I just finished reading Lance Mindheim's self-published books on "Model Railroading as Art" and "How to operate a modern era switching layout" and recommend them both highly. It's funny how you can have an instinct that something is right or not, but until someone else says it, you didn't know what you knew. This works both ways, too, when someone makes a comment that changes your mind in a way that you later come to regret.
In recent years, when showing people my layout, I've made the comment that "If I'd known now how fun it was going to be just to operate the Burlington, WA yard, I could have skipped building the whole rest of the basement and just had that be my layout!" (see my previous blog post on this.)While this makes for a fun joke, Lance's work suggests that it is basically true (as many jokes often are!). Lance goes even further, to say that unless you really enjoy yard work, let your layout just be industries to switch, and not too many of them. If it takes two hours just to (realistically) switch 3 or 4 industries, on a layout with only 9 turnouts, why do you need a whole basement full of them?
I did a lot of my early railfanning in the Interbay/Balmer yard area, which led to my starting my modeling efforts by building a yard. The next question was "where are these cars going and coming to/from? This led to the realization that there were two yards in Everett to the north, and a sprawling yard complex south of downtown Seattle, so building them seemed like a priority. After that, I started learning more about some of the interesting local industries and branchlines, which gradually got added. So you could say that I gradually backed into an appreciation of local industry switching. I wonder how my layout would look different today if I had read Lance's operations book when he published it in 2011, instead of this week? Would I have fewer yards and more industries? Perhaps.
One of the challenges of a large layout that hosts operating sessions with a dozen operators at once, is what do you do in between times when you just want to operate it by yourself or with a friend? The OPSIG has published articles about this from time to time, and Lance addresses it nicely in his book. His answer is you pick one or two of your favorite industries and switch them out, using realistic procedures, and let the rest of it be. It will take longer than you think. I've tried a similar approach, which was to put paper clips in certain car cards, and then run a train around the layout working only those cars with paper clips in their car cards. It's a lot of fun and lets me work all around the layout instead of just working a couple of industries. And if I run out of time, it's easy to pick up wherever I left off.
I won't try to summarize Lance's book on art here, but one of its many great ideas is that, because of the physics of miniaturization, everything (except maybe windows) should have a flat finish on it. He uses Dullcote, but other modelers I know have said that Dullcote is still too much of a satin finish, and they use flat sprays from art stores that are designed for taking the sheen off of oil paintings. My big complaint about Dullcote is that it turns white if you put an alcohol-based india ink wash on it. More on this later after I do some experimenting with various flat finishes.
In the meantime, blow for grade crossings, come to a full stop to let the brakeman get off to unlock and flip the switch(s), and never exceed 4 mph when coupling up to a car. :)
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