Installing track on the Mt. Lowe layout

Roadbed and risers are made from artist's foam board.

I'd like to be able to tell you I knew exactly what I was doing when I started putting up grades and installing track, but I can't because I didn't. I did have a schematic of what figure the track should follow, where a track should go over or under another as well as guidelines on how steep grades could be and tightest radius track I could get away with. In retrospect construction was all quite experimental. As a result several areas will need to be strengthened, others trimmed and cleaned up. So, I don't have a neat set of instructions you can follow so you can build your own as I did with the base, only some experiences to convey that you could reflect on if you decide to do something similar.

Burnt umber acrylic was used to pre-paint the roadbed before gluing down track

I cut the risers and roadbed from artist's foam board. The pieces are glued in place with Lepage's white glue. I used foam board because it's quick and easy to cut and form. That was important because as I mentioned before this layout is something of an experiment and I didn't want difficult materials slowing progress as I was working things out. Now that I think I understand how these little grade intensive layouts go together I might use foam blocks or gator board instead if I ever build another.

When I started out I thought the track plan would be close to a true trefoil knot with just one over-under crossing removed. It turned out it wasn't possible with the grades, radii, and vehicle height constraints I was working with. In the end the track plan became a figure-eight that has been twisted over on itself. I'm happy with it as it will still accomplish the scenic effects I'm after and make the overall layout a little less of a rabbit warren.

It turned out that the height of the vehicle was as strong a determining factor on track plan geometry as grade and radius, but I didn't fully appreciate that until construction was well underway. If this setup were for HO or N scale vehicles a twistier layout with more climbs could be built because the underpasses wouldn't need to be as tall as my Mt. Lowe trolley requires. I'm thinking S scale is probably the largest scale this footprint will allow. Ok, if your track plan is dead flat, you could likely use a larger scale, but if it has overs and unders, S is probably the limit.

If you look closely you'll see the base and risers are covered with numbers. Those are for mapping out riser heights and placement. There're a few sets of numbers on the base because I revised my grade plan several times during construction. I should probably buy an inclinometer to measure the grades to see if my calculations are accurate. It's more for curiosity's sake because since the trolley runs ok, the grades are likely in the right ballpark.

As for the track, it's Peco N-gauge code 80 Streamline flex track. The left and right switches are Peco Setrack items. The 60 degree crossing is an Atlas N-gauge code 80 piece. The track is glued down with Weld Bond, except on the part that will host the circular bridge. On that section only the track ends entering and leaving the loop are Weld Bonded as the roadbed will be removed one day to make way for the bridge. The loop track in that area is temporarily tacked down with rubber cement.

The three loops each have their own power leads so the layout isn't completely dependent on rail joiners for electrical continuity. The sidings can have their power switched on or off so that future powered trolleys could be parked on the layout in between runs up the mountain.

How I built the Mt. Lowe layout's trefoil base

Trefoil layout base made from styrofoam. Area is 4 sq. ft..

Last fall I wrote about some notes Bill Schopp published on trefoil planform layouts. I've been intrigued with the shape since then, especially for micro-layouts, and I spent many evenings last winter making drawings in my sketchbook of possible layouts. The shape seems to offer a way to build small layouts with good scene separation since each lobe could host its own scene with vertical elements providing a degree of visual separation in accordance with the design philosophy advocated by Olson and Furlow.

The glued up base is a 2-1/4" thick, 3-layer foam sandwich.

I like to use foam sheets for my layout bases because the results are lightweight as well as quite rigid and strong. Foam sheets are also easy to work with. 

I made the base for the Mt. Lowe micro from 3/4" thick sheets of styrofoam measuring 14-1/2" wide by 4' long that came in a 6-pack from a big box home renovation store. I think the price was around $17 CDN. This isn't the only material you could use to build a base. It just happened to be convenient, and I also had some scraps in the workshop, so that was what I used. 

Paper template; 4 sq. ft., maximum micro-layout size.

You may recall that last fall I also drew a full size template of a 4 sq. ft. trefoil shape so I could physically compare it to a square of the same area. I made use of that template to trace the lobes onto the styrofoam sheets. 

Once again, I'd like to make it clear that you don't have to build up the base in pieces as I'm showing here. If you have a large, thick sheet of foam you can cut the entire shape in one piece from it. In fact, that would be the best way to go, but if all you've got are small pieces, you aren't prevented from making a base, you just have to be a bit more cunning.

Lobe template detail showing interior edge lines.

Do you see those lines radiating from the centre of the template marked by the red arrows in the photo above? Those are the interior edges of the three lobes we're going to cut out. I laid the lobe template on a foam sheet and with a Sharpie pen traced around the lobe's perimeter to where it intersected both those interior edge lines. Then I marked the trefoil's centre with a dot - I had previously punched a small hole in the centre with a compass. After I lifted the template from the sheet I used the Sharpie and a ruler to join the centre dot with the ends of the lobe's perimeter. 

All three lobes laid out on the styrofoam sheets.

I repeated the process two more times to produce three lobes. It was then on to cutting them out.

Checking the fit of the interior edges.

I cut the interior edge lines first so I could check the alignment of the pieces before trimming the lobes' perimeters. I used a razor saw and a metal ruler to make the cuts.

After trimming the lobe perimeters to shape.

The lobe perimeters were then cut to shape freehand with the razor saw. Once the cutting was done, the edges were lightly sanded to smooth them a bit.

Gluing the lobes together. A weight holds the pieces down while drying.

The next thing to do was glue the lobes together. Start by spreading a generous amount of white glue over all the internal edges, then press them together. That metal box in the photo is full of nuts and bolts and is a good weight for holding the lobes in place while the glue dries. The box is an item from the workshop stuff I inherited from my father. I think he made it in high school shop class in the '40s. It's still full of the nuts and bolts it has always contained. That stash comes in handy now and then, not to mention its weight :-)

Filling layer for the styrofoam sandwich that will be the base

Here it is a few hours later after the glue has dried. The pieces fit together quite well. 

At this point the base is quite flimsy and needs careful handling, so be gentle moving it around. What we're going to do next is make a styrofoam sandwich with the above layer as the filling.

Applying the first piece of a 'bread' layer to the centre section.

The top and bottom bread layers of the sandwich are pieces of sheet foam glued to the filling layer we just made. At this stage, the bread pieces don't need to be cut to any particular shape. We'll trim them up once they're glued in place. 

Start by taking a long sheet of foam and laying it on the filling layer so that all three of its edge joints are covered. The sheet can extend well beyond the top and bottom of the filling layer - we'll trim it later. Now apply a generous amount of glue to the area on the filling layer where the bread sheet will go. Place the bread on top and hold it in place with some weights and clamps. Yeah, I've got a second collection of inherited nuts and bolts I keep in a plastic bin, and along with the metal box inside, it makes for a nice weight to hold this half sandwich together while the glue dries. 

Applying a bread layer to a lobe.

When the glue has dried, trim the bread piece's edges so they match those of the filling layer. The next steps are just a repetition of that first application of a piece to the bread layer. You keep gluing on pieces until both sides of the filling layer have bread sheets glued to it. There's nothing special to know other than these two points to keep in mind: 1) make sure you apply a large slab over the centre edges that covers them and as much of the filling layer as possible, and 2) make sure the joints of all the other bread pieces applied to the lobes have the joints staggered with respect to the top and bottom layers. Point 2) helps make the base is as strong as possible. If the joints on the upper and lower bread surfaces line up it makes for a weaker final structure.

Almost done adding pieces of bread :-)

The above photo shows the base when the sandwich is almost done. Over on the left side of the photo you can see the perimeter is rough cut at this stage. Once all the pieces of the bread layers had been glued together and cut to match the filling layer, some final shaping  was done with a rasp and sanding block to smooth out the contours.

All the trimming of the bread layers creates a lot of styrofoam odd cuts. I saved most of them for use when building the mountain scenery.

And here it is. The sandwich is done and awaiting perimeter smoothing.

This way of making the base is fairly easy, although it does take a bit of time. So, if you've got a few pieces of sheet foam lying around, this method allows a layout board to be built up from those scraps.

Before I go for coffee I should mention that when I built this base I wasn't sure if the layout would work, that is, I didn't know if could I successfully install the multilevel track plan with its complex - well, complex for me - grades, easements, and curves. Now that track work is behind me, and the layout appears viable, I think I might add some extra foam layers to the bottom so I can cut in some deep valleys to make the track seem even higher. Well, that's for the future, now is for coffee :-)

It's Alive!

Some posts on construction to follow in the days ahead.

The many faceted coincidences between Wimbledon Green, Lester Moore, and E. L. Moore

Recently I’ve been rereading some graphic novels by Seth. I feel an affinity with his style of illustration and his stories, so whenever I need some sort of pick-me-up I crack them open. 

Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World has had my attention for the last week or so. In the introductory note Seth says he doesn’t think this is one of his best works, but drawing and writing it was a compulsion. It’s a compulsion for me too. When I’m looking for some light escapism I feel compelled to read it. There’s something wild and manic about it, what with its eccentric cast of characters, autogyros, speeding trains, wild Ontario locations, chases, heists, discoveries, shady deals, and on and on. It’s a series of interconnected stories, cameos, comic reviews, monologues, and interviews all linked together to tell the story of Wimbledon Green.

There’s one story in particular I always come back to, Fine and Dandy: A Short Talk by Wimbledon Green. Why? From the first time I read it, it seemed to have strong parallels, at least in my mind, to E. L. Moore’s life and work. I’ve always marvelled at the coincidence. Now, don’t get me wrong as you read further, what appears in the story is all fiction, and all coincidence.

In the talk Green tells the story of cartoonist Lester Moore and a comic book he created called Fine and Dandy that ran for 36 issues between 1946 and 1951. So literally right from square one - most of the comic is a grid of squares! - we have Lester Moore, aka L. Moore, aka LM, which immediately strikes the E. L. Moore gong in my brain. If I was a conspiracy theorist I’d think this was the beginning of a coded message :-) 

Ok, so name similarity aside, what else? Well, Green then tells us LM entered cartooning rather late in life. LM was in his 30s, which isn’t that old, but apparently was for starting as a publishing cartoonist. ELM entered his field late too. He was in his late 50s when he published his first item, a photo in Model Railroader. Green notes prior to cartooning LM held a variety of jobs and he “tramped about in the 30’s”. ELM held a variety of jobs in his early life and was a self-described “vagabond” in the 30’s. Green notes LM may have used some of his hoboing experiences in his comic; ELM appears to have.

Fine and Dandy chronicles the comic adventures of two hobos, Fine and Dandy, as they tramp the backroads and rural areas of Depression era America. There’s a recurring cast of characters. Green mentions just three: Li’l Tiny, a child hobo (reminds me of ELM’s Baby Spumoni); Boxcar Pearl, a woman hobo (reminds me of ELM’s Ma Spumoni); and Gran’pa Stretch, the world’s oldest hobo (reminds me of ELM’s Grandpa Bunn). ELM had his cast of characters too - examples I’ve noted in ()s in the previous sentence - with many recurring. Fine and Dandy often found themselves in jail for ‘liberating’ chickens; ELM hints that he too may have spent sometime in lockup for something similarly trivial. 

And LM and ELM both feature trains in their work.

Green ends his talk by saying, “”Fine + Dandy” fit easily into the elite group of comic characters who live off the page. Moore breathed something of himself into them —so that they had a felling of inner depths. Even now, some 50 years later, I can still feel their presence in the world.” With some minor rewording, the same could be said of ELM and his legacy.

No doubt the similarities I see are simply due to Seth creating an excellent simulation of a genre of cartoon storytelling that was popular in the first half of 20th century America. Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Trolley is a good example of the type. It was popular because even though fictional, readers could identify with it, and many perhaps even lived some of it. No doubt ELM was soaked in it and admired it, both the times and the genre, so he too was a stylist in the genre even though the medium was different. My rational mind knows why the coincidences between LM and ELM are there, there’s another part of my mind that enjoys the fantasy of revelling in “what if there was a link” whenever it hears the gong :-)

A craftsman kit of E. L. Moore's Bunn's Feed & Seed?

Kit box images sourced from this item on eBay

Galen alerted me to this kit version of E. L. Moore's Bunn's Feed & Seed currently (as of this posting) up for sale on eBay. I haven't heard of the manufacturer or its E. L. Moore Series of kits. I have no idea when this kit was manufactured or if there are other kits in the series. I found the MSRP printed on the box interesting at nearly $100US as Mr. Moore noted the cost of the project in his August 1973 MR article as "about $2". An internet inflation calculator tells me that $2 US in 1973 works out to around $14.50 US in today's money. It would probably be tough to build Bunn's from scratch in accordance with Mr. Moore's instructions for $14.50, but it should be possible for far less than $100.

Climbing curve test

The next step in testing the LOL Mk. I was rounding a layout-like curve while climbing a 10% grade. I think the above set up, with approximately a 10% grade and a 10.5" diameter curve, is about the tightest the little vehicle can handle. The motor sounds fine and the wheels don't slip, but I found that it's important to make sure the grade is as close to 10% as I can get it, and to make sure the track is fairly level across the ties. The track's elasticity has a mind of its own and wants to spring the rails into a shape that isn't conducive to smooth LOL travel. Ok, the signs are good, but I'm still not convinced the layout is possible. More testing? Hmmmm.

Book Talk

Left: John Olson's 1983 book | Right: Malcolm Furlow's 1984 book

I’d like to say that I have some sort of master reading plan and choose all the books I read and talk about here in some sort of rational manner, but it just doesn’t work that way.

I got to buying and reading these two books in a very roundabout way that maybe has some after the fact logic to it, but it didn’t seem to at the time. If you’ve been reading along here for a while you know I’ve been writing a bit about Tom Daniel and his Bad Water Western layout. I found out that he is a friend of John Olson, and this, along with some pondering about trefoil layouts, got me thinking again about Olson’s Cielo Lumber Company layout that appeared in the January 1974 issue of Railroad Modeler. I couldn’t remember the details of the layout’s trackplan and was wondering if it was some sort of trefoil given what I remembered about the shape of its layout board. It wasn’t, but the search got me wondering if Olson had written anything about making scenery similar to that found in California’s San Gabriel Mountains where the Mt. Lowe railway was located. I recalled Olson was an expert in California scenery, and with a Mt. Lowe inspired railway on my mind, I thought his work might have something for me. 

I went looking.

John Olson wrote a bit for Model Railroader magazine in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Some articles I knew about, and some I didn’t. Here’s a list of what I could find of his 20th century MR publications:

May ’76: A day at Mule Shoes Meadows

May ’77: New life for an old American

Dec ’78: Building and switching Blackhole Mine

Jan ’79: The history of Mescal Lines Consolidation no. 12

May ’80: 50 tons of boxcab fun

Sept ’80: A freight dock for the Mescal Lines

Feb ’81: Tank car water tank

Feb ’82, Apr ’82, June ’82, Aug ’82, Oct ’82, Nov ’82, Dec ’82, Jan ’83, Feb ’83; Jerome & Southwestern HO layout construction series

Nov ’82: A mail-order mine; Although attributed to Olson, this appears to be a joint article with Malcolm Furlow

Jan ’84: The Mescal Lines RR

Oct ’93, Nov ’93, Dec ’93; Tascosa & Calcio HOn3 layout construction series

Olson also wrote some articles for Railroad Model Craftsman. I’ll get to one in particular, his Stop Gap Falls article that appeared in the January ’75 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman, in a future post as it had quite an influence on me when it was published.

The Olson articles that appeared in the late ‘70s, ‘80s, and early ‘90s were a bit of a blur to me. I wasn’t an active model railroader at that time, nor much of an armchair one either. I would buy an issue of MR now and then to see what was going on, but that was the extent of my involvement in the hobby. When it came to magazines it was Creative Computing, Byte, MacWorld, 80micro, MacTutor, and the Whole Earth Review, with a dash of MR and RMC to reminisce. I knew Olson, and Furlow, were doing big things, but how big was a mystery. Forty or so years on I’m finally catching up :-)

One thing I did know was that MR’s publisher, Kalmbach, had collected up the articles in the Jerome & Southwestern series from '82 and '83 and re-published them in 1983 as the book, Building an HO Model Railroad with Personality. I know, I know, the articles are available in digital form in MR’s archives, but I’m partial to physical books, so I spent sometime searching online for a copy in decent condition for a reasonable price. 

When it comes to California scenery, Olson’s Mescal Lines article from Jan ’84 would be the reference as it covers modelling several different regions of the state. His Jerome & Southwestern layout is set in and around Jerome, Arizona. So, if I was looking for very specific instructions on modelling California scenery this wouldn’t be the reference, but it’s very good at presenting his overall approach to model railroading, so I wouldn’t reject it just because it didn’t deal specifically with my narrow interests. 

If you’re reading the works of John Olson, you can’t help but notice the works of Malcolm Furlow come up a lot - and vice versa. Well, that was because Olson and Furlow were friends and colleagues. Furlow is another major figure from that late ‘70s to early ‘90s era I was vaguely familiar with, but I had nothing more than a cursory knowledge of what he was up to. So, I thought, ok, I know Kalmbach also published a book about a Furlow project layout from that era so I figured I’d hunt down a copy of that too. Surprisingly, I found a good copy at a good price at an online seller in Whitehorse in the Yukon! Furlow’s reach was quite long.

The book is HO Narrow Gauge Railroad You Can Build that was released in 1984, the year after Olson’s was published. It’s a collection of Furlow’s articles on his HOn3, Colorado based, San Juan Central project layout that were published in every issue of MR between November 1983 and August 1984, except for January ’84 which featured the article on John Olson’s Mescal Lines.

Like Olson, Furlow had published many articles in the model railroading press before his famous San Juan Central series. His initial appearance in MR was as the first place finisher of MR’s 3rd photo contest in the January ’80 issue. Here’s a list of his 20th century publications in MR:

Aug ’80: White water on the Denver & Rio Chama Western

Mar ’81: Modeling Furlow’s Slough

July ’81: Sheridan, Colorado: 1927

Nov ’82: A mail-order mine; Although attributed to Olson, this appears to be a joint article with Malcolm Furlow

Dec ’82: The Bern & Wagonlit RR; A report on Rosemary McKee’s Z-scale layout

July ’83: Fred Gill’s Diamond Valley Line

Aug ’83: It’s 1916 again in downtown Dallas; co-written with Craig Kosinski

Nov ’83, Dec ’83, Feb ’84, Mar ’84, Apr ’84, May ’84, June ’84, July ’84, Aug ’84: San Juan Central HOn3 construction series

Sept ’84: Model Railroad Photography

Dec ’84: Vic Butterworth’s N scale railroad

Jan ’85: The San Jose Society of Model Railroaders

Aug ’85: The Peninsula Model Railroad Association

Dec ’85: Harry Clark’s Indian Creek Valley Ry.

Jan ’86: The Silverton & Telluride Ry. Co.

Feb ’86: Deciduous Anyone?; written by Billy Haynes with Furlow’s photos (with Furlow appearing in one!). The article’s subtitle is, “Malcolm Furlow’s technique for making large, broadleaf trees”, so it almost seems like a Furlow article.

Oct ’86: The Magical Time Machine

Oct ’86: Adventures in G

Nov ’86: How white-metal castings are made

Nov ’86: Further adventures in G

Dec ’86: Tom Kunkel’s Lionel layout of the ‘80s

Oct ’87: Ted Hough’s HO Canadian Pacific Ry.; co-written with Paul Scoles

Jan ’88: Feb ’88, Mar ’88: Carbondale Central HO construction series

Sept ’89: Ken Davis’ Great Northern Ry.; co-written with Paul Scoles

Dec ’89: The Tomahawk & Lobo Creek RR; co-written with Paul Scoles

Mar ’94: Building the Silver Canyon Road

One thing that jumps out of the list are the number of articles he wrote reporting on other peoples’ layouts. He also provided the photos for those articles. What I don’t note in the list are all the articles written by other authors for whom he shot the photos, and there are many. Furlow was a master of model railroad photography, and MR made good use of his talents. If all you see of Furlow’s photographic work is what is in his book, you’ll get a good sense of what a master he was.

In some respects the two books seem very similar. Both deal with building modest sized layouts whose themes are locations in the southwestern USA at a time in the early 20th century when steam locos, early small diesels, ICE automobiles and trucks, and horse-drawn wagons roamed together in a down-at-the-heels milieu. Both present model railroad layout building as a family-oriented activity. Sons and daughters and wives make guest appearances throughout the pages. Both present the completed layouts as attractively finished and convivial items that wouldn’t look out of place in a family room or den. They don’t present the layouts as eccentric things to be relegated to a basement or garage. Both took about a year to build. Olson notes in the last chapter of his book that his layout was “six months abuilding in the back room of Ron’s [JDL: Ron Dickson's] design studio” and also notes in the same chapter “… over a year while the railroad took shape…”, so I’d guess and say it took roughly a year. Furlow notes in his Acknowledgements section that he spent 13 months on his project.

And finally, both books are in Kalmbach’s high class style they were famous for in that era. Neither crude and simplistic computer graphics nor Powerpoint-itis and business-school-speak are anywhere to be found in these books. Those curses were still in the future. Everything, drawings, text, lists, and photos, are all clean in design and execution, as well as thoughtfully laid out.

And those photos. Wow! You could buy these books for the photos alone and you wouldn’t have wasted your money. Did you read my end of 2023 post in the Book Talk series? The one about art and model railroading? In it I suggested that a place to start thinking about model railroading as art was to study and discuss photos that have some meaning to you. For me, I’d add the photos in these books to the discussion. Given the era we’re now in, maybe we should consider these as art books and not mainly as how-tos as they were when first published. Their high production values, combined with the outstanding photography of Olson and Furlow, I think is what gives them their lasting value even if the how-to methods they show have almost been completely assimilated today.

Although there are many similarities between the books, there are some differences in what’s presented. Layout form is one. But, even that difference seems to eventually loop back towards similarity in a deeper sense.

Olson’s layout has two parts: one is a standard 4’x8’ main layout, and the other is 2’x6’ extension called the Back Alley & Wharf. The reader could focus on building the 4’x8’ part, ignoring the extension, and still end up with a complete layout. Although his 4’x8’ layout is by no means a conventional standard piece of plywood layout of the time, it could fit in one’s footprint, and thereby make no additional space demands.

Furlow’s layout, although narrow gauge and in theory more compact than a standard gauge cousin, requires a 10’x10’ room. Ok, well, if one built Olson’s extension along with his main layout you’d need around a 10’x10’ room too for the whole thing, but the basic setup needing only a standard 4’x8’ space seems a good selling point for the time. Furlow’s layout might be condensed a little by leaving off the rightmost of its three modules: the Montrose module. It looks like if one didn’t build Montrose, you would still have a complete layout, and a little smaller one too. 

The footprint of Furlow’s layout looks more freeform and flowing than Olson’s, whose perimeter is made up of a big rectangle for the 4’x8’, and a little one for the 2’x6’. Furlow’s may have been a result of his philosophy that: “I’m not one for doing a lot of advance planning, and I tend to design as I go along. Nor am I afraid to make changes.” This is not to say that Olson was wedded only to formal planning. He discusses at length in chapter 2 the need for creating a full-size plan from whatever small plans you’ve created because you’ll no doubt find issues that are better encountered and worked out at a full-size plan stage with pens and rulers than at a later saws and lumber stage. Look at this photo of him (below, on the left) laying out the full-size plan on a piece of paper taped to a wall:

Yeap, on the right that’s the famous Hans Namuth photo of Jackson Pollock in action. For some unknown reason when I saw that photo of Olson deep in layout planning my mind flashed on that Pollock picture. I think it’s because I believe layout planning and design is a full body activity, and in that regard there is a connection between Furlow, with his design as he goes along, making real-time changes, to Olson with his full size wall plans to work out tricky track details, and Pollock with his drip action paintings. Look, a layout is a large physical object, laced with copious amounts of colour and movement, so it seems odd to me that planning such an object should be the exclusive domain of small drawings and neat little plans. There’s a contradiction there that Olson and Furlow don’t suffer from in these books. It seems an unspoken design philosophy.

As a sidelight in Playing with Trains Sam Posey presents us with a visit he and Bob Hayden made to Malcom Furlow’s New Mexico ranch in the early 2000s. By this time Furlow had been gone from model railroading for quite a while, and although he was now a successful painter, he was in the process of making a comeback to the hobby. One of the many interesting things noted about Furlow in this section of Posey's book was a modelling technique Furlow developed soon after he got into photography in the ‘70s: “He would position his lights [JDL: his photo lights that is] and keep them on as he worked, creating a composition of light and shadow. He began constructing scenes with a picture intended as the final product, not the modeling.” He used lighting as a tool to create scenes while they were being constructed, which gives us some insight into why his scenes are so dynamic and photogenic. In the book Posey seems to imply this was a well established modelling method Furlow practiced well before the San Juan Central was built, so I speculate it was part of Furlow’s “design as I go along approach” applied during that layout’s creation. This appears to be another instance of going beyond intellectualized layout planning in favour of engaging in physical processes. 

That particular Furlow observation resonated with me as I recently read these thoughts of Paul Valéry in Walter Benjamin’s essay, The Storyteller,

“Artistic observation can attain an almost mystical depth. The objects on which it falls lose their names. Light and shade form very particular systems, present very individual questions which depend upon no knowledge and are derived from no practice, but get their existence and value exclusively from a certain accord of the soul, the eye, and the hand of someone who was born to perceive them and evoke them in his own inner self.”

The San Juan Central still exists and is part of The Magic of Model Railroading exhibit at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. I wonder what Furlow would have thought of how his layout was lit. 

I’ll have to think about light and shadow more. I’ve had John Alton’s Painting With Light on my shelf for years. I need to read it again. It might be a place to start.

Ok, as well as unspoken design philosophies the books also contain a smattering of spoken ones, ok, well, written ones :-) Here are a couple:

Olson: “The key to building and enjoying a successful pike isn’t buying the most expensive products available; it’s using what you can afford creatively.”

Furlow: “Besides being dramatic, vertical scenery offers many layout planning advantages. Mountains can be used as view blocks to prevent us from seeing the entire layout at once.”

There are others, but I’ll leave discovering them for you.

Now, you might be saying, “Weren’t these principally how-to books, not philosophical and artistic tomes?” Yes they were, and I know haven’t commented on the efficacy of the books’ how-to information. Here’s the thing: if you consider the models and techniques as individual, stand-alone entities and processes you might say they’ve been surpassed in comparison to the products and methods available today. You might have something there, but I think you need to look at the modelling in terms of the overall composition of the layouts, and consider how each layout element makes a visual contribution. For example, we can buy far more detailed and accurate boxcars than what are shown in Olson’s book, but when looked at as part of a scene, the vehicles and how they have been detailed and weathered look just right. I find the photo that spans pages 2 and 3 particularly illustrative in this regard. The components of the train in that image aren’t particularly fine by today’s standards, but when carefully weathered in accordance with Olson’s instructions, and composed on the layout with all its other elements, there is an overall rightness to the scene. In short, it’s the scene that matters, and how the individual elements contribute to it. I’ll have to try some of Olson’s and Furlow’s methods before I comment further.

Before we wrap things up and go for coffee I have to mention the unspoken presence hovering over these books: the legendary John Allen. Both Olson and Furlow credit Allen's work as being a strong initial inspiration. Well, Furlow goes a bit further and says that an article he read by Olson in the ‘70s was what inspired him to redouble his efforts in model railroading. I don’t know much about John Allen other than the legend and a few of his photos. I know there was a book by past MR editor Linn Westcott called Model Railroading with John Allen that Kalmbach published in 1981. Maybe I need to get logical, find a copy to buy, and write about it in the next Book Talk. Stranger things have happened :-)