Last
weekend was one of these moments when you question everything about model
railroading. Kind of like when I wrote the “Thinking out loud” series of
articles many years ago where I vented my frustration. Call it midlife crisis
if you wish, but I’m reaching a point where I want to get off that train and do
something else more meaningful, more streamlined and in harmony with my current
pace of life.
I’ve been
riding the prototype modelling train for years now, probably close to two
decades and it has never brought any sense of achievement, i.e., interacting
with my trains in a close and personal way. With prototype modelling, there is
always a new barrier we set for ourselves after jumping the last hurdle. It’s
certainly a good school to learn a lot about the trade, but at the same time,
it can lead to hobby burnout and unsatisfaction. As I said to Chris Mears, I
don’t care about operating trains in a highly and well-thought environment… I
don’t care! I tried it countless times and it never meshes into my regular
schedule for more than a few days. It’s boring to me and I can do nothing about
it.
A month
ago, I was asked by Lonnie, a well-known member of the St. Louis RPM to write a
bio about myself for the website promotional material. As could be expected,
the instruction were both very clear and oriented toward a goal: to share your
“identity” by assigning a specific prototype, locale and era to your modelling
efforts. It felt awkward to write it… it felt weird, as if I was an impostor. I
don’t model a single prototype in a specific era and locale and don’t believe
it’s a fundamental aspect of my relation to this hobby. In hindsight, I should
have written the truth: “Matthieu Lachance isn’t a prototype modeller, but he
enjoys modelling based on prototype pictures to achieve realistic results.” My
approach is to inform my modelling based on reality… not to replicate a very
specific slice of reality and consider it my entire creative world.
Lance
Mindheim’s wise words still resonate with me: “he doesn’t give a rat’s rear
about operation…” I could say that about many things related to that hobby.
Regular readers will know that I like to replicate specific trains in their
environment… but not how a specific subdivision works. Over the last few days,
I’ve been in introspection mode and had to recognize that what drives my
participation in this hobby is recreating trains (locomotives + cars).
Stations, signals, turnouts, bridges are there for context, they create a
frame, a setup, a mise en scène, but they aren’t the end goal. When I look at
Charlevoix Railway in Louis-Marie’s basement, I’m extremely grateful to have
been able to build such a thing with friends… only if trains could run their
course without reaching the end too soon.
I’ve shared
many times my idea to create generic layouts which provide a parade route to
display trains in a compelling way. Each time I’ve created a layout, it was all
about setting up nice little railfanning spots: a bridge, an overpass, a grade
crossing, a hill, a broad curve… And this is what I’ve done when I succeeded in
this hobby. The home layout isn’t different. The project has been in planning
for years and the current iteration dates to 2020. If you have followed
the Monk Subdivision project, you know that I’ve worked hard to streamline it
to the bare minimum, to get the essence of a railway with as little elements as
possible. The focus was on framing nice views. On the other hand, the operating
scheme has been a nightmare even if very simple. Running up to 8 trains with
two staging and a bunch of control panels isn’t my cup of tea. I have also to
ask myself: will I have the time to set these operating sessions. Will I have
the patience to program them, to debug these things when all I want is to run
trains because I can operate them elsewhere (Stanstead and Murray Bay
Subdivision). Why not start with a simpler layout that can be expanded when and
if required?
As I’ve found out over the last few years in other realms of
my life, it’s a time of streamlining to go right to what matters and enjoy it.
It’s not about taking shortcuts, but about finding what is essential. In that
regard, the Monk Subdivision isn’t different and its goals, while still the
same, must be attained in a timely and meaningful way. Let’s look at what it
means by a series of three sketches.
Monk Subdivision is just a big excuse to look at long trains
running on the mainline (option 1). Nothing less, nothing more. The two
stagings are funnels that feed trains to that stretch of mainline. There are
two approaches to that: you model the real way trains meet, of you find a way
to simply mimic that impression of bidirectional traffic. The first way is the
most typical one and based on prototype. You have a single track mainline with
a passing track and trains meet there. Since you live in a model world, you
lack space and compress things. Long turnouts end up crammed into curves and
you fight with geometry. On the other hand, you have nice view of trains
entering the passing track and cool signals. OK, alright with me… oh! But you
have to control the train constantly, so railfanning is taking the back seat
because you need to have that cab in your hand and make sure traffic is moving
safely… Loss of immersion. And don’t talk about the level of wiring involved
just to get started.
The other option (2A), shunned by serious hobbyists oriented
toward “real” operation, is to simply create the illusion of a passing track.
It works on the premise that if you are looking at a very long siding (Armagh
had a 140 car passing track capacity), there are very little chances that would
will see both end of it except if you are standing by a turnout. In that case,
the line will look like a double track mainline with bidirectional (albeit
slow) traffic. That raises a couple of questions… Armagh siding was about a
little bit over a mile long, which is about 64 feet in HO scale. The entire
visible mainline on the layout is at best 42 feet long… So you won’t see both
ends at all, which is an interesting observation. One could decide to model
only one visible turnout, the other one being implied as being somewhere in the
outside world. You still must manage traffic, but only at one end of the
passing track, making your life easier and, focussing the experience in one
unique place that becomes special.
Less is more...
One solution would be to partially represent them. You have
the two signals on the passing and mainline that are a few hundred feet from
the turnout. The turnout itself and the approach signal being invisible, in the
outside world. While looking at prototypical distances of signals to the
throwbar in Quebec, it’s about 360 feet! Which is roughly 4 feet in HO.
Something rarely modelled correctly due to compression… But that’s the nice
thing about Monk, compression doesn’t apply because it’s a series of railfanning
vignettes. As for operation, the traffic and signals would be handled exactly
like a double track mainline with Automatic Block Signalling (ABS), which is
the most basic way to implement them.
Real signals are quite far appart from a turnout.
At the end of the day, there is nothing new in what I’m presenting. It’s simply an acknowledgement that prototype operations aren’t the core role for Monk which, at the end of the day, it closer to an exhibition layout or a diorama with action. More on that on the next installment!
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