Selective compression has been referenced and discussed here in theory.
But howabout some photo examples from modelers here who have used it effectively, since a picture is worth a thousand words.
A short explanation with the picture would help too.
Here are a couple. First, an oil refinery. I have a large set of loading racks on the inside of the turnback curve at the end of my center penisula. The refinery itself is on the far side of the tracks, what is the aisle. I have just a couple of pieces of refinery equipment and three tanks representing the tank farm. There is a short, mountain viewblock that protects the scene from elbows. I've thought about getting a pic of a large refinery complex and using is, but the abstract mountain forms work well enough.
Something similar here with my smelter and mill complex. The RR track side of things is in 3D, while the aisle if where the bulk of the facility would be. It has some features from ASARCO's complex and the subsequent uranium mill operated there starting in WWII, although massively reduced in size.
Here's another, my coal mine, which conceals an MTs in/loads out facility. Please ignore the mountain those loading tracks really go around a bend up the gulch back there. Obviously, a facility like this would be far larger, with tracks stretching a half-mile or more.
All are also necessary compromises. Sure, selective compression sometimes doesn't quite work for some. But the reality is it's often the only tool you can afford with limited space and resoruces. It's either that or simply have a far more limited trackplan. I don't begrudge those who have it the luxury of space but also don't want to put down people from trying methods like this. Considering the alternatives, what would you do?
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
I don't have pictures but if you have the most recent Model Railroader, there is a great article about modeling a cement plant. Even though the plant model is 12 feet long, the author (Pelle Soeborg) does a great job of explaining his reasoning for selectively compressing the cement works. the final model has the look and feel or a HUGE rail-served industry even without being full sized.
The essence of selective compression is a balance between modeling reality and just what is needed to suggest that reality. My layout will feature as its focus a large terminal station based on LaSalle St in Chicago. To model the real thing, one would need a football stadium. However, selective compression has allowed me to compress it into a modelable size. For instance, I could have 20 some tracks at the station, but when will I ever have that many operators in my small train room. Even half that many is just too much. I settled on 8 with some functioning as mail and baggage. In fact, when I staged a fake operating session on my plan to check it, I discovered that four tracks would likely be enough without crowding the room and creating nightmares in staging. Yet, this proved too small to convincing portray LaSalle St so a few more were added. Ridership had already started to fall and trains discontinued by my modeling period so if these tracks sit vacant, that would be prototypical. Modeling the full thing is simply unrealistic and unnecessary. It achieves nothing beyond being able to make a basic claim to absolute authenticity. Since my goal is realistic operation, I don't worry about such claims. You can see pictures of my layout by following the link below.
Visit my layout!
LaSalle Street Station
mlehman Considering the alternatives, what would you do?
Considering the alternatives, what would you do?
I'm not sure. That's why I asked.
Here's an end view of my yard:
As a photo, it looks pretty good. It conveys the idea of a yard, but compared to a prototype yard, it's absurdly small. There are only half a dozen tracks, and they only hold 6 or 7 cars each.
On the left side, there's an icing platform and ice house. It's straight out of the box of the Walthers kit. The ice house structure actually looks too big, but the real problem is that in the 1:1 world, the platforms would be much longer. This one holds 3 or 4 cars. At that rate, by the time a crew could ice a whole train, they'd have to start again because the ice in the the first cars they loaded would have melted.
On the right is a packing plant and a stockyard.
All the parts are there. There's a siding for stock cars, a pen for the hogs, a chute for unloading, and a building on the right for getting the job done. On the other side of the building is a loading dock for the outgoing meat products. But, there's only one pen and one chute, and room for only a handful of cars. I've still got half the stockyard pen kit on a shelf, unbuilt. It's a complete industry, but it's been compressed down to a single copy of each element.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
Big Boy Forever mlehman Considering the alternatives, what would you do? I'm not sure. That's why I asked.
Here's where only you can really size up the space you have, the options you're considering and what things like your budget in time and money can do.
The first thing to do IMO is to consider why and how rail service would work with the industry you have in mind. If you have a lot of track and a few puny buildings, that's not believeable. More buildings and less track would be better. Beyond getting that in balance, the space you have to devote to the rest of the industry needs to convey two things: what the industry does -- including why its rail-served -- and a larger footprint off the layout you can't see, but which the scene in front of you conveys.
Here's another example of that. It's an ideal indistry for shipping just about anything, even car loads of stuff you don't even know what's in them -- a nuke plant. I can send just about every car imaginable into the two tracks that are the visible service. You, as the public know they won't just let you walk in and visit, so you don't really feel you "must know more" because you can't see enough from the front gate in real life any more than you can on my model. It's truly conceptually out of sight and out of mind -- how did many of us ever sleep during the 60s without that kind of distancing ourselves from a very grim reality?...
So don't take my nuke plant too seriously, although it is meant to provoke conversation from time to time. It's mainly there to provide a soruce of traffic, which it does wonderfully. Here's pretty much it...
I guess my point is that selective compression takes advanatage of using the mind's ability to imagine, yet keep at a safe distance things it can't see, but which it has cues suggesting they're there.
So what I'm seeing here is that you reduce the length and number of tracks, reduce the number of buildings, tanks, structures etc., and reduce the number of cars; is that the idea?
My guess is that the "amount" of reducing is up to the individual.
On the other hand, I think maybe in prototypes there is sometimes reduction also, although maybe I'm wrong.
"Reduction" would be one of the methods.
Two more aspects are "suggestion" and "selection."
Suggestioning there is more than meets the eye could be the main gate to my nuke plant. There's obviously a lot behind that gate. We don't expect to see it all by looking past the gate, although what we can see can be suggested. You can't see it in that night picture, but there are some low warehouses in the distance that can be seen during the day, again suggesting more is there.
Selection can use the refinery example. Having the refinery complex in all its interconnections would be cool, but there's not space to really do that. Same thing with the tank farm. I had enough space on the far side of the tracks from the loading racks to establish the refinery's presence. What I really needed was a source of a bunch of traffic and a destination for all those Gramps tank cars. I can load about 10 cars at a time. The racks take up more space than the tanks and frac tower, but that's because I selected to focus on the RR-related facilities.
Sometimes it's just making something big smaller and sticking it in there, even though it doesn't quite make sense. My best example of this is the mill pond at the sawmill. It is tiny and barely believeable. The main requirment was to accomodate 3 log racks at its front where the siding is adjacent to it. It barely does that and is about 13" wide there. But it angles sharply back fron there and is only about 4.5" deep. The area between the two parts of the building is just 6" wide. Somehow, it works, mostly because of the small windows on the building behind it, which help force the perspective.
Farther away, but a better overall pic. Selective compresssion doesn't mean what you have in 3D is small. The mill here is about 3' long with the loading dock. It's a high angle shot, but from a more normal veiwing angle, there appears to be more behind the building you can see. Beiing angled from the wall enhances this effect.
Usually, the prototype is trying to look larger than they really are. False front buildings, for instance.
Big Boy Forever... howabout some photo examples from modelers here who have used it effectively, since a picture is worth a thousand words.
Uh-oh, now you really got me started!
Ever since I began modeling railroads, my dream has always been to model the rail-served parts of a steel mill. Here is a link to an ariel photo of the facility that ignited this dream of mine, Ford's River Rouge complex:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/RIVER_ROUGE_PLANT_OF_THE_FORD_MOTOR_COMPANY_COVERS_1200_ACRES_OF_LAND_IN_DEARBORN_-_NARA_-_549725.jpg
Since there is no way I could fit this 1200-acre mill on a 12x6 foot peninsula, I obviously had to make some compromises:
Mainly, I concern myself with only the recognizable "signature" structures, i.e. the blast furnaces and the Basic Oxygen Furnace [BOF] converter mill. Rouge had three blast furnaces, I reduced mine to one [there may be more in the aisle space and beyond, I'm leaving that to the viewer's imagination ]. Also, rather than the BOF being on the opposite side of the canal, it is on the same side. If I had modeled the BOF building in its uncompressed entirety, it would have covered an area 6ft by 6ft, IOW half the peninsula. So I chose to model only the "charging" side where scrap metal is delivered via gondolas, and omit the continuous-casting side which is not quite as rail-centric. Now it only occupies 2ft by 2ft, small enough to fit - but still large enough to visually dominate its end of the peninsula.
I chose to model only a small subset of spurs, easily reachable by guest operators, where different types of frieght cars are loaded/unloaded. This allows me to have a yard small enough to fit on the 12x6 peninsula, but large enough to store and sort all of the cars that get spotted within the mill. [Coal cars for the coke mill have their own separate 2-track yard.] I can also run hot metal cars between the blast furnace and the BOF, and slag pot trains from the blast furnace to a dumping area somewhere off the layout [a.k.a. staging].
For the harbor, only a 10-inch platform is "permanent" - wide enough to hold my Sylvan Scale Models ore boat. That model is 4.5ft long and 6" wide; uncompressed, it would have been 9" wide and 7ft long. I also have a single ore bridge, whereas a typical prototype mill has 3 or 4 of those. My harbor "water" is green cellophane hanging 36" beyond the edge of the ore boat platform, so I can prop it up for photos like I did here:
Here is how it normally looks 99% of the time:
One thing I could only hint at, was the mile-long rolling mill buildings that cover half the square footage of a typical mill property. I only model the tail end, where the finished rolls get loaded onto coil cars.
Steel modeling "purists" may not like my abbreviated mill, but with my space limitations I'm quite satisfied with it.
-Ken in Maryland (B&O modeler, former CSX modeler)