On the Relationship of CVs, Thesis statements, and Place

HBS 700 cleaned up and ready to tackle the mean cobblestone streets of Hoboken, NJ.

A recent long email thread between modelers in Kansas City and Austin has centered around CV settings for realistic operation of locomotives. The concern has been to accurately set momentum, braking, and sounds properly to achieve the feeling of running an actual locomotive. This feeds directly into a running conversation among several of my modeling friends about the central organizing principle of layouts, or the thesis statement, that governs decisions about the construction and operation of a layout. Like anything in life, I believe having a central conceptual basis, or reason, for what you are doing with your layout makes your endeavor more cohesive, focused and helps it communicate your vision and intent more clearly.

I will concede that a majority of modelers may believe that a rigorous conceptual basis for a model railroad takes the fun out of the pursuit, because the enjoyment comes from doing whatever seems like fun at the moment. I can not stress enough that I have no problem with spontaneity and undirected play at all as a fun way to practice model railroading. (See my Fall 2013 LSR Marker Lamp editorial in vol 59, number 4 where I talk about modeling to escape versus modeling to engage.) But, suspend your disbelief for a moment if you think that modeling to engage sounds too much like work, and please think of it as just getting really involved in playing.

A huge part of any game and even undirected play involves a set of rules, or constraints, that make the game more fun for everyone, even if you are the only one playing, because how are you going to know what you are doing or if you are doing it well or not without rules? For me, having that central organizing principle or thesis statement is rule number one. Without knowing what I am setting out to do, how will I know if I do it or not? There may be several types of theses possible, but I would say that they are all sub categories of a very large catch-all bucket of categories that involve the idea and communication of the qualities of place.

On my layout, I am still developing my thesis, but the trajectory has something to do with conveying identity and the relationship of customer and railroad. Being a short line railroad, the Hoboken Shore had intimate interaction on a daily basis with its customers. My questions for this are, how could one model this closeness, and how can personalities come into play? On the Waterfront, which was filmed along the HBS right of way, provides an excellent example of the turmoil and roughness of the moment in time of the environment surrounding the HBS. I'd like my layout to impart some sort of understanding of this, and what it may have been like to work on a railroad in that particular place. Because of this trajectory, it becomes necessary to focus on the operator as individual within the context of 1950s Hoboken. 

The HBS was already waning on the heels of its busiest time during WWII. There must have been a malaise settling on the town and railroad as things were falling apart all over the Mile Square City. The mayor owned the local garbage collection company, and when decisions weren't made to his satisfaction, he refused to pick up trash for several weeks until the decisions were reversed. Graft, corruption, and general New Jersey politics led to empty buildings, dirty, malnourished children roaming the streets, and general hard times while the rest of the country was enjoying a post-war boom. It was so bad, that the mayor enacted a law that made it illegal to photograph the city during this time.

Capturing the idea of a place is a topic of an excellent blog post entitled "Power of Place" I read recently from Mike Cougill at his OST Publications blog. In it he explores the notions of place and the challenges of modeling them on a layout. He says,"in modeling, we give scant notice to how the railroad and community grew together. We only give a cursory acknowledgment of how the railroad fits the landscape and in turn, is shaped by it." We do tend to become fixated on the stuff and techniques of the layout instead of the overall effect we are trying to achieve. A 'can't see the forest for the trees' sort of thing, but I believe that creating an idea of place is the central reason behind creating any layout.

The place of Hoboken in 1959 is what I am modeling, so what does locomotive sound have to do with this? Simply and directly, the pace of operation for switching multiple industries in an urban setting is necessarily slow, so I want to make operation about the little things that were apart of the everyday movement of goods and products around the waterfront. This was what the railroad crews had, everyday things in small quantities that made up their entire lives. No varnish whizzing by at speed, no thundering Big Boys belching steam, nobody to really notice what was going on except for the people they dealt with everyday at the coffee factory, the shipyard, and the piers. The world was a small one connected to the globe, and it was these individual sounds that made up the ebb and flow of the aural scenery. 

It is easy to get sucked into tweaking CV settings on a locomotive just for the sake of getting the sound right. My driving interest, though, is to provide user feedback that makes prototypical operation easier and more enjoyable for the operator on my layout. Keeping this in mind while performing a seemingly isolated task of CV setting is important to me.

So hearing the small, but can-do nature of the revving of a 44-tonner before it moves is modeling the character and the reality of the Hoboken Shore Railroad. It wasn't glamorous, it wasn't pretty, but it was specific and part of the everyday experience of the individuals of the railroad, and that's important in supporting the thesis about the place that I am recreating on my layout. This small sound detail directly helps the central conceptual basis for my layout to communicate the particular place of Hoboken, NJ and how the railroad fit into it. For me, this makes for loads of fun, even though I am focused, rigorous and deliberate in my play.

More

For a great example of a strong, central thesis, see the layout of Jim Senese of Tulsa, OK. He has a clear intent for operators explore the interaction of multiple railroads with differing personalities on his "Kansas City Terminal RR" layout in Model Railroad Planning 1998.

I think place is a great topic for further exploration and conversation. I'd like to hear from you if you know of modelers who make place an important part of their layout.

This first appeared in Vol 61, Number 1 of the Marker Lamp.

A Thousand Words…

Another guest post from Gerry Fitzgerald. This time he points us towards research tools (and cool photographs). And there is a really nice philosophical underpinning about the way Gerry pursues his passion for railroading - revealed in what Gerry believes is the purpose of history.  -rt

A Thousand Words...

by Gerard J Fitzgerald

One of the many seismic changes to American culture caused by the entry of the United States into World War II was the flood of women into the workforce on the home front. Many jobs, including positions in the industrial sector such as on the nation’s railroads, were filled by women who labored in spaces vacated by men who had been drafted or had volunteered for formal military service. Long standing cultural and gender bias was checked, if only in the short term, by the expediency of a global wartime emergency.

Evidence of such radical change is seen in the photo above. Taken in Clinton, Iowa, in April of 1943, this snapshot of industrial life along the rails shows Mrs. Viola Sievers working as a roundhouse employee, preparing (I believe…) a Chicago and Northwestern H-Class 4-8-4 “Northern” for service. Dwarfed by the driving wheels and boiler of this Baldwin built giant, Mrs. Sievers is understood in this photo to be a small yet vital part of a dedicated national rail transportation network focused on American and Allied victory. Without the onset of war Mrs. Sievers -or for that matter any other woman-would rarely, if ever, have been allowed near a locomotive in that particular capacity as a railroad employee.

The person behind the camera was Jack Delano, and his name, not to mention his photographic style and artistry, is recognizable and familiar to many in our hobby. Perhaps best remembered today by some for his wonderful contributions to cinema and folk music in Puerto Rico, Mr. Delanao was, in 1943, working for the United State’s Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information as a field photographer. His mission, which was just as important as Mrs. Sievers and the crew of C&NW 3034, was to record on film life in these United States for posterity. Delano’s federal patronage gave him access not only to restricted areas such as railroad property, sites which were generally off limits to all forms of photography during the war because of national security concerns, but also to exotic materials such as color film, which at the time was exceedingly difficult to obtain because of war time shortages. This project had been initiated in 1935 to capture the toll of the Depression on the lives of rural Americans and was continued on into the war years through various government agencies until 1944.

The use of color in lieu of black and white film during this period was another indication of changing times, here a reflection of the impact of science and technology on consumer life in the early twentieth century. For better or worse science marches on and in 2014, much like in 1943, people are working to create and make available new devices and systems to enhance/complicate our way of life. At the same time the tools and methodologies that people use to investigate the past also continue to expand and evolve. This includes how we access and process photographs such as the ones taken by Mr. Delano back in the 1930s and 1940s.

Since at least the 1980s -and one can argue that the origins of this type of research goes much further back in the last century- work by scholars who were at the time considered outside of the traditional scope of social scientific research, much less the humanities, have worked synergistically with historians, anthropologists, archeologists and other academic types to create an entire new field called Digital Humanities. The field is considered so promising that in the United States the National Endowment For the Humanities (NEH) launched a formal initiative to encourage and fund this type of research in 2006. This sequence of events is, for a select group of humanists, very similar to when physicists were surprised to find out in the late 1930s that an understanding of neutron capture and fission was a license to print money. But I digress…

What the digital humanities is exactly, much less what the field can do, or what some practioners hope the field can accomplish in the future …is a very complicated and often contentious question. From a practical standpoint those issues are not really a pressing concern for any model railroaders reading this blog post. Although if you are really interested consider going to the page entitled “A Guide to Digital Humanities at Northwestern University (http://sites.library.northwestern.edu/dh/) or “Debates in Digital Humanities at CUNY (http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/) but pack a lunch because you’ll be reading for some time, possibly for at least a few weeks. Be forewarned! If a sentence which reads in part “Despite the significant trend in Digital Humanities towards networked and multimodal spanning social, visual, and haptic media…” sounds like it was lifted from an Onion article (it wasn’t!), or just gives you a headache (it shouldn’t), just skip down one paragraph where I get to the point about how your tax dollars are paying off to facilitate your hobby needs.

For the record, Digital Humanities is defined on Wikipedia for the folks still reading in the peanut gallery in the following way:

An area of research, teaching, and creation concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. Developing from the fields of humanistic computing, and digital humanities praxis (dh praxis) digital humanities embrace a variety of topics, from curating online collections to data mining large cultural data sets. Digital humanities (often abbreviated DH) currently incorporate both digitized and born-digital materials and combine the methodologies from traditional humanities disciplines such as history, philosophy, linguistics, literature, art, archeology, music and cultural studies) and social sciences with tools provided by computing (such as date visualization, information retrieval, data mining, statistics, text mining) and digital publishing. As well, related subfields of digital humanities have emerged like software studies, platform studies, and critical code studies.

So what does any of this have to do with that Sunshine kit you squirreled away five years ago into that secret closet in your basement and which has been gathering dust ever since? Well quite a bit as it turns out. There is a new Digital Humanities initiative at Yale called Photogrammar (http://photogrammar.yale.edu/) which is a “web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United State’s Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).” This is without doubt the niftiest thing to come out of the New Haven campus since Cole Porter.

From a model railroading standpoint this means that all those wonderful Jack Delano color photographs taken in the wintery Midwestern hinterlands during the 1940s, photos which RPM types love to drool over and incessantly argue about, are available in a new and more interesting format. Plus hundred of other photos Mr. Delano took which you probably haven’t seen. Not to mentions tens of thousands of other photos taken by greats such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and some other not so famous names, all of whom worked on what was the largest photo project ever undertaken in American history. (For a new PBS documentary on the life and work on Dorothea Lange please see the following: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/) These artists and visionaries bequeathed to us a photographic vision that not only shaped our understanding of the terrible effects of the Great Depression on the nation, but, in so doing, also created a visual collective memory of the American landscape that guides our hearts and minds to this day.

Aside from the photographs the Yale site makes use of Digital Humanities software that allow users to find photos by state, by date, by photographer and also provides graphic analysis of photographs by category (http://photogrammar.yale.edu/labs/). The site is very easy to use and builds upon the collective experience of mining the photo page at the Library of Congress: (http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/).

What modelers do with this wonderful new resource remains to be seen but time will tell. How “history” is employed within the hobby, and to what ends, is a topic that holds a great deal of interest for me and to be honest sometimes gives me a headache. Historical evidence comes in various forms and a photograph is a particularly accessible type of evidence especially in the age of the Internet. And yet a photograph can often be a very tricky primary document to wield, much less interpret, even as it remains a potentially powerful tool.

One of the other photographers involved in the FSA-OWI project was the late great Walker Evans who is a hero of mine. Evans, along with the writer James Agee, produced a book on the eve of American entry into World War II that chronicled their work exploring the lives of impoverished white tenant farmers in Hale County, Alabama, in 1936. Of the many works produced by scholars, writers, artists, photographers and journalists about the dramatic impact of the Great Depression on life in the United States, Agee and Evans’ 1941 book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, has achieved the status of a modern classic. One of the most unique and idiosyncratic publications of its day, the book combines Agee’s words and Evans’ photographs resulting in arguably the most significant documentary examination of the era of rural American life in the impoverished South. The book draws readers into the lives of those who labored and also into the spaces in which they lived. By focusing in part on rich descriptions of the sensory, spatial, material, and architectural aspects of a particular vernacular landscape, the authors created a powerful and often indelible historical image that, even today, has purchase in how Americans remember the rural South at that time.

Amazingly enough James Agee and Walker Evans went south to Hale county under contract for Fortune Magazine (yes THAT Fortune Magazine!) to chronicle the lives of enervated and near penniless sharecroppers. Apparently the editors passed on assigning the piece to Karl Marx as he was still dead and John Dos Passos was still editing the proofs of The Big Money. Agee realized early on his prose would probably not find a home in Fortune, knew he could still sleep soundly at night if that was the case, and bided his time. Both his words and the Evans photos reached a limited audience five years later when the 600 copies of the first edition made their way out into a country that was gearing up for war. It languished for a time but a small audience of astute observers recognized upon release that the book was a classic. Over time the book has become somewhat controversial, especially to the descendants of those photographed. Regardless, the book’s importance in American history flows out of photos and text that bore witness to forms of rural poverty and extreme material deprivation that was startling to many Americans in 1936. Such poverty, which still exists today in various locales, is equally disturbing almost eighty years later.

The photographs in the collection that the Yale platform has so graciously repackaged for everyone’s use provide a wonderful opportunity, not only as a visual and historic resource, but perhaps more importantly as a stepping-off point for objective analysis, discussion, and perhaps even personal introspection on the various meaning of American history. To paraphrase what I said on a model railroad chat group last year (when I was discussing the inherent complexities of modeling the Jim Crow South…): While some in the hobby do seem to want to embrace the nuance and complexity of American history when it increases the realism of their modeling endeavors when it comes to technologically determinist features such as rivet detail, prototypically correct paint schemes, operational minutiae, layout design, signal systems, and chronologically distinct weathering effects to name but a few examples…many place very specific limits on how much of the larger American cultural experience they really want to model. The type of details found for instance in a close reading of the photos taken by Delano, Evans, and Lange, among others back in the day.

Which is fine…as far as it goes… although history makes less sense if one cherry picks or filters culture through a cheesecloth. To be more precise and to the point, history is not supposed to make you comfortable - it is supposed to make you THINK! Which is why the new online archive from Yale is such a useful tool. This wonderful treasure trove of photos, coupled with the powerful new graphic and search capabilities available on the Yale webpage, will give all of us the opportunity to think carefully about what we see in these images of the American past. Because in the final analysis how we see the past, and how we struggle to objectively interpret history, ultimately tells us a great deal about how we view ourselves.

Apocalyptic Perspectives and Dystopian Dioramas

Model railroading can be a lot more than an escape from everyday life. It can be a method of understanding and exploring much more challenging situations and conditions of our world. A rarely taken trajectory in modeling is the depiction of dystopic scenes of dark realities.

I came across the first of a handful of darker dioramas some years ago. It is the work of a Yale architecture student (probably graduated by now)  Peter Feigenbaum in his Trainset Ghetto installation. Plenty of graffiti and trash in a rough contemporary urban scene. The lack of scale figures makes it even more foreboding and bleak.

Bleak, barren and broken.

What do we get from modeling a gritty, non-romantic area of urban blight? Maybe it has to do with a deeper, more real, feeling of reality. The dark and ugly are often more vivid and touching events in our own lives that perhaps provoke much more emotional stimulation than the joyous occasions. This is definitely not a normal trajectory for modelers, but I suggest that it is just as satisfying, if not more so, than modeling the sentimental, happy, idyllic scenes of our childhood or romantic notions of better times past that are more fiction than fact. Peter's dirty reality is not the only one I've stumbled upon that plucks at the grim emotions of uncomfortable situations.

Thomas Doyle is another artist who uses scale modeling as his medium to explore difficult and transformational events that are often less than happy scenes. His artist's statement indicates he is after those deeper emotional moments.

My work mines the debris of memory through the creation of intricate worlds sculpted in 1:43 scale and smaller. Often sealed under glass, the works depict the remnants of things past—whether major, transformational experiences, or the quieter moments that resonate loudly throughout a life. In much the way the mind recalls events through the fog of time, the works distort reality through a warped and dreamlike lens.

Another artist James Cauty is dabbling in the scale model railroading medium shows us an extended crime scene. Police, investigators and a general environment of mayhem poke at the establishment through nicely detailed work of architectural modelers. He wants us to consider our relationship to authority in a large installation. The 'layout' is,

far from the rural idyll of old model villages, Cauty’s diorama makes a political statement about societal freedom and state control.

Collateral damage from the getaway chase.

A description of the installation:

A motorcade brings the queen to view the scene of the crime.

Thousands of police swarm over a scorched landscape tattered and torn by rioting and looting, every window in every building is smashed, vehicles are overturned, bridges and roads destroyed, power pylons are down, a burned-out church still smoulders. Above this post-mayhem scene of destruction, helicopters shine their searchlights on the battered landscape. Above the helicopters, a train rumbles past...

These art works are designed to communicate a theme or some sort of meaning beyond just recreating a part of the world. They are all dark in some way, whether through the topic, the execution or the exploration of uncanny emotions. They are all by artists and not modelers. While everything we build communicates about the conditions of the building process, intentional, overt and explicit communication through models is what transforms the pursuit from a pastime to an art form (or a design form).

The above examples are nominally works of art simply for the fact that they were produced by artists for art galleries. What happens if model railroaders build layouts in their homes that create a recognizable message about society?  Are they even modelers anymore, and are they now, instead, artists? A quick search of the Internet reveals on the UK N Gauge Forum that this approach is being taken up by at least one modeler.

The forum participant, Mr Grumpy, is attempting to tap into the dystopian visions offered in such movies as The Matrix, Blade Runner and 1984. His N scale modeling is intended to portray the "divide between rich and poor" with skyscrapers built on "crumbling slums below." His layout is still in construction, but his exemplary video from Final Fantasy VII indicates it is definitely headed towards gloomy futurism:



Off the top of my head for my own Hoboken Shore layout, I have a couple of items to possibly explore grittier sides of the rough Hoboken waterfront. One is at Bethlehem Steel during the union strike of 1947 (as seen in the photo below) when almost 42,000 workers on the east coast paralyzed the ship building yards.

Picket line of Bethlehem Steel strike of 1947

Also of note are the extreme signs of poverty found in Hoboken at the time due to graft and corruption of Mayor McFeeley's regime. Garbage collection was suspended at a point as political retaliation, and the large numbers of out of work immigrant merchant marines and large population of poor children roamed aimlessly about the streets. Almost every other building seemed to be vacant at the time, with squatters inhabiting half-crumbled structures. An article appeared in the US Camera journal (in the collection of Hoboken Historical Museum web site) that illustrates the dire situation of the city in the 1940s. The entire article is interesting and posted in its entirety in their online collections.

From US Camera Vol IV, No.2

And equally ripe for dystopic modeling is the tough harbor life as seen in On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando, where apparently there were lots of longshoremen beating up each other. Far from the cute or funny scenes of overturned apple carts or skinny dippers normally found in a model railroad, I am contemplating these dark depictions to accurately portray how awful life was in this area of New York Harbor. It would be misleading not to model these scenes that were so important to the culture and environment in which the Hoboken Shore Railroad operated during the 40s and 50s. Certainly not the glamour and polish found in streamline passenger trains and glorious stations one more often sees in layouts and railroad press, but I wish to present a rather dirty, poignant slice of a hard everyday existence of which the railroad was a part.

Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy gets pounded by mobsters On the Waterfront (Horizon Pictures, 1954)

This is definitely an underrepresented niche in the hobby that occurs in isolated instances in a few layouts. I think both dark modeling and the broader genre of artistic modeling bear some more thought in the pages of this blog at some point later. Meanwhile, there are a couple of recent examples of prototype opportunities to explore darker railroading topics.

A common occurrence these days are (old) tank cars from the Bakken Oil Fields making their way precariously through communities across North America while pipeline construction is catching up to the new oil shale deposit production. This catastrophe happened in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, Canada recently, when a train with 72 tankers full of crude oil is parked uphill in Nantes, and through a series of unfortunate events, ends up 10 kilometers away exploding and burning in Lac-Mégantic.

I have seen plenty of firefighters and fire trucks on layouts fighting car or building fires, but I don't recall having seen a model of a railroad accident. (Feel free to point me towards any examples in the comments section!) The discussion of dark layout subjects is simply to illustrate the idea that not all layouts have to glamorize what is in reality the very dirty, rough and dangerous business of railroading.

Another instance of a prototype event that seems to beg to be modeled for a contest model or RPM meet. From an email circulating through the railroad community:

CN train that hit a log truck on the Redditt sub (between Winnipeg MB and Sioux Lookout ON) at Sunstrum, ON (mile 38). Lead unit was the 5146 a GMDL SD40. Seeing the truck on the crossing before hitting it with the train, the engineer hit the deck below the window level and the head end brakeman ducked down behind the wall and door under the middle windows, that leads down to the nose of the engine. Both made it out alive. There was glass everywhere, the pulp logs loaded cross wise on the truck, penetrated into the cab including through the number boards.

Quite an amazing image, and equally amazing the crew wasn't killed. I haven't seen anyone tackle a modeling project such as this.

Why don't we see more modeling of disasters and unpleasantness? I think one answer is rather simple and straightforward: why would a 'normal' modeler want to spend a lot of time ruminating on a layout that was dystopic? That certainly couldn't be a happy retreat from the hassles and tragedies of everyday life, which is a big reason to have hobbies in the first place. I think that there is, however, satisfaction and respite in creating more challenging layouts with unpleasant or uncomfortable topics, and there is an equal sense of recreation to that pursuit.

There are also benefits for the final product of the layout itself, whether it is dystopic, idyllic or somewhere in between, if we approach creation of it from a more considered perspective of an artist or designer.

I believe that layouts that have a carefully conceived theme or thesis statement are generally better off than those that do not. In more general terms, and with dark and grittiness aside, there is a lot of room for layouts having identifiable themes and theses to be less craft-focused and more artistically focused. There are a lot of distinct situations available for such modeling found in many varied kinds of prototypes.

Getting the look of a railroad accurate is a technical pursuit, but getting the feel of the railroad is a more artistic endeavor. To be thought about more is why this more artistic approach would be beneficial, and how a rigorous thesis statement could help make decisions and provide productive focus for the modeler. It has everything to do with the process producing a better outcome. Simply put, it is identifying what effect you are trying to achieve beyond making a model look like its real life prototype. What is your layout's thesis statement? This may not be part of your current process, but it deserves a little consideration.

Speaking of process, I see that the glue is dry, so I need to get back to laying track.

We don't actually like creativity

Disclaimer: Refer to my previous post about different modeling approaches and how there is plenty of room for all of us. I'm not trying to be disrespectful of others. I am just sharing how I feel.

And it is a lonely place. From a mathematical blog: http://easyquestion.net/thinkagain/2011/02/18/think-outside-the-box/

This is a personal reaction to an article I ran across in Slate over a month ago that hit me where I live titled, Inside the Box: People don't actually like creativity. It is a short piece that presents the phenomenon in this country where we celebrate imaginative people and where "viewing the world creatively is supposed to be an asset, even a virtue," but we actually have a bias against the ideas generated by that creativity. The referenced study reveals that people desire creativity, but reject creative ideas when we have a practical motivation counter to the creative idea. In other words, we like the idea of creativity, but not the actuality of it.

By day I am a mild-mannered architect and, until recently, teacher of design where I am supposedly valued for my ability to think and act creatively. As pointed out in the article, though, this is not what people really want from me. They want products that are a good-looking version of what they already know and are comfortable with. Something they have seen before that doesn't challenge them, something that doesn't stick out, something that is acceptable to others because that is what others have.

Oh, they will say they want you to 'think outside the box' (the phrase I hate the very most hearing), but what they really want is for you to be good at replicating what is already in the world. And, after being in model railroading for almost 40 years now, I have learned that model railroaders are people, too, and the same applies in this hobby world as much as it does in the real world.

The lack of risk-taking in the hobby has and will always surprise me, but I now have a tenuous grasp on the situation - at least enough of one to be able to better handle the situation. In general, people like recipes, solutions and 'right.' They don't like messy thinking, trying several iterations before being satisfied, or uncertainty. The want to 'know' how to do something and not to figure out how to do something new. As a consequence, I have gone from an exuberant young hobbiest throwing out ideas left and right to any and all who ask, to a much more cautious encourager of different approaches to a problem, to a reserved and reluctant adviser. I'm not happy about this change, but it is a survival skill learned the hard way.

As a designer, I was taught to respect the past, but not to replicate it. I am always looking forward, re-designing old things, looking for new problems to solve and trying to improve on any and every situation I come across. 'Progressive', 'new', and 'innovative' are the watchwords of the designer. Being creative is not an outcome, it is a different way of living life. It is a process and not a product. But it makes it difficult to relate to others at times, and it is almost always exhausting, especially when nothing comes of it. This happens in life, and equally unfortunately, it often happens in model railroading.

I used to offer 'creative' ideas about layout design to any and all that asked. The way these encounters go is that there is general discussion about "doing something" to a layout - be it scenery, track arrangement, fascia design, operating scheme, etc. This is like a form of crack cocaine being offered to a designer.

What happens is that my objective brain begins to shut down. This is the part of the brain that comes up with all the inhibitions and all the reasons not to do something. It is the logical, linear and doing part of the brain. It shuts down so that the subjective, free-associating, abstract and creative part of the brain can get some breathing room to do its thing - come up with a new idea.

So, my eyes get big, my pulse quickens, the world starts to slow down as the ideas speed up. I am in the zone. I ask innocently, "what is it that you are really trying to do?" A sharp first question is almost always devastating. "What do you mean?" is the usual response. I probe more. "What kind of mood are you trying to present? Do you want grandeur, intimacy, ruggedness?" Now I've got them thinking in a different way. It is not about finding the solution anymore. Our conversation is suddenly now about defining the problem and figuring out a desired outcome. Not until that is set will we concentrate on 'solving' the actual problem.

"You are talking about "x", but it seems like "y" is the problem if you are trying for that effect," I say tentatively. "You're right!" they say with surprise. "Then what if we did..." and we are off on a brainstorming adventure that comes up with many 'outside the box' (cringe) ideas. It is an exciting conversation, and it often lasts for several minutes. Or even hours, because once you are in the design thinking zone, you are looking at the layout in a totally different way. Suddenly that initial 'problem' transforms into a multitude of 'opportunities' to apply the same conceptual idea thought of for the original. Now everything is falling into place. Every decision about the layout relates to a central idea. Every decision becomes easy. Everything now makes sense.

Then the logical side wakes up in my conversation partner. "That's nice, but nobody builds a layout that way," he says suddenly aware that he has left the comfort of everything he has ever seen in a model railroad. "So?" I reply innocently shrugging my shoulders just the slightest bit. "Those are really creative ideas, but I'll have to think about it." And with that I know that nothing we talked about will ever happen.

I can't begin to count all the times that scenario has played out in front of my eyes like a car wreck you see unfolding in front of you with no power to stop it. It is a horrible feeling. It is the crash after a drug-induced high. Over the years the highs are not as high and the crashes are not as hard since I am pretty well desensitized, but it is still something that I actively avoid. I try not to think creatively when I am around (most) model railroaders - it's not what they are actually interested in hearing.

There are still the inquiries for advice. After editing the Layout Design Journal where I tried to do something different and was rejected, I get several inquiries from people who are looking for creative ideas. What they are actually looking for, though, is the 'right' answer - the answer that others have done before. Yes, there are good general rules of thumb like any endeavor, but there are also a universe of new ways of interpreting those general rules. For a while I tried to vet people to make sure they were looking for creative ideas - testing them, asking if they were really sure they wanted a creative suggestion, and they always said "yes", but they always meant "no." I don't try to vet anymore. At this point, I either just do what they have already decided is the right way or decline to help.

I have learned to adapt so that I can have fun, and it has worked out pretty well. The stress of trying to convince people to look at things a different way is gone, the disappointment and awkwardness in others' reactions is gone, the feeling of being a weird outsider is gone. I can now blend in and back slap everyone on what they do and not have to explain my crazy ideas. Perhaps I can sneakily get others to design rather than just do, but for the most part now, I try to enjoy other peoples' approach to the hobby as they enjoy them and not how I would enjoy them. Kind of a Zen approach to the social aspects of the hobby. A passage in the book Chuang Tzu reads, “flow with whatever is happening and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.”

I've found a couple of people in this perhaps yet undefined niche who really like to design what they are doing rather than just do what they are doing, and I follow their work, and we have great conversations. Some call it 'thinking man's' pursuits - I just call it designing. I'm hoping to find a few more of these types of modelers and maybe put some of our thoughts together in a publication.

The point of having a hobby, though is satisfaction on your own terms, in your own time and place. My terms happen to include re-thinking what to do and how to do things versus doing them like everyone else already does it. Or more succinctly, I like to design.