Spacing Things Out
- Jul 27
- 2 min read
The one thing railroads can do better than any other mode of transportation is move massive amounts of really heavy stuff over long distances and do so fairly quickly. That's their business model in a nutshell. However, one aspect of this poses challenges on the modeling front. Specifically, creating the illusions of those long distances. In the real world, a train travels through one town and then goes more than quite a while through the countryside before getting to the next one.
Our train rooms will always feel too small. On top of that, there are so many compelling modeling subjects (towns, yards, industries, etc.) that it's hard to avoid the temptation to model as many of them as we can. So, we don't have enough space, and we have tons of things we want to represent. Something has to give. All too often, that "something" is the space between towns. The logic being that if we squeeze things closer together, we can get more in. Think about what this does, though. You've eliminated the key element of the rail scene: distance.
An alternative is to represent fewer towns on your layout, thereby leaving room for some scenery between them. As this happens, the illusion of distance begins to take form.
The lead photo was taken on a previous layout of mine (featured in the July 2001 issue of MR). The room was roughly 20' by 20'. One of the key aspects of the design was that it really only represented one town and just a portion of the countryside of a medium-sized Indiana County. In the middle was the town of Bloomington and McDoel Yard to the south. Other than that, all you had were the tiny villages of Clear Creek and Ellettsville. The payoff of taking this approach is that it allows plenty of space to create the illusion of traveling over a greater distance. In other words, it creates the illusion of an actual railroad going from point A to point B. I go into more depth on the subject of composition in my just-released book, Student to Master.
