Time to Think Again

It has been over a year since I wrote the post, Time to Think.  There I pondered what to do with the space I have been blessed with; a garage.  Since then I have determined that space is not so good for model trains.  In fact, it needs more work than I realized even though it isn't a bad space for a workshop and storage.  It will be a fine place to build Halloween props each year, work on home improvement projects or generally make a mess I wouldn't make in the house.  In fact, I built this year's NMRBO diorama in that space and the Pine Branch Park railroad has lived there since we moved in.

Can you find the diorama in this image?

But the trains can't live there much longer.  The winter was indeed cold and damp.  No leaks in the roof, but seepage from the concrete floor needs to be addressed eventually.  The summers have been hot and dry but thanks to our evening lows the mornings are pleasant and the garage can be used for a few hours.  If the weather is mild and the evening breeze picks up it is downright enjoyable with the garage door open (and a cold beverage!).  The spiders aren't too bad, nor the dust, and so far - knock on wood - no sign of rodents!  Still, it is a hostile environment for vintage craftsman structures and rolling stock!

So where will the trains go?  As I mentioned in my post "New Digs", this house has a second living room we call the den.  There I'll be sharing the space with my son's computer desk, a bookshelf with display cabinet, and a TV area.  The bookshelf was built last fall and just in the last month I installed new lighting.  My son's computer area is well established and he regularly plays VR games in that end of the room, wildly swinging his arms, working up a sweat!  The workbench has been moved to make room for the trains.

Percy enjoys his new bed atop a Helmer cabinet between my workbench and the sliding glass doors overlooking the back yard.  We both enjoy the natural light and the view.

 
All that remains before the trains come inside is to build some legs for the railroad.  In the garage, both this one and the last, it rested on metal shelving and that will remain in the garage.  In the den it will need legs with wheels; not that it will be rolled around that often, but it will be convenient for photo shoots and cleaning.  Beneath the benchwork will be space for rolling carts.  These will hold paints, supplies, tools, etc. that don't fit in the Ikea Helmer drawers at the workbench.

I'm also going to make some shelves to go over the workbench.  The lowest will include a section of cork board for tacking up instructions (or maybe a metal strip for magnets).  As I've used this smaller bench I have discovered the need to set large plan sheets and even smaller instruction pages...somewhere.  Now that the cat is sharing the space, there's really no good place to put pages of plans.  My desk lamp seen in the photo above will be relocated and strip lighting will be attached under the lowest shelf.  This will not only give me a few more inches on the work surface, but the shelf will provide a place to attach a camera looking straight down onto the bench, should I decide to shoot a video or two.

Hopefully all this will be accomplished in September because October will be for building new Halloween yard haunt props and that time will be here soon!  Feel free to leave comments or questions down below and thanks for reading!

Horse Car Revival

Since the early planning stages of the Pine Branch Park pike, I have endeavored to tell a story.  That story is about the changes in transportation and its effects on the culture of 1920s Florida.  This transition period - not the steam-to-diesel transition period of oft modeled by so many - saw the shift from horse-drawn to horseless carriages.  By the late '20s the horse-drawn streetcar had been replaced by a horseless car of another kind, still on rails, but drawing power from overhead wires.  If not, then it was replaced by the automobile and its tracks in the street pulled up or simply paved over unceremoniously. 

Neatly paved street track in Jacksonville, 1920.

That ripping out of the old was what I sought to portray on the main street of Ocala Springs.  I had plans for a street crew to be digging out bricks (follow this link for inspiration in that regard) and loading them into a wagon, and rail being put onto a truck for delivery to the scrap dealer. This would be an interesting scene in itself, but when another wagon's wheels got bound up in the street track and tipped over its load, a traffic jam ensued - naturally, at an intersection, to cause the most chaos.  Now we're talking.  Humor and interest.  The old Horse Car was not to be scrapped, but instead purchased by that entrepreneur, Strickland, and placed on a display track as a tourist trap roadside attraction where visitors could have their picture made as a souvenir.

Horse car in Ocala; appears to be broad gauge.

But recently I've been considering the disposition of dioramas.  Last year's NMRBO entry was built around a brick street with the horse-drawn streetcar modeled in service, rolling down "Orange Avenue".  What if that track never went out of service?  Sure, the last horse car ran in San Francisco in 1913, and my diorama was set in 1914, but the Ocali Creek is set in the late 1920s.  Did horse cars survive that long?  According to J.H. White Jr., "...New York, had a few horsecars running until July 1917. Pittsburgh ran its last hay burner in 1923, and Sulphur Rock, Arkansas, shut down the U.S. horsecar era in 1926."  Well, horse-puckey.

So now I'm faced with a wonderful dilemma where both options are interesting.  Either I live with the anachronism and keep the old nag pulling her coach, or I proceed as planned and show the line as being removed.  In these sorts of cases I tend to look at the pros and cons for each scenario and make a decision after I've mulled it over a while.  In this case, I'm in no hurry, but this is the best time for this sort of cogitation, when there's no rush.  So I drew up a plan, or rather, modified the existing plan to include a rough indication of the functioning (or not) horse car line and a car barn with attached stable.  Here 'tis:

Click on the image to see it larger.

The horse car track is shown in red.  The curves are a bit sharp and would likely be eased a bit.  Though the car itself actually rolls, this won't be an operating model as I haven't perfected the miniaturizing gun to work on living tissue, beyond the odd pigeon, and I'm not sure what you'd feed a miniature horse.  The car barn and stable shown in orange would probably be either an ornate affair with some gingerbread or a simple shed.  There would also be a passenger platform (not shown) near the station so the horse car could make connections with local branch passenger trains.

Of course some of you may have already hit on the compromise I may inevitably take, to do both.  That is, to lay this track including a now-shuttered car barn and depict the line as being removed by the road gang.  But there is another option still.  I could install overhead wires over the main street portion in front of the businesses and place a cute little Birney there, as if the line were still in operation now converted to electricity.  Hmmm...maybe I'll have a bowl of oats then hit the hay and think about this in the morning.  Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

Icing on the Cake!

I'm happy to report that I won FIRST PLACE in the Walthers National Model Railroad Build Off 2023, in the Adult HO scale category.  I had no expectation that I'd even place, but it sure feels good to receive the recognition.  Of course the prize money will go a long way towards any future expansion of the Ocali Creek Railway!  Congratulations to all the winners this year!

Let's just imagine they're eating cake.

I've updated the list of labels in the sidebar to include nmrbo23.  Clicking that will bring up all the posts about this year's diorama.  Honestly, the building and completion of the diorama itself is four months of challenging fun.  This year I got to try some new techniques and practice skills as well.  But to win is really icing on the cake.

Found One!

I'd love to visit Japan someday, though the thought of spending 12 hours in a pressurized aluminum tube at 40 thousand feet over the Pacific does not thrill me at all.  So until that day when the stars align and time, funds and courage meet, I resign myself to exploring the land of the rising sun with Google.  My son got an Oculus VR headset for Christmas two years ago and we put Google Earth on there.  Warning, if you get vertigo, the feeling is real when you select a region and suddenly you're hovering in low Earth orbit next to the planet with empty space all around you.  <shivers>  Better to type in a street address and not be so high up.  Once you drop into street view the experience is pleasant, providing beautiful vistas, interesting structures and of course, trains.

Anyway, when walking in Kamakura one day I came across this:

Can you see it?  No?  Take a closer look:

Yes!  It is a model railroad.  I have no idea what this store actually sells, but they've got trains.  Maybe someone with better Google hunting skills can discover and let me know.  Some folks hunt for garden gnomes; I hunt for trains and this time I found a tiny railroad in a store window.

Pictures I Didn't Submit

Here are a few shots taken during the construction of my entry into the Walthers National Model Railroad Build Off contest for 2023.  These didn't make the cut.  I'll say more in the captions.

Doesn't everyone wash their walls?  This was to try and scrub away the tape residue from the window panes.  Yes, I masked every single window pane in order paint the bright blue windows white.  Because they're cast as one molded piece - clear, blue and white all together.  Who thought that was a good idea?

Fans of the 90s comedy "Frasier" may recognize this coffee mug.  My folks bought it for me at a yard sale, not knowing the connection to the show.  Neither did I until a fan pointed it out to me.  I use it nearly every Sunday.

This was the point in the process where I was considering a printed backdrop.  Didn't go that route, but was inspired by the imagery to model two Bald Cypress trees on the diorama.

And here are those Cypress trees being constructed outside, because my family couldn't stand the aroma of the super glue kicker.  Woodland Scenics tall columnar pines made a great trunk and armature.

The NMRBO Hurricane.  My workbench in the throes of scenic application.

My son Andrew was a great help setting up the photoshoots and used this opportunity to take some images of his own.  And I thought my hair was long when I was in high school.

Hopper's Narrative Influence

Careful viewers will note that the three images in the preceding blog post were all works by Edward Hopper.  Hopper (1882-1967) was an American artist known for his realistic scenes of ordinary life.  According to Wikipedia he "created subdued drama out of commonplace subjects layered with a poetic meaning, inviting narrative interpretations".  Sounds good to me, especially that last bit about inviting narrative interpretations.  I believe strongly that art and story are two sides of a coin.  The best art, like great model railroads, tells a story or sometimes raises questions in the viewers mind that lead to a "narrative interpretation".  

A quick search of the Model Railroader archive will reveal a few brief mentions of Edward Hopper.  Most notable is an article by John Armstrong in which he recreates, in model form, the scene depicted in Hopper's painting "The Nighthawks".  To honor Armstrong a painting was made by railroad artist Ted Rose which included the grand old master himself standing trackside next to a Canandaigua Southern steam engine with the Nighthawks scene in the background.  Think about it; a fictional scene from a famous painting recreated on a freelanced model railroad, finally depicted full circle in a painting.  Narrative indeed.

But perhaps lesser known - because it is entirely my speculation - is this scene, shown on Earl Smallshaw's Middletown and Mystic Mines railroad:

Now, I can't prove it, primarily because Smallshaw has gone on to that great roundhouse in the sky, but I suspect what we're looking at is a nod to this painting:

House by the Railroad, Edward Hopper, 1925

Hopper's painting, indeed many of his railroad paintings, were made in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the time frame of Smallshaw's M&MM.  Note the use of negative space in both images to highlight the subject and draw its contours into sharp relief.  On the Middletown & Mystic Mines this house was the home of Fenton Farnsworth, founder of the M&MM.  As the story goes, he would often step out onto his porch to watch the 8:25 doodlebug go by.  According to the photo's caption in the May 1982 Model Railroader, "Just before his retirement he had this quaint Victorian home built on a knoll and as close to the right-of-way as possible so he could keep an eye on his creation."  Narrative.  Art inspires a story.  

Smallshaw's model, by the way, was a Classic Miniatures Leadville House.  Not an exact match to the house in Hopper's painting but it captures the spirit.  Neither is the supposed real-life inspiration for the painting a match, attributed to a home in New York which also only vaguely looks like the house in Hopper's painting.  But here's yet a third house with a connection (so I'm led to believe) to Hopper's "House by the Railroad":

I selected this one from the many views available on the internet because of the lighting which so closely matches Hopper's work.  Hitchcock reportedly liked the look of Hopper's painting and was inspired to create the Bates Mansion for his film "Psycho".  Supposedly.  But such supposition is part of the fun of "narrative interpretation" isn't it?  Sometimes not knowing is more interesting.

As I've built structures for dioramas over the last two years (see nmrbo22 and nmrbo23 tags for more) I've enjoyed creating narratives around each.  How old are these buildings?  Who might live there?  How can the structure itself tell the story?  What clues can I give the viewer to help discover that narrative?  In the case of Smallshaw's and Hitchcock's Victorian structures we're provided a narrative and given a larger context in which that story is placed.  

But Hopper's masterpiece has no such context beyond the railroad tracks in the foreground.  The structure itself offers no clues beyond an approximate age based on architectural details and the date of Hopper's painting, 1925.   Art critics can and do speculate about the narrative, but they have no more corner on that market than you or I when it comes to imagination.  Perhaps the best we can do is to be inspired enough to recreate our own House by the Railroad and maybe even invite our viewers to cast their own narrative interpretations.

Negative Space and Parade Routes

Railroad Train by Edward Hopper, 1908

When I was reading the July 2023 edition of Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine I came across this statement in Joe Fugate's editorial:

 "Negative space is basically the so-called 'boring stuff' that has little to do with the railroad.  It's the stuff that typically gets thrown out when we selectively compress a railroad route into a layout track plan.  Rather than add something else 'railroady' to the layout, a 'negative space scene' takes space away from the railroady part per se hence the term 'negative' space."

No.  That's not what it means at all.

From wikipedia: "In art and design, negative space is the empty space around and between the subject(s) of an image.^[1] Negative space may be most evident when the space around a subject, not the subject itself, forms an interesting or artistically relevant shape, and such space occasionally is used to artistic effect as the "real" subject of an image" 

Furthermore, "Elements of an image that distract from the intended subject, or in the case of photography, objects in the same focal plane, are not considered negative space. Negative space may be used to depict a subject in a chosen medium by showing everything around the subject, but not the subject itself. Use of negative space will produce a silhouette of the subject. Most often, negative space is used as a neutral or contrasting background to draw attention to the main subject, which then is referred to as the positive space."

The "boring stuff" in between our "railroady scenes" is NOT negative space.

To be fair, I get what he's trying to say.  In the editorial he continues to elaborate on what he thinks negative space means for modelers and while he's totally misusing the term, he's still pointing to a concept I endorse.  Our model railroads have to strike a balance between the "railroady" and "non-railroady" scenes we see in the real world.  Most model railroads are heavy on the stations, yards, industries, and signature scenic effects like tunnels and bridges because these are often considered the most interesting elements.  

But in the real world there are, for example, suburbs, non-railroad-served industries, and miles and miles of nature alongside the tracks.  The problem is that the "empty" scenes in between aren't really empty.  While it would be tempting to call a plain, simple scene between more interesting scenes "negative space", a better term for these scenes would be, simply put, ordinary scenes.  The world is full of them and, as Joe rightly points out in his editorial, these often get cut from our model railroads as we selectively compress the world.

House by the Railroad by Edward Hopper 1925

But to say such an ordinary scene is "boring" is an opinion.  Real railroads run through a variety of settings and it is up to the modeler to determine what is interesting enough to be included in the limited space we all have.  It is the operations-fixated focus of the mainstream modeling community that drives this false dichotomy between what is interesting (railroady) and what is boring (the rest of the stuff).

Let me present an idea that might serve to recapture a more positive and balanced perspective on those "boring" scenes - the Parade Route or Paradestrecke in German.  I mention the German translation because that's where I see this concept at work the most, whether on FREMO layouts or home railroads.  When possible, it is desirable to include a stretch of railroad on which trains can get up and go, run hard, stretch their legs, etc.  This is that place we all know and love, standing trackside where the power of a train can be viscerally felt as it thunders by.  

A parade route can include a featured element such as a trestle or even structures, but the primary focus is on the train.  A viewer might look at the scene and enjoy the scenery the way a person would view and enjoy a landscape painting, and it might evoke feelings of peace, tranquility, or mild interest.  But the real interest occurs when the train enters the scene.  This is the place to let that freight creep by so the viewer can admire those detailed cars you spent so much time weathering, or to send that limited express screaming by at 70 per, drivers flashing.

Railroad Sunset by Edward Hopper, 1929

The American modeling culture used to include these ideas, in part.  A classic track plan was the 'out-and-back'.  This provided a visible yard for either storing trains or possibly switching cars and a mainline loop, usually folded and twisted over itself for a longer run but with a reversing section allowing a train to return to the yard from whence it departed.  In effect, the main line was the parade route.  These plans were often accompanied by such text as "let 'em roll on the main while you switch the yard" or some similar admonishment.  Sounds like two kinds of fun at the same time.

Admittedly, those early track plans allowing for trains to just run laps were dependent on, and for the benefit of, companies that sold an ever-increasing selection of locomotives and rolling stock.  The cure for "boredom" on such a pike was to (purchase, build and) run a variety of trains, not necessarily to operate them prototypically.  But once we began heading down the path towards prototype fidelity and operation it seemed the parade routes began to wither, literally shrinking in favor of squeezing in more sidings or more closely modeling a prototype track arrangement and squeezing out "ordinary" scenery.

Long before the prototype operators gained dominance in the hobby Frank Ellison et al found a way to have your cake and eat it too, including both parade routes - though he likely didn't use that term - and serious operation that mimicked the real railroads.  John Allen did the same, as did so many of his contemporaries.  Creating a section of the railroad exclusively for watching the train travel through beautiful scenery was often as important as spotting freight cars or making station stops on time.

But today such ideas are pooh-poohed to the point that magazine editors have to write editorials encouraging folks to consider "negative space" in their operations-oriented railroads.  Perhaps these old ideas will become new again.  Today's non-hobbyist public that attend train shows generally see trains - both model and prototype - as railfans, not operators.  In the real world trains travel through ordinary scenes.  Most North American modular layouts aren't created for operating, but rather favor long trains running through ordinary scenes.

Ordinary scenes are not negative space.  

Boring is in the eye of the beholder.