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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by RhB_HJ Hi all, This one has been on my mind for a while. Looking at the garden railway scene today, here in North America or in Europe and Australia I ask myself what's with the "moaning"? The mfgs come up with larger engines we moan, they make things closer to scale we moan. In the former case because the critters won't fit on our layouts, in the latter because we need more clearance. So what!? If one starts out building a "cutsy, ringy-dink" garden railway ( I don't mean that in a belittling way!!) with tight radii, small rolling stock etc. and then discovers the "monsters", is it realistic to expect that the two will complement each other i.e. the "monsters" will run on the same track as the cutsy stuff? If one has a limited amount of real estate it is realistic to expect that the monster engines together with 10 streamliners or 20 boxcars won't be chasing their own tails? With as many of us coming from smaller scales as appears to be the case, would it be reasonable to assume that we all learned something about "limitations" in the smaller scales? Or does everything in Large Scale have to be reinvented (including the wheel [}:)][8)] ) because we have such short memories or things don't scale up in our mind's eye? Question is: can't we build good garden railways within the space at our disposal with what's out there, provided we set some reasonable limits for ourselves? Which perhaps means we don't get to run the "monsters" of whichever! Whoever stipulated bigger is better? must have been some marketing guy! In my book a small well executed layout that makes good use of the space is better than a larger layout that's crammed to the gills because one just had to fit one more engine, one more structure and one more gimmick. In short less is more! And we haven't talked about money, yet! [/quote]Hay there guys and gals, some of us have been in this garden RR thing for 10/15/20 years and back then we didn't have a clue where this hobby would be going. If we did know we could have built our layouts to suite the longer wider rolling stock now available. On our line we used the Bachmann Big Hauler as a clearance gauge and are now forced to rebuild our existing layout or limit our rolling stock to the smaller offerings. We didn't build our "cutsy" railways on purpose but because we were unable to see into the future. Garden railroading even ten years ago was very different than it is today. Standard gauge models were almost nonexistent and so was the interest in such models. I believe an influx of small scale modelers has created the current demand for standard gauge along with some garden railroaders who had an interest but didn't say much about that fact. May all your weeds be wild flowers.... OLD DAD
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