Life imitating art, Railway Post Office

[timthechef]

Did anyone read the letter to MR in the railway post office in the new issue (March) ? Is this guy for real? He said that the photo on page 78 of the January issue of the transition service facility belonged in a april fools catigory. He wrote "It shows a few tracks placed directly on painted plywood, without ballast; a flat gray backdrop deviod of any attempt at clouds, with a few low-relief buildings inches in front of it; and a steeply inclined road curving upward to help frame the mirror under the bridge at the right, just past the leftward curve of the tracks before they pass through the backdrop".
I went to that issue and looked at the photo and I don't think that it is a shot of a model! The picture looks like it is a real shot. There are telephone wires, people walking on the tracks, smoke coming from a steam engine in the background. The man states that he has been reading MR for 45 years, well I think he may need some glasses! [:(!]

[CNJ831]

A rather odd stituation and a bit of a difficult post to respond to. Unfortunately, I won't likely get my March copy of MR for days yet (I seem to be of the very last State-side person to see its arrival for some reason) so I can't read the original letter appearing in the magazine but I wonder if this guy wasn't making some sort of a joke. MR usually responds to such odd letters, when they print them, with a clarification statement. Didn't they say anything?

Anyway, the photo is obviously of the prototype, not a modeled scene. The immediate give away is the size of the leaves on the trees - far too small and delicate ever to be a model. And there are many further indications. Anyway, the photo is credited to Linn Westcott, who died long before any such close-to-reality photos (i.e. photoshopped) were possible. Plus, the photo is said to date from April 17, 1953 in the caption!

This all sounds rather strange to me and I find it hard to believe anyone would ever take this picture to be an obviously modeled scene.

CNJ831

[dknelson]

I read the letter and thought it was a rather strained attempt at humor. But the basic point I think is that Westcott captured prototype situations that lent themselves to accurate modeling -- including the limitations of modeling.
Lately MR has been featuring some of Westcott's prototype detail shots. This is good because he had a keen eye for interesting details, as anyone who has seen very early issues of Trains magazine can tell you. One of his classic covers was a water tank shot at a very slight angle -- which made the tank appear more massive.
I read somewhere that they have a large file of his slides but that unfortunately Linn Westcott did not always label his slides thoroughly. But he was shooting color in the early 1950s when most guys shot only black and white.
Dave Nelson

[Anonymous]

He was kidding, folks.

Lokk at the last line: "I thought I'd seen everything but this was a new one--life imitating model railroad artifice." Artifice means a design, especially one intended to decieve.

In order words, don't knock his layout, because there's a prototype for everything.

[timthechef]

Thanks for clearing that up, When I read the letter and looked at the picture, I got really confused. I couldn't see how any one could get so upset by the picture, especially enough to write a letter.
I was pretty upset a few months back when I read 2 letters bashing Malcolm Furlow's Wild West layout and I considered writing in about that. I felt that the layouts were beautiful wheather they where prototypicly correct or not. We all enjoy modeling different things for different reasons and we should all be able to recognize great layouts wheather they are our thing or not. Well enough ranting. Thanks for giving me reason not to be upset.