jecorbettI got a chuckle out of the fact that the ranch and Virginia City are quite a distance and two mountain ranges apart. Not exactly set up for a casual ride into town as so often happened on the TV show.
Beautiful country without a doubt, always wanted to visit the Tahoe area when visiting my parents temporary home for 10 years in Winnemucca(spell?) Nevada. I recommend visiting Bodie CA if you have not seen it, pretty cool place.
"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."-Albert Einstein
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I do this with my layout. There're a few tracks leading to the fascia.
You see here at the bottom right a dummy turnout. Westport yard is bigger!
And a few interchange tracks ends at the fascia too. Like this not much used one:
Wolfgang
Pueblo & Salt Lake RR
Come to us http://www.westportterminal.de my videos my blog
Selective Ommissing? Sure alot of that happened with my road.
I left out the wye junction off the B&O, Left off a whole town, left off a river crossing, left off.... you get the idea.
But I refused to quit. I dug in and figured out that each building that did make it onto the railroad will be large enough to handle the freight in and out as WELL as the work spaces needed to process the freight. Take the stamp house for example. It unloads coil cars inside a bay fitting three cars at a time for about... 20 coils or so. There is room for the crane inside to reach all three cars, lift the covers off all of them and stack it to one side and put the coils into a specific area of the interior where the work area crew processes them to output a product necessary towards the finished product.
I cannot find a crane small enough to fit, I cannot get a decent floor into that building yet and I got way too much"Daylight" shining in from all the windows through to the other side windows and no lighting or people. Yet.
All of those problems were ommissions for now but hopefully will be solved in time.
If I had to have this building as a part of a larger building complex, my workbench isnt large enough to process a construction of a industry that will cover a entire 4x8 for just one building. UGH.
Clark Propst's M-St.L in Mason City IA layout (Dec 2008 RMC) shows a good example of selective ommission. He was unable to fit the Decker meat plant into the layout, but built the siding that went to the plant at a point where the tracks are on one side of a chain link fence, crossing the road going into the plant's gate. He modelled the chain link fence, and on the other side used a colorized photo mural of the plant in the distance on the backdrop.
Mark and John:
The very first house I lived in as a child was right across the street from the Nevada City terminal, and according to my mother, I would stand at the window and watch the train come in (while wetting my diaper, LOL!). After we moved to Gold Flat, east of town, the quickest way to walk into Nevada City was along the old abandoned line (now Railroad Avenue) and through the old yard. The terminal building wasn't torn down until the 1960's when a freeway was put through the area. It was a private residence. And we kids would always jump into the turntable pit and play around until the city had it filled in because it was considered 'dangerous.' Yah? To WHOM?
I love that book of Gerald Best's. My copy is absolutely dog-eared, LOL!
Tom
Tom View my layout photos! http://s299.photobucket.com/albums/mm310/TWhite-014/Rio%20Grande%20Yuba%20River%20Sub One can NEVER have too many Articulateds!
markpierce Tom, The track layout of Nevada City, a great little shortline terminus, has been a favorite of mine for several decades. It contains nine turnouts, turntable, engine house, combination depot, and three small adjacent industries. For that matter, NCNG's main yard at Grass Valley is a great little through-track yard. (The track plans are on pages 204-207 of Gerald Best's book Nevada County Narrow Gauge.) Yep, it is really a shame you didn't model Nevada City. Mark
Tom,
The track layout of Nevada City, a great little shortline terminus, has been a favorite of mine for several decades. It contains nine turnouts, turntable, engine house, combination depot, and three small adjacent industries. For that matter, NCNG's main yard at Grass Valley is a great little through-track yard. (The track plans are on pages 204-207 of Gerald Best's book Nevada County Narrow Gauge.) Yep, it is really a shame you didn't model Nevada City.
Mark
Mark,
Thanks for the heads up. I have a branchline planned for my layout but have not been able to come up with a track plan that I'm happy with for my terminus. The features you describe for Nevada City are virtually identical to what I want to include at my terminus. Even though mine is a fictional town in southern New York and is a standard gauge line, the track plan you referenced should be a great source for ideas. I'll have to check it out.
John
Geared Steam [The collection of wagons, cars, steam tractors, assorted mining equipment and other relics (as well as an WP caboose) is worth a visit (bring a camera) I spent most of my time examining these items more than walking through the Bonanza movie set.
[The collection of wagons, cars, steam tractors, assorted mining equipment and other relics (as well as an WP caboose) is worth a visit (bring a camera) I spent most of my time examining these items more than walking through the Bonanza movie set.
Unfortunately, I got to Virginia City too late in the day to do much more than a drive through. I didn't even know about the Bonanza movie set. I'd spent most of the day touring Lake Tahoe, which is unbelievably beautiful. I've never seen water that blue. Even the culture shock of passing over the state line into Nevada and seeing the massive hotel/casino complexes was impressive. A little farther up the loop there is a Ponderosa ranch. I didn't get to tour that either. I got a chuckle out of the fact that the ranch and Virginia City are quite a distance and two mountain ranges apart. Not exactly set up for a casual ride into town as so often happened on the TV show.
All in all, I was very impressed with the Carson Valley area. I can understand why people would want to live and/or retire in that area. Certainly a place I'd like to revisit when I had more time. There is a small tourist railroad/museum around Carson City which I did visit. The railroad isn't much bigger than an amusement park train ride but very nice anyway. The museum is small but very well kept. Certainly worth the price of the modest admission. From my visit, I can understand why the Virginia and Truckee is a popular railroad for modelers.
jecorbett It looked to me like it has become quite a tourist trap, apparently trading on the fame Bonanza brought to the the town.
Not to hijack this thread, but yes it has become a trap but worth the price of admission IMHO. The collection of wagons, cars, steam tractors, assorted mining equipment and other relics (as well as an WP caboose) is worth a visit (bring a camera) I spent most of my time examining these items more than walking through the Bonanza movie set.
twhite Deer Creek simply could not be modeled--it theoretically occupies the space where my control panel is. Which is too bad, because I'd originally planned to model Deer Creek after Nevada City, a famous little town in California's Northern Mine country.
Deer Creek simply could not be modeled--it theoretically occupies the space where my control panel is. Which is too bad, because I'd originally planned to model Deer Creek after Nevada City, a famous little town in California's Northern Mine country.
Personally, I feel that Creative Layout Design is volume 2 of Track Planning for Realistic Operation. I have worn my copy out. Unfortunately, it is no longer in print or I'd buy another copy.
An interesting version of selective omission is to model about 3-5ft of a building along the front edge of the layout so that you are looking through the doors and windows to see the siding. This has been covered once or twice in the model railroading magazines and, at least from the pictures, looks pretty effective.
Enjoy
Paul
Your description of Wagon Wheel Gap reminds me of an experience I had last summer. My niece was getting married in the Reno area, and having grown up on the Bonanza tv show, I had to visit the real Virginia City while I was out there. Unlike the town on the tv program, the real Virginia City, like your Wagon Wheel Gap, is up on the mountain someplace. Actually, it is just about on top of the mountain. It was quite a drive getting up there. It looked to me like it has become quite a tourist trap, apparently trading on the fame Bonanza brought to the the town.
This idea works fine -- it's also been covered in MR a few times over the years. A nice addition I've used on a couple of layouts is to post a diagram on the fascia showing the freight docks, loading doors, dishcarge chutes, etc. that are imagined to be on the track. That way, the crew does the work to put the cars in the proper "spot" order before shoving the string into the track. Adds lots of operational "play value" to a single track.
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Ah yes, 'Selective Omission'. I had to do that on the Yuba River Sub. In my case it was 'selectively omitting' two towns: the town of Deer Creek, where my major yard is, and the town of Wagon Wheel Gap, where the line cuts through the ridge between the South and Middle forks of the Yuba River. Wagon Wheel Gap has a road curving up and around a mountain from the station, then disappearing into a cut in the scenery (the town's presumably up on the mountain, someplace). Deer Creek simply could not be modeled--it theoretically occupies the space where my control panel is. Which is too bad, because I'd originally planned to model Deer Creek after Nevada City, a famous little town in California's Northern Mine country.
Oh, well--
...And here I thought this was yet another thread about how Model Railroader Magazine did so-and-so or a thread got deleted!
I suppose Selective Omission is pretty common; although most modelers don't think of backdrop or low relief buildings as John Armstrong's Selective Omission, but they really are.
On my HO scale layout, I have a few low-relief buildings, and my cement plant gets it's gravel trucked in from "off the layout." I also have a track leading through the backdrop which serves as an interchange. On the other side it's used for storing the railroad's buisness cars and as a team track. Strange that the dead-end track leading into that building never gets switched, but somehow there's different cars on it every session!
I couldn't agree more about John Armstrong. I have often refered to his Track Planning for Realistic Operation as my bible. If I could recommend just one book to an aspiring model railroader, that would be the one. Those of us in this hobby were lucky to have him around as long as we did.
I like that idea--one of the 2009 layouts displayed in the layout 2009 MRR's has one featuring an edge of a quarry sort of mounted on the fascia. I'm thinking of something along the same line for a layout up here. Tnx for reinforcing John Armstrong's name here...another of my favorite MRR'ers.
Any argument carried far enough will end up in Semantics--Hartz's law of rhetoric Emerald. Leemer and Southern The route of the Sceptre Express Barry
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While going through a crate of old model railroading books a few days ago, I came John Armstrong's Creative Layout Design book, which I forgot I even had in my library. I took a few minutes to browse through it and came across a passage in which he discusses the use of selective omission as opposed to selective compression. In cases where a facility is so large that it cannot be believably compressed into the available space, he suggests modeling just enough to suggest that a larger facility is there but off the layout. For example, he suggests modeling just the part that interfaces with the railroad, such as a siding for a much larger plant that theoretically is in the aisle where the viewer is standing. Another example he gave was modeling a coal tipple suggesting the ajoining mine is around a bend and out of sight.
I think this is a very useful suggestion and I believe I have used a form of it on my layout without even thinking of it in terms of selective omission. In my case, I have an industrial spur that disappears behind and then into a row of shallow background structures. About 10 feet down the mainline from this dummy spur I have a series of commercial backdrops of a power plant, steel mill, and oil refinery. Theoretically, my industrial spur serves these large plants. If all goes as planned, I can back a cut of cars into this muzzle loading spur track and leave them there to be picked up on a later run. Of course all this depends on being able to reliably couple and uncouple the freight cars on this blind spur. I have tested it with some success but since I haven't commenced full fledged operations yet, I can't say how reliably this is going to work. If it becomes too much of a hassle, It might just become a scenic feature without any operational use.