dehusman The problem is that newcomers don't know what they don't know.
Good point.
Another challenge is that lot of people seemingly are not familiar with the concept of trying to define their goals before looking for ways to reach those goals. It is a bit harder to get to where you want to go, when you don't know (even roughly) where you want to go :-)
And of course, even though some people might not like that I mention "the elephant in the room" : a lot of people cannot communicate very well in a written medium like a web forum.
If you can't spell and you can't use a dictionary or a spell checker, you can't use search engines very well. Mind you - I am not talking about just the odd typo here, or people who don't know the difference between "there" and "their", or such piddling issues.
If you cannot formulate a clear sentence or break your thoughts down into coherent paragraphs, it is hard for others (and yourself) to understand what you want to accomplish.
If you have had a tortured relationship with written texts, it is hard to use books and web pages to gather information.
In short - if someone is has a lot of trouble with expressing himself in writing, he or she will probably also have trouble gathering and making use of information already in place.
So - you reply to each new poster as he or she comes online and asks the first questions. Some get up to speed fast, some at an average tempo, some slow, some never.
Smile, Stein
(edited a little for clarity ...)
I think we need to lighten up a bit gentlemen and do for others that we wish some had done for us back in the day when we first got started. Let them profit from your years of experience and making mistakes. Tell me honestly that there isn't one of you who did something you wished you hadn't done and learned a lesson the hard way and would have much appreciated a senior or more experienced modeler say stop wait don't do that and here's why and this is what you should do. I recently met a world class celebrity modeler if you will who is building a new layout now after having torn down a very famous well published layout of 25 years. I was amazed when he told me and I'm paraphrasing a bit being it was so long since he had built a new layout that he was amazed at how much new stuff he didn't know and was learning so many new things about building a layout. Maybe they just weren't available way back when when a lot of us got started and maybe they were but we just didn't know about them. The internet is a fabulous invention that has changed our lives for ever and it's one of the greatest tools any model railroader especially the new ones has at his disposal. Think about way back when in the dark ages of model railroading when many got started and you wanted to build a certain structure or find the exact color of a Western Maryland Caboose used in 1954. You trudged off to a library and if you were lucky maybe you found something or you wnet to the hobby shop and had to purchase RMC or Model Railroader etc. hoping to find the right information. Now all you have to do is type in a search on Google.
I think it's great that some of these new guys charge head first into the hobby with great exuberance and full of great ideas or maybe none at all but at least they want into the hobby. So it's the responsibility if you will of more senior more experienced modelers to help them with their questions and be more helpful then condescending when ewbies ask what soem precive as stupid questions or don't know what their doing.
I have been in the classic car Ho trod motorcycle business for 37 years and have forgotten more about building hot rods then most people will ever know but when I go to a car show or a cruise night if some guy who doesn't even own a hot rod wants to ask me anything I will always take the time to answer him the best I can. My advice to them is don't be afraid to get into the hobby if you feel the passion to want to own or build one your never going to know anything if you don't start some place.
Thats all these guys are looking for is a place to start.
When I first got back into MRR, I spent all my down time at work trying to come up with a track plan to fit my 15' x 24' space. I found it very frustrating because there was always something that would put the kybosh on my trackplan. Thinking outside the box I thought how about filling the room with as much benchwork as possible while leaving enough space to make it a comfortable place to be. So I started drawing designs of just benchwork and not worrying about a trackplan.
Thinking that in real life the geography of the country wasn't made to accommodate the railroad, but rather the railroad had to work with the local geography. The only thing I worried about when designing the benchwork was that it had to accommodate minimum 30+ inch radius curves. I soon had my local geography in the form of benchwork done on paper. It covered the most surface area of the room while making doors and other things still accessible. By doing it this way I ended up with a much longer mainline than I had ever came up with by drawing trackplans.
The next thing to consider was industry. When the CPR pushed through to the west coast of Canada Industry soon started to pop up along the way. So not knowing to much about switching I started reading about it. I also went to Google Earth and started looking down at all the industrial areas to see what was involved with as far as sidings and access off the main line was handled. My conclusion was that in order not to foul up the main an appropriate amount of siding was always required. But in some places where you have a mountain on one side and a river on the other I did see sidings for some small industries go right off the main. I guess you work with the space you have in real life too.
I went back to my layout plan. Benchwork drawn up first and then a trackplan to fit my benchwork. I then looked at all the places I could put industries and the other things I wanted and boy did it all come together nicely. I had spots for lots of things that would require a siding and space to do it.
In conclusion I'll just say, that as soon as I realized that some industries would take up more than my entire room if I was to do them to scale I had to think a little differently. Always do your reseach and reading before proceeding to the next step. This includes learning at least a little about switching and ops. It is one more thing that makes the layout less toy like and and more like a real working model.
Brent
"All of the world's problems are the result of the difference between how we think and how the world works."
I kind of get the feeling it bugs you to read those posts (like mine will be till I am up to speed)?
The internet is a new thing. Not too many years ago you could not post..."now help" so you had to just figure it out. I am doing both. There is so much new stuff out there, and some stuff you just don't find without a tip from a seasoned pro. I look at the people that answer, as people helping people. I will one day pass that along. If we all just told everyone to go figure it out then why have the forum? I post questions I cannot quite find an answer to. I look to the exp. people to possibly open a door, or shine some light; and they have... so thanks!
If noob post bug you just don't read them. Even better, get a members only area for seasoned people and police it so noobs are removed along with their posts. Everyone is a noob at something.... Shoot every day I have to teach my boss how to do our job.
I posted a question about road/rail bed. I would have never thought of using ceiling tile! but one of the answers explained in great detail everything I needed to do. THAT old dog taught me a new trick.
dehusmanMost forums don't discuss operations in any detail. On most forums the "operations" part of the forum is just a photo album of operating sessions, with little or no discussion.
Speaking as one of your newbies, I'll definitely concur with this part. There's an overwhelming amount of information out there on the technical aspects of laying and wiring track and an endless number of plans to browse. But, for those of us who didn't grow up railfanning, there's no convenient resource explaining how prototypical roads worked and how that translates into a simple model railroad track plan and/or operating session. Armstrong's book covers the prototype part of that, but it's in gruesome detail, and his application of those principles to layouts is aimed at much larger layouts than any newbie is likely to build. Koester's book on realistic operations is similar - lots of good ideas, but way over the head of someone new to the scene. What would be really helpful is a simple example of an operating session on a small layout, two trains maximum, describing what the trains are doing and why. Because really... how many people get started by building a 15'x20' walk-in with two yards, multiple towns, and service facilities? The best attempt at that that I saw was actually a little two-page article at the end of Kalmbach's "HO Railroad From Start to Finish". It was short, understandable, and free of unexplained railroad operations jargon ("the yardmaster", "the dispatcher", "waybills", etc.). More articles like that, fleshed out a bit to illustrate different industry and railroad operations, to explain some of that terminology, and to look back on implications for track planning would have been extremely helpful to me. I'm fairly experienced when it comes to diving into hobbies I don't understand and eventually pieced most of this together from various sources, but I think it turns off a lot of people. A short, newbie-targeted, and preferably free online resource of this type is much needed.
CTValleyRRI guess what made it work for me was that I wasn't afraid to chuck everything and start over if it didn't fit...
While I may be new to MRR, those very same words could come right out of my mouth in regards to, say, computer networking or backpacking or wargaming. To some extent, this is a result of the lack of good resources I described above - if the forum regulars seem to know everything and there's no easy reference to find it yourself, then it's easy to become dependent on them to do everything for you. But it's also, I'm afraid, a sign of the times. I've found that older folks (one of which I'm not, BTW - I'm a sprightly 33) are more comfortable with the attitude that you do some reasonable research, but then just get in and do it, make mistakes, learn from them, and do a better job the next time around. Today's world is all about pre-packaged solutions - "There's an App for that!" - and most younger folks and some older ones aren't comfortable with solving problems as you go. I wish I knew the solution for that - I know from experience that simply pointing people to good resources and being encouraging isn't always enough.
CTValleyRRFor newcomers to the hobby, what gets you started in a given direction? A layout at a train show, a pre-fab track plan, a train set, or what?
I'm a systematic type. I try to learn everything I reasonably can about the overall organization of a subject, then pick some tidbit that looks interesting, run with it, and see where it takes me. I didn't grow up close to the RR industry and knew basically nothing about specific roads or their operations. But being a Chicagoan, I was interested in modelling a Midwestern road, researched a few of them, and found the NKP's history pretty interesting. They also had cool Berkshires. Well, there's a good road to start with! I had an existing interest in WWII from my gaming background, so that seemed a reasonable era to pick. Having done some research on the various lines and nearby industries, I'm now at the point of settling on a particular location. I'm leaning toward Euclid, OH - it's named after my favorite geometer (I'm a math teacher, BTW), it has an interesting local short line (the Euclid RR, serving a nearby bluestone quarry), it's home to what was the premier producer of Art Deco metal decor (Chase Brass and Copper, which went on to produce munitions in WWII), and it's the birthplace of one my favorite sci-fi authors (Roger Zelazny). Alongside the historical research, I'm browsing track plans and considering how plausibly they could model what I'm interested in. At the same time, I'm fiddling around rearranging sectional track on my table to get a better sense of available space and the overall look of different plans.
So I didn't have any kind of firm goal when I started out - I just tried to learn what I could and followed whatever caught my interest. I'm happy with where that's taken me so far. But I suspect most people would approach the hobby rather differently, with some specific goal (road, operation, location, etc.) in mind.
CTValleyRR So I though I might try to stimulate some discussion on this topic. For old hands, how can we get new entrants to the hobby to think through the basics (what railroad, what era, what location, what equipment), as well as some basic operational understanding (switching, yards, point-to-point vs continuous running) BEFORE they get in over their heads with a layout or plan that doesn't suit their needs.
So I though I might try to stimulate some discussion on this topic. For old hands, how can we get new entrants to the hobby to think through the basics (what railroad, what era, what location, what equipment), as well as some basic operational understanding (switching, yards, point-to-point vs continuous running) BEFORE they get in over their heads with a layout or plan that doesn't suit their needs.
The problem is that newcomers don't know what they don't know. They have no concept of what "operation" is or how switching is done.
Ultimately, it would be interesting to see if we can minimize the number of newcomers who charge ahead and then get frustrated, or jump on the forums having absolutely no idea how to proceed.
Most forums don't discuss operations in any detail. On most forums the "operations" part of the forum is just a photo album of operating sessions, with little or no discussion.
One way to help is to try to have the modeler add operating features to the layouts or explain the use of various track features and moves. It is very common on this (and other forum) for somebody to post a plan of an operationally catatonic layout and 50 peole with "encourage" them with "Looks good to me.", "Good job!", "Looks fun to operate." comments. The trick is to offer suggestions without offending them, especially when they are showered with comments reinforcing the operationally deficient plan.
Dave H. Painted side goes up. My website : wnbranch.com
Maybe we can get Kalmbach to reprint pages 2 to 6 of John Armstrong's 1983 18 Tailor-Made Model Railroad Track Plans which discusses the concept of givens & druthers and relative priorities (operations vs. mainline, running, track vs. scenery, etc.) along with his four page questionnaire that he used working with clients. [The book is out of print but copies can be found.]
I do like your questions/topics for thinking through the basics. What was the inspiration/raison d'etre should be the first.
Alan
PS
Stein posted this in the General Discussion forum [link] :
"Here is a link to page of the type of questions a for-hire layout designer ask his customers - the kind of things you should think through, and decide on for yourself, even if you were to hire someone else to do your layout planning for you: http://www.layoutvision.com/id13.html. Note that he says explicitly on his page that you don't have to have an firm and final answer for every single question on the web page above."
Co-owner of the proposed CT River Valley RR (HO scale) http://home.comcast.net/~docinct/CTRiverValleyRR/
I find it more than a little amazing how many new users jump on to this site and say, "I have this new train set / layout plan / train room, now please help."
I know I first got into the hobby 35 years ago when my father gave my brother and I a train set for Christmas. While that was fun for a while, I quickly lost interest in the "two loops on a ping pong table" and started something with some focus and a unified theme. I guess what made it work for me was that I wasn't afraid to chuck everything and start over if it didn't fit (yes, I still have a couple of structures, two locos, 6 freight cars, and a bunch of sectional track from that first layout).. This experience, however, taught me enough about what I DID want on a layout that my next experience (granted, it was 20 years later) was much more fulfilling.
For newcomers to the hobby, what gets you started in a given direction? A layout at a train show, a pre-fab track plan, a train set, or what?
Any thoughts?
Connecticut Valley Railroad A Branch of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford
"If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right." -- Henry Ford