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 :-)