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Among my many wonderful Christmas presents, My Darling B gave me a ticket to this year’s Mad City Model Railroad Show and Sale, sponsored by the South Central Wisconsin chapter of the National Model Railroader’s Association. If there’s anything with more potential for fun than a convention center packed bellybuttons-to-buttcheeks with train geeks and their toys, I can’t think of it right now. Not that you can do in public, anyway.
I spent the better part of yesterday wandering the aisles between about a gajillion vendor’s booths and model train layouts at the local convention center. It wasn’t something you’d want to do if you weren’t a train geek. In fact, when I finally took a break to eat the sandwich I’d packed for lunch, I took a seat at a table where a woman was happily listening to whatever her ear buds were plugged into, which turned out to be the Badger’s game. “My husband’s into trains, not me,” she explained. “I’m just along for the ride.” I didn’t ask why her husband didn’t drop her off at the Badger’s game, or why she didn’t listen to the game in the comfort of her own home instead of sitting in an uncomfortable plastic stacking chair parked dead in the middle of a convention center filled with thousands of people radiating non-sport-related geekiness. She smiled as she chatted with me, but I had to wonder a little bit why she was there.
As for myself, I had a great time, although to be honest I wish there’d been a few more bargains on the vendor’s tables, and at shows I’ve been to previously I’ve seen a lot more modeling demonstrations and seminars, but there was very little of that sort on offer yesterday.
That’s not meant to be a knock on the layouts. I love to watch the trains go around and around as much as the next kid, big or little. Give me a stool to park on and I’ll sit all day with my mouth hanging open. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what I did, and so did the kids. Exhibits like this one from The Toy Train Barn were surrounded by a teeming ring of kids from opening until about three o’clock (coincidentally right around nap time). There was very little crying or fussing, even from the most precocious little booger-eaters. There was so much action that most of them couldn’t afford to blink for fear of missing a moment of it.
As much as I like watching the trains go round and round, I’m a nut for the modeling. I stared for quite a while at this scene, a display model in a vendor’s booth of a laser-cut kit. It wasn’t even part of a layout; there were no trains anywhere near it, but the longer I gazed at it, the more I admired every little thing going on here. The ducks! The dog! The weathervane! Amazing!
These laser-cut kits have become enormously popular, in spite of their seemingly outrageous prices. The appeal is obviously the level of detail possible, together with the relative ease of putting them together, when compared to designing, cutting and assembling a scene like this from scratch. It would not only take a lot of time and patience, but a wealth of imagination most of us can only dream of. When you figure what all that’s worth, I don’t doubt they’re worth every penny, but I don’t see how anybody can afford more than one or two. You almost have to mortgage your real house to afford buying these little ones. I didn’t ask about the prices (If you have to ask ...), but I’m sure each one of those barns goes not less than a hundred bucks, and possibly as much as two-hundred.
Of course, it’s possible to create a mesmerizing scene without a huge cash outlay. This scene is part of a “module,” a train scene about three feet long and maybe a foot wide. Modules are meant to be joined together end-to-end, so the tracks have to run from one point to another point on each module. A long string of these can be an exciting string of discoveries one after another, or they can be deadly monotonous if the modelers don’t use their imagination.
This guy’s created quite an entrancing scene using a shallow creek, a set of trestles to cross it, a steam wrecker and, just to add a little life, a pair of cows. He’s made sure to mingle a variety of trees and brush, and he’s gone easy on the grass, which usually ends up looking like fur. The cut and the exposed layers of rock in the foreground emphasize the depth of the relatively shallow creek, and knocks the viewer out of the mindset that this started out as a flat slab of plywood. Very nice work.
I think this is an overhead shot of the same module, but the trees don’t look the same, so I’m not sure. I wish I’d taken notes. I sure will next time. Anyway, the modeler’s added amazing depth to what would have been a really boring scene by the simple expedient of splashing a little bright orange to it. The color catches your eye, the lettering on the car draws you closer so you notice the trailer and the people in the river. After you’ve gotten that close, you start to notice all kinds of detail, and suddenly it’s not just a static scene, it’s a place where people live. Very well done.
But let’s get back to the trains, because that’s what I went for, first and foremost, and that’s surely what you want to see.
I love steam locomotives. A roundhouse full of them, like this one, makes my mouth hang open. Someday, maybe, I’ll be able to post a roster with this many steamers in it, but getting there will take quite a while. The little buggers are expensive. This many locos would run me, at the very least, $1,000.00, even if I searched e-bay every day for a year and bought a couple broken-down Bachmans just for show. (I know, I know, “broken-down Bachmans” was a little repetitive.)
In the meantime, I still love to look. I press my nose up against any display case with a steamer in it, and I always stop to take a long look when they come chugging along the main line of a layout — or, in this case, when they’re all cozied up together at a roundhouse. This brace of Burlington Northern steamers was on the Capitol City N’gineers layout, if memory serves (and my apologies if I’ve gotten it wrong; see the caveat about notes above).
I was drawn to layouts wherever I saw the orange and maroon colors of the Milwaukee Road’s passenger livery. This speeding Fairbanks-Morse unit pulling a long drag of streamliners hooked me from across the room.
There’s quite a lot of detail in this scene, the bathers along the beach on the left being the most obvious and interesting.
This rail station is the only model I came close to buying. It’s a really gorgeous model and I’ve always wanted an old-fashioned depot like this on my layout. A kit like this costs around a hundred bucks, though. I hovered over it for ten or fifteen minutes, trying to make up my mind: Did I want to blow almost half the bankroll I’d brought with me? In the end I decided I’d rather see what kinds of bargains I could find, and glumly dragged myself away from it.
A good thing I did, too — I could buy the station kit by mail order any time, but I found a couple buys I would have kicked myself for missing.
This is one of those scenes, like the steam locomotives at the roundhouse, that makes me drool. Look at all those freaking locos! If these are all owned by one guy, I’m very jealous. That Challenger — the big, black steam locomotive with two smokestacks — has a suggested retail price of half my monthly salary. You think I’m making that up, but I’m not.
I’m particularly intrigued by the one in the upper left which seems to have a jet engine exhaust pipe carved into its butt end. What’s that all about? The loco looks big enough to harbor an atomic reactor core, so anything could be down the business end of that chute.
The bug-faced one on the right is kinda cute. It must have been mortifying to be the engineer driving the real, live version of that.
Just one more look at a gorgeously-modeled scene. Word of warning: The full-sized photo is 356 kb, but well worth the wait.
Some model railroaders like to play with trains, and some build a layout mostly for the pleasure of modeling a beautifully detailed scene. The full-sized photo of this tiny little treat (modeled in N scale; the kids are roughly half an inch tall) is not as clear as I would’ve liked it to be, but the amount of detail is simply astounding. The modeler must’ve spent a week just getting the tree to look this good. Everything else — the clubhouse, the tree house, the tire swing, the paths worn through the grass — is frosting on the cake. Quite a work of art!
A few of the models were quite a bit larger than the toy trains I collect and play with. This live steamer is big enough to get in and ride.
Photos & text © 2007 Dave Okonski