what lonely siding?

what lonely siding?

in modeling

we often spend

a great deal of time

super detailing 

a particular car 

or structure

so that it is just like 

the real thing

why then ?

are there so few 

sidings

that seem to show

the same care to

the small details

why not ?

take another look at

your sidings

maybe they can be a lot more 

interesting

with just a bit of

detailing

I extend my most heartfelt apologies to Mr. Geoff Auburn from whose article, What Lonely Siding?, that appeared in the Dec ’74 issue of Railroad Modeler, these sentences were extracted and mangled into verse, to Railroad Modeler and Railroad Modeler aficionados, and the entire would of poetry for this misbegotten piece of doggerel.

In the comments to an earlier post Michael suggested that the article’s title, What Lonely Siding?, was reminiscent of poetry by John Ashbery. I’m not familiar with the work of Mr. Ashbery, but I took up the challenge to see if a poem, however terrible, could be extracted from the article that captured the essence of that article.

What Lonely Siding?, although a modest article, is important if you’re at all interested in the principles and practice of Full Observation and its applicability to scene detailing. The article is basically a collection of photographs of equipment once found at the Chilcoot siding, which the author notes is “located east of Portola (Calif.) on the Western Pacific branch to Reno”. The article is much in the tradition of lineside detail books. One that's on my list to buy, although only tangentially related to said genre of books, is Geoff Kent’s Wild Swan publication, Unconsidered Trifles: Images of the Everyday for Modellers & Artists.

I guess even rather utilitarian articles can have rather poetic titles. Seems very Zen to me :-)