Lab results

Lost Ocean Line's track plan

With all the unusually good weather we’ve been experiencing this week I’ve had no motivation for modelling. Although, I’ve been dabbling in the lab :-)

I view Instagram as something of a lab where I undertake experiments. Some are me just trying to learn the things that Instagram can do, like figuring out how to create multiple image posts. Right now I’m trying to figure out how to post video clips. Other posts are meant as probes to see what people are interested in; others are just me archiving what I think are interesting pictures. So I try posting what I think are different types of photos to see if anything clicks.

Most posts these days get a fairly ho-hum response when it comes to likes, and most garner around 20 to 30 give or take a few. There’ve been a couple of outliers that have clocked in around 2.5x the usual number of likes. The post of Mels Diner at night on the old Lost Ocean Line Layout was one of those. 

The biggest surprise though was the photo of the Lost Ocean Line’s track plan. One day I realized I hadn’t posted any overview photos of the old LOL layout, so I posted one. It turned out to be one of the outliers in likes, and someone posted a comment saying they’d like to see the track plan. I soon discovered I really didn’t have a photo that properly showed the track plan, but I did have one that sort of showed it - it’s the lead-in one to this blog post. That photo turned out to get around 14x more likes than usual and continues to receive a steady trickle even now. The likes on most posts die out within 24 hours. 

The results of the LOL track plan experiment were quite surprising. Later I posted some track plan shots of other layouts, but no dice with those even as the LOL photo keeps generating a trickle of likes. Maybe the LOL track plan photo attracted an unusual amount of spam? Didn’t seem like it. Maybe people were just tickled by the layout's name and nothing more. Anyway, here at the 30Squares Media Empire we’re continuing discussions about that unusual lab result. Thoughts?

Streetcar on the highway

The weather was nice today so we went out for a long drive in our rolling, socially distanced metal box. We saw that streetcar rig pulled over on the shoulder of the westbound lane. I did a uey and pulled off on the shoulder of the eastbound lane to have a look. It looked like an Alstom Citadis Spirit. I don't know where it was headed other than west. 

Selective Compression [alternate]

Selective Compression: [alternate] The placement of uncompressed objects into a compressed landscape to create the illusion of great distance in a small area.

Usage: I used selective compression to model the scene along Ocean Boulevard.

Source: John Ostler proposes this alternative definition in his article, In defense of freelancing, that appeared in the December 2002 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman. Mr Ostler states:

Selective compression is mentioned frequently by model railroad writers; however, it is rarely defined. Here is my definition for it: selective compression is the placement of uncompressed objects into a compressed landscape to create the illusion of great distance in a small area. This definition is different from the usual one, as you can see.

The usual definition is something like this: a technique to remove redundant visual and spatial elements from a building to distill it down in size to just the features that make it useful on a layout [refer to the main entry on Selective Compression for a fuller explanation].

from The Dictionary of Non-Existent Model Railroad Terms, 3rd ed., 2019.

Yard [archaic]

Yard: [archaic] A layout-like display that may or may not include a model train.

Usage: My yard includes a model of the town where I grew-up.

Source: ‘Yard’ is an archaic word that predates electric model railroad layouts, but whose roots are not yet well established. Adolph F. Frank, in his 1981 book, Animated Scale Models Handbook, implies that ‘yard’ might derive from the term ‘Christmas tree yard’:

When I was a small boy, it was customary for families to have a "Putz" or Nativity scene as part of their Christmas decorations, which were usually found under the Christmas tree. Many of these families were descendants of old European craftsmen who made ornate and elaborate displays. I'm speaking of a time in our industrial history when a large portion of the labor force was extremely skilled with their hands. They were artistic types - machinists, pattern makers, finish carpenters and other artisans - who being fine craftsmen, seemed to delight in outdoing one another in making these displays. As a result, the Nativity scene slowly became just one part of a much larger display, commonly called the Christmas tree yard. In this yard was found anything from a model of the family home to a model of the entire village in which they lived.

As I grew older, in the late '20s and early '30s, the electric train came into prominence and was added to the display or yard. Automobile dealers took their entire display rooms and built large villages with waterfalls, as well as working trains and automobiles. I was immensely intrigued by these elaborate displays.

Mr. Frank might be the Adolph F. Frank who was born in Pennsylvania in 1918, and enlisted in the US Army on 15 Oct 1942, and if so, the dates stated in the quote, along with the date of birth and enlistment, suggest the term ‘yard’ was in use in the 1920s, and maybe the 1910s. Further research and citations are required.

Laurence T. Gieringer in his article 35-Year Old Model City, that appeared in the January / February 1938 issue of Lionel’s The Model Builder, uses ‘yard’ in a casual manner which suggests it might have been a well-known term to the magazine’s readers, although since it’s bracketed by ‘’ it might have been verging on archaic by that time:

“Ninety percent of the material that has gone into my little ‘yard’ has been discarded by someone and includes old tin cans, worn-out sunscreens, old bed sheets, old doors, cheese boxes and cigar boxes,” Gieringer explained.

Mr. Frank concludes his book by noting that by 1981 a model train is more-or-less a given for any layout:

Undoubtedly, you have noticed that I have not discussed the field of model railroading. I did this on purpose, for there have been volumes written on the subject, and anything I could write would be anticlimactic. There is, however, one thing certain: no layout or display would be complete without a model train.

from The Dictionary of Non-Existent Model Railroad Terms, 2nd ed., 1999.

Laurence Gieringer’s unacknowledged articles?

MB Mar/Apr '38; He could have been me had I been born earlier

I was wandering through some back issues of Lionel’s The Model Builder magazine, and in the January / February 1938 issue I came across this statement in an article called Contest Winners, which obviously was an announcement of who won a recent model building contest sponsored by the magazine:

Second prize was awarded to Laurence T. Gieringer of 340 North Ninth street, Reading, Pennsylvania. Pictures of the second prize winning railroad, and of the business street for which the award was made, are shown on another page in this issue.

Where was that page? I think they are actually referring to two articles in that issue. The first is 35-Year Old Model City, which has an interview with Mr. Gieringer, discusses his railroad (which was later to be known as the famous Roadside America), and presents many pictures of his work. In my earlier post about Mr. Gieringer and Roadside America I listed this article as being written by him, but it may have been written by a magazine staffer as no author is listed in either the table of contents or article.

The second article, which I think is the page referred to in the phrase, the business street for which the award was made, is Building A Model City. Again, no author byline is attached, and to make matters more mysterious, there’s no mention of Mr. Gieringer in the story. Although, the article is the beginning of a series about modelling buildings along a business street, and the models and techniques look like Mr. Gieringer’s. And then there’s the similarity in titles between the two articles. And then there’s the materials: they’re in the folk tradition, and consistent with Mr. Gieringer’s approach:

The materials, with the exception of a sheet of Masonite, are to be picked up around the house or office. They are cardboard of various thicknesses, a cigar box or two, sides and end of an apple box, common iron wire, a 1” plant [sic] [JDL: I think they meant ‘plank’] of white pine, cypress or other soft wood, some scraps of cellophane, tracing paper and few green bottters [sic] [JDL: from the article’s text it looks like they meant ‘blotters’].

I’m going to speculate that that article, as well as the others in the series, was either written by Mr. Gieringer, or ghost written about his work by a staffer at the magazine. The article states what’s in the series:

Buildings to be pictured and described in this series will include 

 a corner drug store; 

 stone cathedral; 

 bank and office building; 

 apartment hotel;

 movie theatre with roof tanks and air conditioning apparatus; 

 hat store with upper floors given over to a ladies’ ready-to-wear shop and an artist’s loft studio; 

 a building housing a double store with modern, recessed show windows and a gas station.

Building A Model City covers the corner drug store project. Here’s where the others were published - well, at least the ones that I can verify so far:

1938

Jan / Feb: Building a Model City (describes how to build a corner drug store)

Mar / Apr: Model Stone Church

May / Jun: Bank Building for the Model City

Jul / Aug: Miniature Apartment Hotel

Oct:       Constructing a Model Theatre

I haven’t yet found either the hat store (although I see a picture of it in the Constructing a Model Theatre article) or the double store with gas station, but this table of contents entry, Three Stores Under One Roof, in the Nov / Dec 1938 issue looks promising. The problem is the article itself appears to be missing from the archive - the archive’s maintainers inform me that the pages are missing because they were damaged or missing from the original they scanned. 

I’ll update the list when I find out more; however, I think it’s clear that we’re seeing a number of classic Laurence Gieringer projects that possibly haven’t been identified as such. And what if they weren’t by him? They’re still a fascinating look into model construction techniques circa the late 1930s built before the introduction of widely available specialized model making materials.