Hello Everyone,
My dream layout was to model the main factories in my town in their 1940’s hay days, especially the three my grandparents worked in for their whole working life. Well, after sifting through all the research ( I had an old high school friend provide me with detailed site and railroad drawings, historical photos, and historical write ups) I finally deduced that this is an incredible project in any scale and not feasible in HO. I wanted to do more then just put a factory building, storage building, and powerhouse to represent a specific factory.... I dreamed of doing the whole complex.
Well, the smallest of the factory complexes , the Woolen Mill, would be about a city block in Real life or a 9‘ x 9‘ table minimum just for that complex. Definitely not feasible. It would look great with all five production buildings, powerhouse, office, auxiliary building, and coal pit along with the bridge entering into the complex but definitely not feasible.
The largest of the factories I dreamed of doing was the Brass Mill which was almost 4 city blocks in real life or a 36‘ x 36‘ table just dedicated to this factory complex. Granted, it had a lot of operational railroad features incorporated into it but definitely not feasible for a model railroad.
I am telling everyone this because I’m wondering if anybody has ever had the chance to do such a project with a club which may have had access to a very large space to take on such a project. If so, does anybody have any drawings or schematics tey can post and share? I’m just curious how you went about it and how it turned out.
What you can do, is focus on the railroad part of these industries, and represent the rest as a backdrop, with photo backdrops, hand painting, back drop style building flats, or combinations of each, or what ever you feel comfortable with.
Just a thought.
Mike.
My You Tube
If I remember correctly there have been articles in MR about selective compression in modeling 'overall' industries in limited space.
I 'second' the idea of modeling just the 'foreground' items in a plant, and using a backdrop for the 'remaining' areas -- if you were going to model something like the Bayway refinery complex, where a full rendition would probably take several modeler-lives of time and gymnasia of space, you might easily get the sense, and I suspect most of the people looking at such a model wouldn't start shouting and pointing because a hydroformer, say, was in the wrong relation to flare towers in the part of the plant layout actually built.
Another approach might be to 'mock up' some of the buildings as masses with photo-overprint, and then sequentially replace them as you get the time and inspiration for further superdetail. Compress the areas away from the track layout or further from the viewer, and use forced perspective where necessary to give an enhanced sense of scale from normal viewing positions.
Great approaches to selectively compressing key areas of a plant. Looking at my Brass Mill plant I focused On the areas specifically served by the railroad....the powerhouse, the scrap building, the packing / shipping building, and the raw materials receiving area. Those are the four buildings with tracks using railroad operations. Add in on or two production/ manufacturing buildings and the huge complex can be represented in a five to six building complex that fits in a 2’x3’ diorama set up much like the Gateway switching dioramas on the internet with three to four parallel crossing tracks and buildings strategically placed. Add a relevant backdrop and it achieves the affect I was looking for on my layout.
Thanks guys for the input and ideas. I will definitely research the archives for articles on selective compression as well as railroad operations for the industries I plan on modeling.
How big are the real city blocks?
Two single industry layouts that I can remember can be reviewed in How To Build Realistic Layouts, Industries You can Model Kalmbach , Model Railroader Special Issue - "Big Industry In The Valley"
This one depicts a representation of the American Viscose rayon plant in Front Royal, Virginia. A very large layout 7'6" X 18" in HO.
The other is in Model Railroad Planning 2014
Kalmbach, Model Railroader Special Issue, "Switching For Breakfast."
Here, A 12' X 14' layout for N and also HO models the Post Cereal plant in BatleCreek, Michigan.
I like industrial model railroading a lot, but have not done a single industry as shown in these two examples. I hope you can find these publications to have a look.