I say go for it! When I was researching building a layout based on the train in The Ghost of Mars, I found this scifi layout. And there are others like it.
I have written three screenplays and I have scenes from all of them on my layout.
One of them is playing in the local movie theater.
And then there is the scene where a giant insect is attacking my layout.
Run for your life!
Relax. It's only a movie.
See you in the popcorn line.
j..........
TheGoodnightSo I'm toying with the idea of making that town into one belonging to my alien planet.
i don't think you'll be the first to have some fantastic creatures.
there was a Scientific American article dicussing the color of vegitation on alient worlds depending on the color of the sun. You might consider unusual colors for scenery.
TheGoodnight I'm a science fiction writer, and my current work-in-progress takes place on an alien planet inhabited by a civilization at a technological level similar to the real-world 1940s.
this not only suggests technologies at a certain stage of development (e.g few jets and no diesel locomotives), but also a specific mix of technologies at specific levels of development.
I read the radio may have been discovered much earlier than expected. What if the transistor and integrated circuits had been invented earlier, but the Wright brothers hadn't discovered flight?
greg - Philadelphia & Reading / Reading
I'm not so sure how far you want to take the fantasy theme, or in what direction(s). Carl Fallberg, a Disney cartoonist, created a number of cartoons that were published in Railroad Magazine in the late 1940's and 1950's. They featured a fictional Western narrow gauge railroad called the Fiddletown & Copperopolis, and were assembled into an undated book published by Hungerford Press of Reseda, California.
In the Foreword, the inimitable Lucius Beebe said the F&C possessed "...a spirit of medieval bravado that would have pleasured Leonardo Da Vinci...." He says "...it soared magnificently above the morbid inhibitions of human devising...." Beebe says the F&C had a "fine contempt for Rule G and a personality all its own compounded in equal measure of larceny, honest hostility toward progress and a complete lack of preoccupation with society and its obligations that has characterized aristocrats down the ages."
Model-worthy F&C subjects would be the experimental air mail service, experimental tender water scoop applied to 2-8-0 number 5, curve-stabilizing tilting passenger cars, McKeen car number M-1, "Leaping Lizard" railbus number 666, the club car "Belle Murphy", 4-2-4T Inspection engine "Bertha", unlucky saddletank yard goat number 13, and of course Master Mechanic Forney Hobbs' experimental two-boiler 2-2-2+2-2-2T number ? named "Earthquake", and its companion test car with bay windows and a cupola.
I have not even begun to list the F&C's many scenic wonders. Unfortunately, I can't post photos, but you might find the book through second hand dealers.
If nothing else, it's a fun read.
Tom
hon30critter Its your railroad - do what you want! Even Miniatur Wunderland in Hamberg, Germany has aliens.
Its your railroad - do what you want! Even Miniatur Wunderland in Hamberg, Germany has aliens.
Oh, don't worry, I wasn't asking for permission. Just sharing thoughts.
I'm not sure I'm going to go the alien route; while it's attractive to represent my writing on my layout, my original plan is equally so: to reproduce the kind of small, East Texas town where my grandfather used to take me to watch the freight trains go past the little depot on Main Street (they never seemed to stop there). That's an obvious attraction going back to why I took up model railroading in the first place.
Most likely I won't make a final decision until I've tried coming up with some designs following the descriptions in my story, and see whether I like the look.
(But the fantastical landscape of Miracle Falls will be on the layout either way.)
Keith:
http://www.miniatur-wunderland.com/
http://www.miniatur-wunderland.com/exhibit/wunderland-sections/america/america-highlights/area-51/
http://www.miniatur-wunderland.com/exhibit/wunderland-sections/harz/highlights/ufo/
Of course you will open yourself up to negative comments from some people. If that happens just ignore them, or better still, borrow a ray gun from the aliens and zap the nay sayers!
If it doesn't work out the way you want you can always change it.
Dave
I'm just a dude with a bad back having a lot of fun with model trains, and finally building a layout!
So, maybe you could do kind of a "steam punk" thing, with perhaps a twist of "road warrior" to keep it a little more "futuristic" Just a quick thought, as I've search such things, on Google.
There was a thread in here a while back about steam punk.
Mike.
My You Tube
BigDaddy You will need one of these http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/301877440051?lpid=82&chn=ps&ul_noapp=true
You will need one of these
http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/301877440051?lpid=82&chn=ps&ul_noapp=true
Oh, I've definitely got one of those! (Shown with some Woodland Scenics pre-made structures that I won't end up using if I do go for the alien town.)
Henry
COB Potomac & Northern
Shenandoah Valley
How about doing the decorative frills on the trains? Ornate Victorian trim on plain boxcars would grab the viewer's attention even more than doing the same thing for homes and businesses.
People have to look for fantasy on my layout, but they will find it.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
I'm finally getting around to doing scenery for my layout, which has been running on plain styrofoam risers for years. I call my layout the I&FRR— the "Imagination & Fantasy Railroad"— because my goal was always to capture all the cool places my long-ago 10-year-old self imagined railroads going, rather than replicating a real world prototype. In keeping with that, while most of my plan is decently realistic, it's got one area I call "Miracle Falls" where a wood trestle bridge will run through some charismatic geology that a real railroad company would never put rails near.
But as I've been thinking about the town that will lie near Miracle Falls, something even more brazenly unreal occurred to me. I'm a science fiction writer, and my current work-in-progress takes place on an alien planet inhabited by a civilization at a technological level similar to the real-world 1940s. So I'm toying with the idea of making that town into one belonging to my alien planet.
How different might it be from our world? The economic benefits of cargo rail are so obvious I take it any civilization at the right level of technology would invent something like it, and anyway I have to assume they've got Earth-style rails or else it just isn't model railroading any more. "Earthly" rolling stock will have to travel between the alien town and the rest of the layout in any case.
But there's no reason why a completely independent civilization would use the same gauge, for instance, as in the US, or have the same particular models of locomotive. It would be possible to simulate a different gauge by creating buildings to a different scale than the official scale of the track I'm using. I'm not much of a scratchbuilder but in these days of 3-D printers I could give that job to a computer.
It's a feature of the alien civilization in my story that they have a very baroque, ornamented style, decorating everything with elaborate details well beyond practicality. My main character, who travels to this world from Earth, notices that to his eyes even their most ordinary garden shed looks like a tiny little Gothic cathedral.
This opens up room for a lot of fun in structure design and even adding some baroque frills to a locomotive or two, if I imagine them as belonging to the alien world and traveling to ours, rather than vice versa.
Anyway, I may or may not have the nerve to do this; I may end up sticking with something closer to reality. But I thought I'd post here, just in case anyone finds it an intriguing idea. If I get as far as designs, I may post a sketch or picture from time to time.
—Keith Goodnight