Why have moving trains on layouts?

[Reorte]

That's what I meant really, because that sort of thing is impossible (at the moment) it is better if figures etc look naturally motionless (eg seated) rather than frozen in mid action - so the contrast with moving trains is less pointed. Compromise of course, no-one will get out when the train arrives at the platform, but as little compromise as possible.

As with the French examples just posted, there is also a difference between simply moving and operating.

Good point. I think I agree with you that that would be a better approach, but I suppose the counter-argument is that, whilst nothing else is moving and that's unrealistic, a few posed-in-movement figures give the impression of more life than there actually is. Now how to motorise a tree so that it looks like it's windy...

[Pacific231G]

I find that diorama, simple running through, approach interesting. As I said above I'm more interested in appearance than operation, and that would avoid some compromises in appearance that operation generally involves - either the giant hand or unprototypical automatic couplings. On the other hand, however you reverse the train for another appearance, it must spend only a small part of the time in the modelled area?

The two modules I had photos of are from a display at the Baie de Somme festival in 2009 by the Dieppe based model railway club Litorail 76. The approach they have taken with their Littorail 3000 module is significantly different from the NMRA, FFMF and FREMO87 standards. Each scenic module is an open fronted box 1 metre long, 60cms high and 36cms wide and is accompanied by a 40cm long hidden module open at the rear to enable stock to be handled or extra tracks to be terminated and also to separate the different scenes. There is an option to have two 120cm long modules joined together as a single scene for a complete small station or industry with a single hidden module which makes up the same total length as two standard modules.

 

The construction of the module box is integral rather than having a conventional baseboard with a removable proscenium and part of the idea seems to be that as well as building single modules an individual modeller could build a couple of them with a fiddle yard as a home layout The standard interface is for a single track with one or two optional additional tracks 45mm each side of it and the track standard is based on Peco code 75 rather than the code 100 adopted by other standards.

The club itself has eight 45 degree curved hidden modules with track at a radius of 800mm. These allow modules to be displayed as a square, rectange or even as an octagon.

There is a set of photographs and a complete set of specifications (in French but well illustrated) on the club's website http://littorail76.chez.com/modu3000.htm

[Pacific231G]

That's what I meant really, because that sort of thing is impossible (at the moment) it is better if figures etc look naturally motionless (eg seated) rather than frozen in mid action - so the contrast with moving trains is less pointed. Compromise of course, no-one will get out when the train arrives at the platform, but as little compromise as possible.

As with the French examples just posted, there is also a difference between simply moving and operating.

One advantage of modelling rural France is that nobody ever seems to be moving anyway. It's amazing how empty a village can appear except at certain times of day. I've just been examining the traffic figures for some local railways in the South West and you'd be lucky to see more than two or three passengers getting on or off at any station anyway except when it's market day in the local town. In 1911, when there was no competition from buses and very few cars, one company operating four lines each with two return trains a day averaged just 273 passengers a day in total. That makes about seventeen for each train and of those passengers just 124 were first class ...in the whole year for all four lines one of which served a seaside resort!!

 

I do have one really useful figure- from Preiser I think- who is an elderly priest sitting on his luggage and presumably waiting for a train. It also used to be quite common at many stations to not allow passengers onto the platform (from the waiting room) until their train was ready to board.

It's a complete contrast from the busy busy (Germanic?) world of Faller/Preiser where the entire population seem to outside working, welding, putting out fires, being stopped by the police, mending the roads, hiking, biking and walking their dogs or, if they are indoors, rather energetically making love!

[Titan]

Good point. I think I agree with you that that would be a better approach, but I suppose the counter-argument is that, whilst nothing else is moving and that's unrealistic, a few posed-in-movement figures give the impression of more life than there actually is. Now how to motorise a tree so that it looks like it's windy...

 Oh thats easy, hollow flexible trunk, stiff piece of bent wire up the middle, and a motor to rotate said wire in time with the wind sound effects, and you can have them bending and swaying how you want. But just don't leave the motor running or it will look like they are hula-hooping!

[Reorte]

 Oh thats easy, hollow flexible trunk, stiff piece of bent wire up the middle, and a motor to rotate said wire in time with the wind sound effects, and you can have them bending and swaying how you want. But just don't leave the motor running or it will look like they are hula-hooping!

Sounds like that would give me a model of a drunk ent rather than a tree in the wind!

[Andy Reichert]

There are HO working models of cyclists now.

[Reorte]

Despite my comments about advancements in robotics some movement of people would be possible, as long as it's fairly simple, i.e. a photographer who could raise and lower a camera or someone raising or lowering a flag. It would be very fiddly in 4mm (requiring hollow limbs and body) but not, I think, totally impossible.

 

No, I'm not going to try it!

[johnarcher]

Neither am I, but, if anyone else remembers that far back, odd things did move on some of Dave Rowe's models. I seem to recall a swan gliding about in the lock on Leighton Buzzard

But, even if you could, you'd just have trains and one or two other things moving in a basically static setting, and I think it looks better if all the things that don't move are chosen/placed so it looks natural that they don't.

I suppose railway modelling combines two different sorts of model, there's the scenic (like non-moving dioramas) and the working model (like planes or ships, but they usually move in the real world, not a modelled setting), combining the two so it looks right (if that matters to you) is an interesting consideration.

[Reorte]

There was a swan gliding around on Flintfield, and I spent as much time watching that when I saw the layout as I did the trains!

 

Come to think of it if it was possible to make everything move convincingly, including people, I'd probably find it all rather creepy.

[Mikkel]

The Viessmann range claim that their moving figures add realism to layouts. I'm really not sure about that:

 

[Londontram]

Sorry Mikkel not sure about that one, looks to much like the top of a music box

[PhilJ W]

IIRC Faller produced some moving figures more than 20 years ago. They were quite basic with only one moving arm, either drinking a tankard of beer or chopping wood.

[Joseph_Pestell]

Sorry Mikkel not sure about that one, looks to much like the top of a music box

 

Yes. About as realistic as that bird (feathered) in a cage that used to features on the BBC Antiques programme with Arthur Negus. But the Germans have always liked this sort of toy on their layouts, so why not?

 

But back to the original question..... Rule 1 applies. It's your layout.

 

Personally, I enjoy "playing trains" but I fully recognise that others do not. At the extreme end, an American friend of mine was keen to built a large scale model diorama which would just have consisted of a piece of track modelled in great detail including ballast and weeds.

[MikeOxon]

...................... consisted of a piece of track modelled in great detail including ballast and weeds.

 

He could have gone the whole hog and done it at 12"/foot scale in his garden

 

[bike2steam]

Sorry Mikkel not sure about that one, looks to much like the top of a music box

When the camera is too close to the subject, I agree, but railway modelling is 3D art form, like a good oil painting take a step back, then look at it.

[Robin2]

Having, for some time, refrained from entering the discussion I started I'm inclined to the view, expressed by @Titan in Reply #99, that for many people the first imperative is moving trains and (my view not @Titan's) perhaps it makes it a bit more respectable if the "toys" are operated on a scenic layout that obviously required a lot of skill, time and effort to create.

 

And, as other have said, one can do what one pleases (or what pleases one?) on one's own layout.

 

I'm not personally all that interested in playing with trains but I love looking at layouts (with or without movement) in much the same way that I prefer watching heritage trains rather than riding on them. And it's hard to beat the "terror" of a full-sized and unstoppable Pendolino silently approaching at high speed while you stand on the platform or at a level crossing.

 

Like others I was very impressed when I first saw the tiny moving cyclists. But I think what most impressed me for its realistic motion were some Faller buses servicing a railway station. I can't remember where I saw them now but they seemed to have captured the sense of the real thin perfectly. Perhaps what the cyclists and the buses have in common is novelty.

 

...R

[Joseph_Pestell]

He could have gone the whole hog and done it at 12"/foot scale in his garden

 

 

No he couldn't. He lived in a third floor flat in Paris. The landlady, who lived on the 1st floor) was a tolerant old bird but there are limits!

[Pacific231G]

He could have gone the whole hog and done it at 12"/foot scale in his garden

Sounds like Captain Darling's 1:1 model of the ground captured in yesterday's big push in Blackadder Goes Forth. "Look there's a little worm" actually that model would have fitted in a Paris appartment!!

[bluebottle]

IIRC Faller produced some moving figures more than 20 years ago. They were quite basic with only one moving arm, either drinking a tankard of beer or chopping wood.

 

Representing a prototype who alternated between drinking beer and chopping wood? Not surprised he only had one arm.