Lost Ocean Line?

I’m trying to shield this little project from creeping ‘job-ism’ with milestones and deadlines and such, so I’ve been mellowing out a bit on it and have instead been thinking about a name for the railroad. In the spirit of names like Gorre & Daphetid, and Enskale & Hoentee, my current candidate is Lost Ocean Line, or LOL for short. Ok. I’ll meditate on that for awhile :-)

Painted, tracked and powered

[I worked on these tasks in the backyard since the weather was good. This picture shows the track just before I set to gluing it down. The board itself was spray painted with a variety of Krylon Latex colours. The track is mainly Atlas. The circular arc switch is a Peco item that was on sale at the local hobby store a few months back - I'm fascinated with curved switches so I bought it and figured I'd work it in somehow.]

As the title says, I finished painting the board (mainly to get rid of the pink foam colour), glued down the track, and installed the DCC system. The next task is cleaning up the workshop and getting ready for the next steps.

[This picture was taken just after taking a couple of laps of a test run of the DCC system. I bought a simple MRC Prodigy Express system. Works well.]

The Pendon Museum via YouTube

While I was in the process of putting together yesterday's post about the Madder Valley RR, I came across these other two excellent videos of the model railways at the Pendon Museum - the home of the Madder Valley RR - in England. The first has a little more footage of the Madder Valley along with a highly enjoyable B&W film shot by the narrator in the '60s(?). It also goes into other layouts at the museum, but that mainly is the focus of part 2. The layouts of Pendon are odes to English village life in the 1930s. There's great stuff here and hopefully one day I'll have the opportunity to see them in person.

A lesson from the Madder Valley RR?

I struggled a bit figuring out where to place the Madder Valley in the Museum / Gallery / Studio diagram. I think it goes in the Museum / Gallery overlap, but since it is after all now on display in a museum (and is a model of railroad operation), I weaselled out and placed it right on the Museum / Gallery boundary in the museum side. One thing that I think identifies this landmark layout as Gallery is, as the narrator points out, for Mr. Ahern doing what he wanted over-rode conventional consistency - for example, running locomotives he liked if they fit on the track and not worrying if they were a different scale.

And all this Venn diagram stuff aside, this is a fun video, especially the scenes going down the track taken from the front of the train.

Museum and gallery and studio

My inner nerd likes to classify things, so I made this Venn diagram, in the style of those in Indexed, to show where my thinking is on this whole Museum and Gallery thing. I introduced a new subset, Studio, for objects that have some resemblance to model railroads, but aren’t, and don’t feature actual running trains. I think members of the Studio subset are mainly art objects. I put the Brugel-Bosch Bus in this group. It’s clearly art. It has tracks and trains. But they don’t operate. It’s not hard to imagine that they could be made operational, but that would change the nature of the entire piece.

I’ve only indicated placement of model railroads that I’ve touched on in this blog, so it’s in no way complete, and probably very debatable anyway 

Classification schemes are ultimately a losing game, and thinking too much about them usually degenerates into arguments about what goes where; what’s in and what’s out; categories to include and exclude. The list of problems is endless. All schemes have to be worn lightly to get the most out of them, and if not, discarded.

18 Oct update: I noticed today that the Boston & Maine arrow doesn't reach into the Museum area, which it should, so to reiterate, the Boston & Maine should be a part of Museum.