Railfan-Inspired Model Layouts

You and your friends must do a lot of rail fanning. How do you actually apply that to the layout, Don? Well, the first thing you do when you real fan is you get inspiration. That's the greatest thing you get out of rail fanning. The second thing, though, is you get a flavor of the area that you're trying to model. Beyond that, you'll get specific structures and areas that you can take pictures of, and you can bring them back and study them, and then you can distill those into something that you can model that looks to you like the thing that you saw when you were out there rail fanning. It's a lot of fun. Well, you have a good time. Do you take pictures and try to model things from the pictures, or do you just use your memory? Oh, we take pictures. We don't always build it exactly the way the picture looks, but we build it so that it catches the spirit of what we took in the picture. You're also a civil engineer. Now, that must have had a great deal of effect on the design of the layout, the philosophy of the layout, why you built the layout. Can you tell me about those things? Well, obviously, the fellow on the railroad who is interested in the things that I am is the civil engineer on the railroad. I think that it gives you a better appreciation of structure types and what will fit where, what would be a logical thing to put there. For instance, we have a lot of drain pipes on this railroad, simply because we know if it rains here in the cellar, we're gonna need them. Well, take the bridge that's in the background, for example. That's a 1920 Association of American Railway Engineers design for a Cooper E60 loading, and it's got the right span, the right size members, we've got the right kinds of piers on it, and the approach spans are designed properly. Sounds like a civil engineer talking. By the way, if you design the bridge properly, you can build a styrene bridge that'll hold three engines in a row. So there is some benefit to it. Okay, well, you know, there are people that are artists that come to the hobby. There are people who are mechanical-minded, and there are people who are engineering-minded, the people who are electrical-minded. You know, the hobby encompasses a lot of different kinds of people. It sure does. And it's interesting to see different people's layouts. Oftentimes, what is their main interest in life, or what is their job, you see that reflected in their layout. They can't help it do it. It's a strange thing. The most satisfying thing to me in the layout is the artwork, and I thought that was the thing that I was really gonna have the trouble with, because I'm no artist. Well, it's a beautiful layout. Thank you. It's not just an engineering feat, but it's an aesthetic feat. How did you do accomplish that? I can't tell you. Okay. All I can tell you is that I tried to make it look what I saw down there in West Virginia.