Planning and Modeling: prototype vs freelanced layout

 For thirty or more years I worked in a business whose hallmark was a lack of planning. Because of this I am “institutionalized” into a seat-of-the-pants way of thinking. Get it done! Time is money! There’s never time to do it right, but there’s plenty of time to do it over. Or my favorite, “We can’t build shit, but we can fix the hell out of it!”

A good plan executed now, with enthusiasm, is far superior to a perfect plan executed in a day or so.

Okay I’ve made my case for not planning with a series of humorous, or not so humorous, platitudes. In layout building if you are following the prototype, in a sense, your planning is done for  you. Along the Van Nuys Branch of the Southern Pacific, near milepost 464*, is a bakery, Orowheat. It has a spur long enough for about four cars. It’s decorated in a particular set of colors. It is what it is. No more, no less.

The prototype provides you your layout plan. 

With a free lanced railroad any industry that strikes your fancy can pop up where ever there’s space. 

And that’s where the track planning rub resides.

I recently got some feedback about one of my blogs that dealt with gluing down track, and planning. While I’m in favor of gluing down track, because I think it gives you a superior product, I am reluctant to do it again because I make a lot of changes, and the glue I used was not very forgiving.**  In short I do not plan.

Well I’m going to glue down my track, again, Just with a different product, so when I make changes, as I expect to do, I might make them with less track damage.

Additionally I’m sure there are modelers who will, for numerous good reasons, nail down their track.  

I have no plans to hand lay track. I was taught, a long time ago, how to scratch build turnouts. I will use only commercial track products on AIR2. I have no interest in modeling track. I only need it to run my trains. In fact I have no interest in modeling, period. Believe me when I say, if I cannot get it out of the box and on to the track in ten minutes or less, I’m not that interested.

I’m an operator, not a modeler. I would much sooner build you a full sized building to house your layout, than build a craftsman kit resembling a H. O. Scale train building. 

I can build a spaceship out of wood (and have)

-AND-

Make it fly, but I do not enjoy modeling.

But modelers who follow a specific prototype are now chained to the need to model specific locomotives and rolling stock. I say “chained” and realize it’s derogatory. I apologize. The hours spent researching and building those prototypically correct models is fun for those individuals that enjoy that. AND I SUPPORT AND ADMIRE THEM. They accomplish things I can only dream of. 

A retired professional football player once said when asked if he missed Football, “I miss the games. I’d go back in a second for the games. It’s the preparation I don’t miss. The work”.

I think I have the skills to build resin craftsman kits, it’s the WORK I don’t want to do. 

I think I have the skills to plan and build a prototypically accuracy layout, it’s the WORK I don’t want to do.

I just want to play the games.



* how can I be so sure of the Milepost, because that milepost marker, as well as the switch stand from the bakery spur are in my garage.

** I have recently been introduced to a very old glue, one I should have been smart enough in the beginning to realize, but alas was not. The adhesive caulk I was recommended was one of the very worst pieces of advice I was given, and took. The results were both great, and awful. It’s because of the glues permanence, that it is an AWFUL idea for modelers like me. Funny (actually not really) that the guy that gives that advice will fight TO THE DEATH, to prove he’s right rather than admit it might not be right for every modeler (Please excuse this thinly veiled editorial).

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