was more concerned with what looked right to him than with absolute scale accuracy so he was happy to accept the 00 compromise and even mix two and three foot gauge locos with standard gauge but was also an early adopter of two rail. Equally the Erica is far too small for a two hold coaster but nevertheless looks right on Madderport's quayside.

 

One reason for John Ahern's influence was that his articles describing the MVR started to appear during the war when very little actual modelling and even less layout building was going on so his artistic approach to his layout inspired much of what happened once peace returned. There is a lot of Madderport in P.D.Hancock's first Craig.

 

* By 1925 A.R.Walkley had pioneered a lot of what we now take for granted; 2 rail electrification, drectional control of small scale motors by DC  current reversal, automatic couplings, a fully sceniced layout, the truly portable layout and more. However, he was so far ahead that I'm not sure how much he actually influenced later modelling or which of those ideas were simply reinvented many years later.  

[Iain Popplewell]

Just Google searched A R Walkley ,absolutely amazing, his folding layout of 1925 is to all intents and purposes a "Modern" layout, my God it even has the correct gauge to scale ratio of HO a term I understand he invented.Thanks for the info. Pacific231G.The photo of his layout just blew me away.It's like coming across the first solid evidence for the existence of time travel !

Edit:

I don't suppose there are many people still about who actually saw and still recall this layout,but you kind of get the feeling that it probably worked reliably and realistically and I bet the signal worked too.

[Pacific231G]

Just Google searched A R Walkley ,absolutely amazing, his folding layout of 1925 is to all intents and purposes a "Modern" layout, my God it even has the correct gauge to scale ratio of HO a term I understand he invented.Thanks for the info. Pacific231G.The photo of his layout just blew me away.It's like coming across the first solid evidence for the existence of time travel !

It's well out of copyright now so would you like a scan of his 1926 Model Railway News article about it? I'm guessing that your Google search led to my article about early British minimal layouts on the late Carl Arendt's site as that included the photo. 

The use of 3.5mm/ft for "00 gauge" was being pioneered from about 1923 by a small group in the Wimbledon MRC  A. Stewart-Reidpath, Michael Longridge and A.R.Walkley. After the "gauge" war with Henry Greenly and his supporters based on his idea that "the gauge should not define the scale"  Walkley announced in December 1926 that in future he was going to call his models  half 0. In September 1927 J.N. Maskelyne the editor of MRN referred to HO as "a new name... coming into use in some corners of the model railway world" but that's the first reference I've found to it and everyone apart from Walkley working in 3.5mm scale was still referring  to  00 so I think it must have been Maskelyne who invented the term. This seems to have been several years before the term HO was used in the US.

[Iain Popplewell]

Yes David you are correct it was your article I read, all fascinating  new stuff  to me. I'd certainly be interested in seeing a scan of the original MRN article.

[MarkSG]

Yes David you are correct it was your article I read, all fascinating  new stuff  to me. I'd certainly be interested in seeing a scan of the original MRN article.

 

So would I!

[Gene]

Regarding items posted overseas from the UK, I know from personal experience that items sent to family members in Vancouver regularly disappear into a black hole. New Zealand on the other hand, never presents a problem.

 

That doesn't have to happen often, with usually no recompense from the carrier, for a trader to decide that it isn't worth shipping to that country or to insist that the customer pays for costly, fully insured carriage.

Sorry.l don't accept the "insurance routine" as an excuse..... the major UK shop I order from, whose name starts with the 8th letter of the alphabet, has no problem shipping to the US and Canada....and quite reasonable rates too....as do other UK shops.

 

Postal services are like anything else...." sh*t happens" and stuff gets lost,misplaced and yes even stolen......its a big bummer.....move on.