Realistic Train layouts ?

On 12/17/2010 2:38 PM Musicman59 spake thus:
You need to look at some different layouts. I'd suggest starting with George Sellios' Franklin & South Manchester, which is everything that plasticated layout you looked at isn't.
To answer your question above, yes, it's just bad design. One does see a lot of those "Plasticville" layouts, but fortunately there are also many which are anything but.

This has to be the ultimate layout.
Pendon, 4mm scale depicting a huge swathe of British countryside in which the railway is only a small part of re-creating the 1930s as realistically as possible.
Just look at the attention to detail.
From Bob Symes-Schutzmann's youtube channel (BobSymes)
Pendon part 1 Pendon part 2

You might find a lot more help for the 1800's at the EarlyRail Yahoo group. Give it a try. For early cars take a look at:
and check out their US Military RR offerings.
Locomotives are not as easy to find but some exist and many "modernized" versions can be backdated to their original as built state.
For a more realistic layout than the one you looked at, there are lots of possibilities but this is about as good as it gets:

I'm afraid we have to disagree here. Sellios' F&SM is, IMO, not that realistic and looks more like a caricature of the Dirty Thirties than real life.
While it may be an example of excellence in modelling, it's far from realistic. More Disneyesque than realistic.

Agreed, 100%. You don't get much more realistic that Pendon.

I'm rather new to the game - haven't yet built a 'proper' layout, but I think I can give a little insight into the issues you address. First, I think many folks are 'into' running trails more than they are 'into' doing detailed scenery. As for the busy-ness of the layouts - I think that is related to horizontal compression. Yes, you can do all this stuff to scale, but to 'model' a mile (5280 feet) in HO would require 60 feet - about 30 feet in N. Who has the room to 'model' a 50 mile section of road?

You can fall into your own navel getting a layout more and more detailed, and yet never reach absolute one-to-one realism. That being the case, most model railroaders prefer to get their layouts up and running and then backfill the details once the mechanical parts are running consistantly.
Some folks never get around to doing much detailing, weathering, etcetera; but what the heck: it's a hobby and if they get more pleasure out of running trains -and look upon the layout as being only something that keeps the trains from falling to the floor- then more power to 'em.
OTOH, some guys prefer to spend circa 50 hours on each boxcar, and go for details that will never be visible when the car is on the rails; if, indeed it ever *gets* on the rails. Because some model railroaders just like to build stuff and don't care about running it. Ever.
In short; there isn't a "right" or a "wrong": it's *your* railroad and you're free to do whatever you wish with it. (After all, it wouldn't be much fun if there was a rulebook we all had to follow.)
~Pete

On 12/17/2010 5:00 PM Roger Traviss spake thus:
[OP wrote":]
[I responded:]
You're putting rather a finer point on the discussion than I had intended.
But since you brought it up, OK: I suppose by the most restrictive definition of "realistic", Sellios' stuff doesn't quite meet it. By which I mean a note-for-note replica of a scene circa [insert time period here].
But damnit, his buildings, scenes, indeed his entire little HO universe is *plenty* realistic, meaning that he captures the feeling, creates a simalucrum of the place he invites his visitors to imagine. Not a small part of it is the "dirt" that he overlays everything with. Now, I haven't really seen much of John Allen's work, but having seen a lot of George Sellios, I think he is *the* master of making things look realistic through weathering. Disneyesque? In this context, I'm not even sure whether to interpret that as an insult or as praise.
In any case, I sense a good bit of disdain on your part to anything that's not a good British railroad scene. Fair enough; I really don't know anything about, nor do I give much of a shit about, what British scenes of the 1930s look like. You do, which is entirely appropriate, since you grew up there.
I think my answer was perfectly good to the OP's concern about "plasticky" looking layouts. Since he wasn't asking about historical-society realism, I assumed that pointing him in the direction of more realism was appropriate, and I stand by my selection of an example. There are many others, of course, and I'm sure there are British masters of the art as well.
So are we OK?

One of the things that we model railroaders suffer from is the lack of sufficient space to recreate reality at an exact proportionate reduction in what ever scale we work in. As such, a method of getting more into a given space known as "selective compression" is often used. By this method we get a sufficient representation of the real world reduced to fit our available space, and hopefully we get the "feel" of the actual scene on our layout. Sometimes out attempts are successful, sometimes not so much, as in the layout that you observed above. If you keep looking you'll find some layouts that will WOW you.

One of the best O-scale layouts I have seen was the Keighley society's "Runswick Bay". Pre-grouping North Eastern Railway, in a 13' diameter circle.It was based on a secondary line with small engines and short trains.

"David Nebenzahl"
I have an advantage, if you will, by having experience in modelling both sides of the pond. I have seen the best of both worlds. In general, I think the best North American modelling captures the more gritty aspect of railroads than do most UK models which I feel are way too clean and tidy. The buildings are usually pristine as are platforms, rolling stock and locomotives, which is not how I remember the railways in the UK in 1960s at all. :-)
That's why I now model North American, even if freelanced, over modelling the UK.
There are numerous published railroads in MR and RMC that I feel are far more "realistic" than the F&SM or in fact the G&D, although I think that's considered sacrilege by many. The V&O, the Midland Road and others who's names I can't think of right now as I'm too tired. :-)
Overly detailed scenes populated by hundreds of miniature people are not realistic, unless you're modelling downtown on a Saturday afternoon and even then, that needs to be done carefully. Next time you are out in your car driving around the suburbs, where you probably live, see how many people you can see either walking, working in their yards or performing any other function. Not many I'd hazard a guess. Ditto for industrial parks, you see very few people. Go to the local shopping mall and see how many people you see in the parking lot. A dozen at most, if that? Yet MR and the other magazines are always writing about creating "mini-scenes" which, on their own, are OK but when you have a layout over populated with mini-scenes, as seen in the Big Picture, you end up with a model railway that is over crowded with people etc..
As for plasticy buildings, I agree. Everything on my GER was weathered. Freight cars, locomotives, passenger cars, automobiles, trucks, buildings, even people. There were also few people visible, which is as it is in the real world. A few people on the downtown streets, one or two workers visible or partially visible at the manufacturing plants and warehouses and one or two around the freight yards and engine terminals. Just like real life and not how the model magazines suggest.

On 12/17/2010 9:51 PM Roger Traviss spake thus:
I'll grant you that about the F&SM; I guess you could say it is a bit "cartoony" (and maybe overpopulated). Sellios doesn't make many bones about how he likes to create such "scenes" in his writing about the layout.
(Or like the shiny new layouts one sees in TV commercials, like the one for Amtrak currently running here in the US.)
Well, got to give it to you: you write a good answer there.

Musicman59 wrote in news:ac44bb4f-b239-4dc5-99c3- snipped-for-privacy@k22g2000yqh.googlegroups.com:
*snip*
*snip*
I've seen the opposite extreme with a lot of weathering. Some things are weathered so much it's just not realistic. It rains on my layout; does it rain on anyone else's?
There's usually quite a bit of stuff in the way, no matter whether it's cities (buildings and cars) or country (trees, corn, topology, houses). Done well, the layout looks better and feels bigger. Done poorly, it looks bad. Bachmann makes a 4-4-0 American type locomotive. I believe the 1800s stuff is out there, but you just have to look for it. Puckdropper

For the 1800s, look up Paul Scoles - Assuming WWII to be part of the steam to diesel transition, check out Tony Koester -
For realistic in general see the Free online magazine Model Railroad Hobbyist and The work of Joe Fugate
While George Sellios and more particularly John Allen did much to advance the Hobby, both built caricatures . Sellios built initially as a showcase for his products and had to revamp what he had to make it useable as an "operating" model railroad. Tony Koester helped him with that. John Allen had "operations" in mind from the beginning.

Nor do you often get that much space. For smaller, but equally well detailed British layouts, see work by Chris Nevard - I particularly like 'Arne Wharf' - or 'County Gate' by John de Frayssinet and Jennifer Ayres - Those two ought to keep the OP busy for a couple weeks!

You don't. You hide it in staging yards and fiddle yards.

You can fall into your own navel getting a layout more and more detailed, and yet never reach absolute one-to-one realism. That being the case, most model railroaders prefer to get their layouts up and running and then backfill the details once the mechanical parts are running consistantly.
Some folks never get around to doing much detailing, weathering, etcetera; but what the heck: it's a hobby and if they get more pleasure out of running trains -and look upon the layout as being only something that keeps the trains from falling to the floor- then more power to 'em.
OTOH, some guys prefer to spend circa 50 hours on each boxcar, and go for details that will never be visible when the car is on the rails; if, indeed it ever *gets* on the rails. Because some model railroaders just like to build stuff and don't care about running it. Ever.
In short; there isn't a "right" or a "wrong": it's *your* railroad and you're free to do whatever you wish with it. (After all, it wouldn't be much fun if there was a rulebook we all had to follow.)
-------------------------------------------------------------------- And some people have fun Following the Rulebook!

?
There's a Rulebook?
~Pete

I'm not so sure about that. I grew up in the '40s and a lot of his scenes look quite familiar. Of course my memory may have exaggerated things so maybe George has too. But I'm more inclined to think he just ignored the nicer part of town because it wasn't as interesting :-).