Humor on your layout?

[Boyd]

On your layout have you used humor in any way shape matter or form? Is it in your face or hard to find?

[rlplionel]

An Internet buddy sent me a Plasticville billboard for my layout, which states "Unattended children will be given an expresso and a free puppy."

Robert

http://www.robertstrains.com/

[LittleTommy]

I have a lot of humor on my layout, most of which is heavy handed but some is a little subtile.

There are lots of little things, like naming a station after one of the family dogs i.e. "Spike's Peak", incorprating a "dirty joke" from high school into the name of a brewery (I won't specify the joke, but it is "punny"), having a "bat signal" on top of city hall, and having parking spaces marked out in the parking lot for Commisoner Gordon, Batman, The Mayor, The Mayor's Bimbo, and for Criminals Making Payoffs.

Then there are big things like the Billboard for the Columbia School of Quantum Mechanics ("Train to be a Quantum Mechanic, even if you didn't finish High School") , the large illuminated billboard for Peter Pan Makeup ("Use Peter Pan Make Up Before Your Pan Peters Out"),  the Ghostbuster's Ecto 1 outside of the haunted house, the Anamaniacs standing outside the water tower, the figures of the Rugrats on the layout, the crashed flying saucer in the hills, the fertilizer factory  named for a local political figure ("If It's From xxxx, It's Pure Fertilizer"), the cars from the Pixar movie "Cars" mixed in with the scale cars in the roads in the cites, the Hulk in the background smashing us one of my less successful efforts at scratchbuilding a building flat, the moonshine still hidden in the mountains being discovered by a patrol of Boy Scouts , the great white shark attacking the rowboat in the mill pond and the large figure of Godzilla rampaging in between the backgroud flats that make up the biggest city on the layout.

Then there is the really subtile stuff, like the "eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg" billboard overlooking the junkyard that would only be appreciated by a fan of The Great Gatsby, puns that would only be appreciated by physicists (like references to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle), businesses named, rather inappropriately, for characters from "The Maltese Falcon" and "Casablanca" and the Vitameatavegamin billboard that only a few people know is a reference to "I Love Lucy".

I've been lucky enough to have stumbled onto a track plan I liked 21 years ago and haven't had to move so I've been detailing the layout for 20 of those years, adding one or two details a week., Some of the jokes have gotten stale over the years, but the kids and repeat visitors have come to enjoy them and actually get angry if I change them.  The repeat visitors delight in getting new visitors to find the puns, jokes, references to old TV shows and movies, physics and literature of the first half of the 20th Century. A lot of this stuff is in the spirit of the model railroads of the 1950's, like those built by John Allen (when I first began to read Model Railroader, and when the motto was "Model Railroading is Fun" instead of "I am obsessed by prototype authenticity".)

Little Tommy

 

 

 

 

 

 

[dbaker48]

Tommy,

Would Love to see your layout!  That all sounds so great!  Those are the REAL things that may so many layouts fun!  Havn't had much opportunity yet, but I like the idea.  So far the only thing I have done is strategically located the Fireworks Stand next to the Oil Derricks, and have some of those legs and feet that were amputated to accommodate populating some passenger cars, coming out of the trunk of a car that has been pulled over by a motorcycle cop, and a few legs sticking up out of the cemetery next to the church.

[richhotrain]

I get a lot of laughs from people who view my layout and there is nothing intended to be humorous about it ???

Rich