I have found that I was lucky when I put the passengers in my Rapido cars (no leg chopping). Not so with my Branchline equipment. I now have a Preiser box of feet/legs that I kinda want to hold on to, but Im not sure what to do with them. I was thinking either a shoe store with little styrene racks for the shoes, any opinions?
Um... showing under the stall doors of your depot's restroom? Or showing beneath voting booth curtains? Or sticking out of very short camping tents?
A funeral director who lived in my condo complex told me that at my height (6'8") they'd most likely chop my lower legs and /or feet off to fit the casket when the time came. You could have the garbage cans behind the local mortuary filled with those legs and feet and perhaps be perfectly prototypical -- or at least generate some conversations.
Dave Nelson
Eeeeaaaaauuuuuuuuuuu!
Whether it's LPBs for passenger cars, automobiles, or locomotive crews, I'm saving all the cut-off bits.
When construction on the second level of the layout is complete, there'll be a rendering plant, ready to receive gondola loads of such offal.
Wayne
Wayne,
Are we going to get in that rendering conversation again?
Take Care!
Frank
BTW: Do You recall that thread title, when we were talking about Darling & Co.?
doctorwayneWhen construction on the second level of the layout is complete, there'll be a rendering plant, ready to receive gondola loads of such offal.
I was thinking of a possible scene where railroad workers are sawing people's legs off and then carrying them into the passenger cars.
It'll be interesting to see if this topic fades away quickly or if it's got legs.
While I'm serious about including a rendering plant on the layout (it'll likely be a mostly background-type model, but definitely rail-served), I haven't really decided about how to depict the loads. The idea was inspired by a story in Trains magazine, where it was mentioned that loaded cars needed to be switched with care, as the contents tended to slop over the sides and ends when handled roughly - definitely a need for some "DO NOT HUMP" placards.
doctorwayneWhile I'm serious about including a rendering plant on the layout (it'll likely be a mostly background-type model, but definitely rail-served), I haven't really decided about how to depict the loads. The idea was inspired by a story in Trains magazine, where it was mentioned that loaded cars needed to be switched with care, as the contents tended to slop over the sides and ends when handled roughly - definitely a need for some "DO NOT HUMP" placards.
The B&M shipped guts, etc. from slaughterhouses in their Boston Terminal to Atlantic Gelatin in gons. Bob Warren, a brakeman, remembers how a trainmaster was walking the tops on boxcars one snowy day when he came to a snowcovered gon. He jumped and earned the nickname forever more of "Stinky."
The weirdest gondola car loadings I ever saw came out of the Endicott-Johnson tannery at Endicott NY in the mid 1950s. They shipped out scraps of hides trimmed during the tanning process. They were immersed in a milky fluid (lime?). When it left the tannery siding it looked like a car load of milk with stuff floating in it. It sloshed back and forth like water in a bathtub. The liquid soon dribbled off through cracks in the floor, etc.
He said the worst turn he ever handled was one night in mid-summer when the switching list called for them to pick up two gondolas from a slaughterhouse outside East Saint Louis, Illinois, and take them across Eades Bridge to a rendering plant in Saint Louis, Missouri.Because it was hot and humid, and the gons had been sitting for a few days while they were being filled up, you can imagine what the smell must have been like. He said they were full of maggots already, and had to be handled very gently to keep the contents from spilling out over the sides or ends of the gons.
How about a model of a Soilent Green factory?
Hornblower
But what do you do when a seated male passenger on a crowded commuter coach gives a lady his seat?
Back in the transition era, gentlemen did that...
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - where DMU were standing room only)
tomikawaTTBack in the transition era, gentlemen did that...
A lot of them were off fighting the war in 1943-45, so I have mostly female/children passengers, with majority of male passengers riding in the separate smoker coach, but not all. Also I don't fill my cars completely full.
I bumped this thread which was becoming a bit macabre (OK, I may have had something to do with that) to pose a somewhat different problem from the extra foot issue (or the same problem, but from a completely different "direction")Recently I purchased the Presier HO scale Unpainted Uniformed People kit, and set about creating some lawmen and officials for my modules. Well on the way to having some Philadelphia police men (they favor light blue short sleeve shirts, no ties, and black peaked caps), Pennsylvania State Troopers (light long sleeved grey shirts with ties, Campaign hats), Security Guards, a quartet of VFW members with ties and VFW Garrison caps, some bare-headed short sleeved locomotive crew members (I need to figure out how to make some lime-green safety vests for them)...and a guy in a beret for some reason (does not look like Jamie Hyneman at all). It's actually a pretty useful set, you get 24 bodies, quite a number of positional arms...and many dozens of heads. In fact, I had about 48 heads left over, 6 of the ones with the funkiest military/police head gear I cemented to a styrene strip for eventually use as head-mannequins in a costume shop...leaving about 40+ unpurposed heads as show below:
So, unlike those extra left-over shoes which work in a shoe shop, can't really figure out what to do with these (I already have the head mannequin covered in the costume shop), as they have rather wonky caps like German police, Russian military, French officers, etc - and a guy with a feather in his cap.So, any suggestions before they go into the big melting pot of MEK and styrene scraps to make styrene putty?
I've seen people take the cut-off legs from a figure and put them under a car, so it looks like someone slid under the car to maybe change the oil or something. It's quite effective, but really only something that you can use once or (if it's a big layout) perhaps twice.
If you like to do detailed building interiors with lights, you could have a building with large windows being used as a polling place, and have the old-style metal mechanical voting booths that had a curtain that slid across while the person voted visible thru the windows of the building. Just the legs and feet would show under the curtain.
The Hall of Heads from Futurama?
Seriously, you could take a piece of sprue from another kit and glue a head and some arms on it, paint it and use it inside a passenger car. You just can't see details inside cars that well, so anything that suggests passengers are passengers. Even if they look like Lego people with cylidrical torsos, they will look fine inside a coach or vehicle.
Most of us just accept figures as they are, but that's not necessary. I had a whimsical thought one weekend, and turned these 4 Model Power figures
into these characters for my layout:
As you can see, it took some surgery to re-position arms, and some putty to change some shapes, but those arms and heads might be just what you need for custom characters. (And yes, I took brick sheet and painted it yellow...)
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
MisterBeasleyThe Hall of Heads from Futurama?
Seriously, you could take a piece of sprue from another kit and glue a head and some arms on it, paint it and use it inside a passenger car
Most of us just accept figures as they are
As you can see, it took some surgery to re-position arms, and some putty to change some shapes, but those arms and heads might be just what you need for custom characters.
And yes, I took brick sheet and painted it yellow...