I believe it didn't take very long after I decided in my early teens that model railroading would be my hobby for me to start planning a dream layout. You know, the one that would fill my parents' basement and then some, requiring an addition to the house (not to mention a Lotto 6/49 win). I've been carrying that dream around from country to country, house to house, for 30 years. Have I built that dream layout? Of course not.
Reality in the form of a fairly nomadic professional existence, a wife and four children, and the lack of free time that all of that entails, has limited me to starting several roughly 5'x9' layouts. Two ovals of track so that my sons wouldn't necessarily crash into each other all the time, and a chance to practice building benchwork, laying track, and wiring up a DCC system. Good experience to gather, but nowhere close to a dream layout.
So when we recently moved back to Ontario, I found myself once again in a rented home, no dedicated train room space available, but this time with two advantages that allowed me to start what I would call a long-term, serious model railroad. Firstly, I now lived closer to the prototypes that I've always wanted to model, which is a huge source of inspiration. Secondly, I happened upon first the blog and then the books of Lance Mindheim, and through his writings to other folks sharing many of the same thoughts.
Lance's philosophy that immediately caught my attention was that you didn't have to have a huge layout to enjoy the hobby. I'm a bit of a lone wolf modeller anyways, so I doubt that I would ever be able to scare up a bunch of people to run a regularly scheduled operating session. But I knew from being a member of the Nordel Model Railroad Club in Hockessin, DE, that operating was hugely fun. Operating what is basically a switching branch, following Lance's inspiration, should provide the ideal amount of railroading to fit my budget, inclinations, and schedule..
Budget: there's never enough money available for a model railroad(er). Narrowing my focus down to one branchline in a specific time period suddenly made it possible for me to shed all the interesting but now extraneous models that I'd collected over the years. In theory it should also keep me on the straight and narrow should I wander into a hobby shop or show. And the freed up funds would allow me to build a high-quality, highly detailed small layout. Bingo!
Modelling inclinations: I hold myself to very high standards. I want to build close to museum quality track, have very detailed & weathered cars, locomotives, and buildings, and really believable scenery. Frankly, the only person I trust to meet those standards is me. If I don't, I won't have a problem ripping it out and doing it better the second or third time. I'm a perfectionist, which means I frustrate myself and others as I strive towards perfection. It's unattainable, but in the striving comes the learning and improvement, and for me, the fun.
Schedule: I travel a lot for work and also have four small children, so my hobby time should be quite limited. Only by grace of an incredibly supportive, understanding, and patient wife am I able to devote as much time to my obsession as I have. A small layout means that I will better be able to balance family, work, and hobby, while living within my means and being more likely to achieve a certain degree of completeness in a reasonable timeframe.
With all this in mind, I was able to settle on a prototype (CN), location (Waterloo spur St. Jacobs & Elmira for now), timeframe (1988 - 1993), and layout style (sectional, around the walls on shelf brackets). That's pretty much the hardest part. 30 years on I'm ready for some serious modelling! Let's go!
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
A few words on how I ended up choosing this branch line as the subject of my modelling. There were two main sources of inspiration for me: 1) having attended the University of Waterloo myself, whose campus the spur runs through, and 2) Lance Mindheim's (and others') writings on the play value and interest to be had in running a small, prototype-based layout.
The first point is pretty much self-explanatory. I would venture a guess that most modellers are drawn to the trains they watched in their formative years, when they first had the freedom to go out into the world and could choose where to go to watch trains. For me that was initially Canadian National's Oakville sub, running through my hometown. I made many GO train trips to Toronto in the mid- to late '80s and '90s to scout out the track layout around Spadina and the CN Tower, and actually drew many trackplans to fit an expanded version of my parents' house. I wonder where those pieces of paper are right now. I'm pretty sure they've not been thrown away. Looking back, one has to wonder how I thought I would be able to manage modelling a 3- and 4-track mainline, pre-DCC to boot! We'll leave that to Jason Shron and others.
It was while attending university that I came to appreciate CN's secondary mainline through Kitchener and the occasional short local that scooted through the UW campus. Unfortunately I did little to document it, and remained ignorant of the CP operations that were abandoned just as I graduated. However, those times and trains have kept coming back to me over the years as I've planned layouts, started the occasional layout, and certainly as I've collected rolling stock in anticipation of having my dream layout.
There have been many distractions along the way, in terms of deciding on which prototype to follow. Living in Germany, there was no shortage of small branch lines with healthy doses of picturesque scenery, steam and/or electric motive power, plenty of passenger trains that I'd actually had the chance to ride, and interesting freight operations.
In Georgia an absolute gem of a prototype is the former Gainesville Midland RR, now CSX. Multiple six-axle diesel consists pulling long strings of feed hoppers through the razorback hills between Gainesville and Athens, small-town Southern stations with big-time Amtrak & NS operations, shared switching of the local feedmills, and kudzu everywhere! I might still come back to that one.
A move to Delaware introduced me to the former Octararo branch of the PRR, which was operated by a series of shortlines with interesting motive power pulling short trains through the beautiful countryside near Kennett Square, PA - mushroom capital of the world! Just as Gainesville was chicken capital of the world!
Upper New York State offered the water level route of the NYC/CSX, but more interesting was Susquehanna's Utica branch. The list of fantastic prototypes could further include the Delaware Lackawanna in Scranton, the Maryland Midland in lower Delaware, the Ontario Southland/Guelph Junction Railway, the Livonia & Avonville in the Southern Tier, and many more that would each make a fascinating history lesson as well as intriguing model railroad.
In the end, it always seems to come down to what you feel the most connected with. Model railroading is very much an exercise in nostalgia, even if you're modelling what you see outside your window right now. You are capturing a moment in time, and for most people that moment recedes into the past with each day that the railroad in the basement exists. We look for ways to capture a favourite location/motive power/operation, or perhaps just the feeling we ourselves experienced at a particular time in our lives.
For me, that time was my university years, where the trains were captivating, not yet obsessively so as they are now, but where the adventure of being away from home was the larger picture. Building a model railroad based on the CN operations of that era allows me to also think back fondly on the friends, cars, travels, and adventures of that time with each trip into the basement to work on the railroad.
More on narrowing down the choice of a prototype and the role my second source of inspiration played in the next post.
The first point is pretty much self-explanatory. I would venture a guess that most modellers are drawn to the trains they watched in their formative years, when they first had the freedom to go out into the world and could choose where to go to watch trains. For me that was initially Canadian National's Oakville sub, running through my hometown. I made many GO train trips to Toronto in the mid- to late '80s and '90s to scout out the track layout around Spadina and the CN Tower, and actually drew many trackplans to fit an expanded version of my parents' house. I wonder where those pieces of paper are right now. I'm pretty sure they've not been thrown away. Looking back, one has to wonder how I thought I would be able to manage modelling a 3- and 4-track mainline, pre-DCC to boot! We'll leave that to Jason Shron and others.
It was while attending university that I came to appreciate CN's secondary mainline through Kitchener and the occasional short local that scooted through the UW campus. Unfortunately I did little to document it, and remained ignorant of the CP operations that were abandoned just as I graduated. However, those times and trains have kept coming back to me over the years as I've planned layouts, started the occasional layout, and certainly as I've collected rolling stock in anticipation of having my dream layout.
There have been many distractions along the way, in terms of deciding on which prototype to follow. Living in Germany, there was no shortage of small branch lines with healthy doses of picturesque scenery, steam and/or electric motive power, plenty of passenger trains that I'd actually had the chance to ride, and interesting freight operations.
In Georgia an absolute gem of a prototype is the former Gainesville Midland RR, now CSX. Multiple six-axle diesel consists pulling long strings of feed hoppers through the razorback hills between Gainesville and Athens, small-town Southern stations with big-time Amtrak & NS operations, shared switching of the local feedmills, and kudzu everywhere! I might still come back to that one.
A move to Delaware introduced me to the former Octararo branch of the PRR, which was operated by a series of shortlines with interesting motive power pulling short trains through the beautiful countryside near Kennett Square, PA - mushroom capital of the world! Just as Gainesville was chicken capital of the world!
Upper New York State offered the water level route of the NYC/CSX, but more interesting was Susquehanna's Utica branch. The list of fantastic prototypes could further include the Delaware Lackawanna in Scranton, the Maryland Midland in lower Delaware, the Ontario Southland/Guelph Junction Railway, the Livonia & Avonville in the Southern Tier, and many more that would each make a fascinating history lesson as well as intriguing model railroad.
In the end, it always seems to come down to what you feel the most connected with. Model railroading is very much an exercise in nostalgia, even if you're modelling what you see outside your window right now. You are capturing a moment in time, and for most people that moment recedes into the past with each day that the railroad in the basement exists. We look for ways to capture a favourite location/motive power/operation, or perhaps just the feeling we ourselves experienced at a particular time in our lives.
For me, that time was my university years, where the trains were captivating, not yet obsessively so as they are now, but where the adventure of being away from home was the larger picture. Building a model railroad based on the CN operations of that era allows me to also think back fondly on the friends, cars, travels, and adventures of that time with each trip into the basement to work on the railroad.
More on narrowing down the choice of a prototype and the role my second source of inspiration played in the next post.
Monday, April 1, 2013
Welcome to my blog. I am just starting an HO scale model based on late 1980's Canadian National Railway operations on the rail line from Waterloo through St. Jacobs to the end of the line in Elmira, Ontario. I hope to post prototype information as I find it, get questions answered as they come up, and provide a means of documenting the hows and whys of building my modular railroad as it is created.
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