Informing Choices – Amherst Show Aftermath (Part III)

I recently got a chance to return to the Amherst Railway Society’s Hobby Show as a spectator rather than a vendor. I’ve talked about the inspiration a really good train show can provide, especially the modules. But I also find that viewing the layouts does a good job of:

I had enough to say on each to tackle the topics as a series. We’ll continue in this post with informing choices.

If you read this blog with any regularity, you probably know I’m full-on into a permanent layout. I’ve never considered modular in more than a passing way. But viewing the modular layouts at the show made me ask the question: if I wanted/need to move to modular, what route would I take?

Two things come into play here: presentation (as in “how they look together”) and modular standard (as in “how they go together”).

Presentation

If I were to go modular, I’d want to work with a group that had visual standards. Nothing takes me out of the illusion quicker than a green, perfectly flat module placed next to a mountainous winter scene, or a city next to a farm, or a modern scene next to a clearly depression-era module… or any number of different wild module-to-module fluctuations. The work on the individual models may be sublime, but the juxtaposition is quite jarring and simply ruins the effect for me.

(Interestingly, I finished Model Railroad Planning 2019 just after writing the first draft of this post, and Iain Rice made similar comments in one of the articles.)

In my opinion it would be better to have some standards on usable colors, theme, era, and location so that the modules, no matter how they’re joined, have a consistency to them that says “these go together.” A great example of this are the Central New York Modelers. The cohesion of their modules are amazing, and you’d never know they were built by different modelers. Check out their gallery to see what I mean.

Modular Standard

That said, as a construction standard, I would go with Free-mo. And that’s because I find most modular standards too uniform, and ultimately constricting. I’ve come to appreciate the flexibility Free-mo gives you to move away from the “gotta be in a straight line, gotta have n tracks spaced x inches apart” of most standards.

As you can see, with Free-Mo, you don’t have the
standard main lines parallel to the front of the module…

You can go where you need to go and do a little meandering. Need a curve here to fit the scene you want? No problem. Need to add a siding? No problem. Only need a single track? No problem. (See the opening image and the accompanying to see what I mean.)

Real railroads use whatever number of tracks they need where they need them. They go where they need to go, even if it’s not a straight shot from here to there. As a result, most modular standards just seem too rigid to me.

In Conclusion…

Yes, I know my views here are a weird blend of “let’s agree to do the same thing” and “don’t tell me what to do!” Others will defend their desire to model the scene they want without having to worry about what the others in their group are doing. But I feel like the end result of my two choices would result in something that feels more like a real railroad than most modular presentations. It will come down to your own goals, and, as always, your mileage may vary.

Next time, motivation…

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Photo credit: Mark Losiniecki (both photos). Used with permission.

BYJoe Parker ON POSTED INLayout Construction Layout Design Philosophy

Modular has turned me off because of the lack of continuity of the scene, tho I like to use stand alone modular for diorama. So far I saw only one such modular display that please my eyes and it was the one of the Labaja modular group in Calgary, Canada. Their scenery flow from one module to the other and their animation and mini scenes are gorgeous.