No, this isn’t about people getting run over by HO scale model trains. It also is not about people working themselves to death trying to complete a model railroad layout, although I know a few who seemed to try to do that.

What I am talking about here is the loss of scale models that are produced by very talented people and might have display value at museums as part of dioramas.

During the last few years, some friends passed away who had considerable experience in the railroad equipment building industry, and were also dedicated modelers who built very accurate, museum quality model railroad equipment. In all those cases, the outcome for their model railroad layouts and equipment were the same: The layouts were cut up and scrapped, and the equipment was sold to hobby dealers or on eBay.

Modelers tend to do their thing for their own pleasure and amusement, most of them don’t think much about its display value or the fact that it may be around longer than they are and might not be treated with as much respect by their next of kin.

So here is the question: How many museums are actively making an effort to reach out to modelers in their organization and in the model railroad establishment in their area, to encourage them to build displays and dioramas for them? If you are doing this, what has been your experience with the effort? Would it be worthwhile for museums as an industry to make a more prominent effort to appeal to talented model railroaders to work on projects for display? And is there a need to emphasize the concept that doing this kind of work for a museum can result in a valuable and lasting legacy?

Right now it seems like a lot of beautiful work is ending up at the dump when the craftsman who produced it is gone.

PC

Here in Baltimore, all three major museums--B&O, Ellicott City, and Streetcar Museum--enjoy at least some active overlap with the modeling community. B&O and Ellicott City have layouts on display (though many still lament the loss of the historic old layout upstairs). The BSM has an O-scale demonstration layout which can operate by turning a timer switch.

By far the largest "problem" with intersecting modeling and preservation is that apparently the vast majority of modelers are intent on creating THEIR own micro universe. Not as many modelers are going to be interested if, for example, a museum offers a layout space but dictates that they want a model of a particular line, station area, etc. There are exceptions--for example, there's a modular group that replicates the Strasburg RR--but for the most part, modelers want to do their own thing and not conform to any interpretive or reconstructive role. If you are indeed fortunate enough to get a modeler who, for example, collects models of your line's equipment and is willing to work with you, treat this member like gold.

There was one museum I was involved with for a while that, among other things, had a tabletop layout in a baggage car. That group had one eccentric whose hobby was apparently endurance-testing out-of-the-box models, and he could be found at all hours of the day and night, even in the dead of winter with no heat, watching the damned things run around as he painted other stuff for display. He was deemed a voluntary "security system," as I recall.

Most museums are beset with "donations" of items they don't want. Could you imagine crate after crate of beat up, crummy Tyco products donated by the family of someone who fancied himself a "craftsman"? I got out of model trains because those who really make something special are extremely few and far between.

My dad's a model railroader. When the railroad bug bit me, I gave a lot of thought to what I'd do with it. My dad had a nice but unfinished HO layout which he scrapped when we moved. His model railroad club also completely destroyed 20 years of labor when they got their eviction notice from the municipal agency. They learned the lesson and bought their next property.

The craftsman knows that when he begins. He understands that modeling, particularly model layouts, are just as ephemeral of the hobby product of the maniac crossword puzzle solver or the guy who has 10,000 videotapes of every episode of "Days of our Lives". These folks don't say on their deathbeds "Oh my God my models will be destroyed, save them", they say "What a wonderful adventure it was making them, I'm glad I did that."

If they had wanted more permanence in their work, they would have chosen something more like railway preservation, where we fully expect our labor to outlive us.

Of course, if we don't get our equipment indoors, it may not be so different after all :-)



The Western Railway Museum has a variety of car models in the library and one of the car ferry.

And a very old, very large diorama of the entire "future" museum property, which reality has overtaken. But the beast dominates the main hall in the Visitors Center. Its tale is told, and it's time for it to be "moving on". How do you handle that? I believe there would be hurt feelings if it were gotten rid of. The first fantasy of every modeler is to have his piece be loved; but a close second is to have someone else store it :)

Just as you say, it's the nature of models to get scrapped someday, they're just too balky to preserve long-term. Maybe the trick is to write commissions with a 5 year lease, and have the modeler take it home after that time...

I personally found this topic to be of great interest and near/dear to many of my own thoughts. It has long been my thought that railroad models, either equipment examples alone, or staged diorama settings, go a long ways to helping flesh out the story behind a given piece of equipment, it's use, etc. Having said that, I throw out a disclaimer, I beleive in the use of railroad models, not model railroading. Something
like Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry layouts (both the current as well as the older versions), take on a toy train aspect that detracts from the factual story you should be trying to tell. (One man's opinion, nothing more)

A fine example of how to best do this type of modeling was on display two years ago at IRM (a place I would love to see more models to help interpret some of what many visitors don't understand or have the background to appreciate)
This particular display was a diorama in 1/4" scale of the Union, Illinois station/substation, and an Elgin & Belvidere Electric car. This display helped to illustrate very graphically something that no longer exists, and would be prohibitively
expensive to reproduce. Yet it helped to tell a bit of the story of what the original Elgin & Belvidere Electric Railroad looked like and was about, which is also part of the history of IRM, as their mainline is built on the roadbed of the old E&B.

Along these lines, I personally am exhibiting next weekend (Feb 28-Mar 1) at the annual HighWheeler train show at Harper College in Palatine, Illinois. My exhibit is a combination of models and memorabilia, which assuming I've done a 1/2 way decent job, will show to the show visitors a bit of the history of electric streetcars and interurbans in the Illinois Fox Valley area, in particular the Chicago Aurora and Elgin,
and the Aurora Elgin & Fox River Electric.

Mentioning this to just a handful of people over the last several weeks, I was very surprised at how many people had no clue that any of this had ever existed before, even though the CA&E has been gone for just 50 years, and the AE&FRE about 70.
I'm sure that any display of this type, either a permanent, or even semi-permanent display at a museum, or a traveling one such as this, can definitely show and teach about things long since gone.

Another example of the good use that models can be used for in a museum setting is to attract interest in a given restoration project. While the handful of knowledgeable types at the museum may see that "pile of broken rusty junk" for the restorable jewel of the museum collection that it might one day become, the average visitor only sees the "junk" part of it. A model of what the museum hopes to restore that to, along with perhaps a donation box, is an easy, relatively cheap, and very graphic way to present that message to all visitors.

I have long regretted the loss of an extremely well-done set of probably "standard" gauge interurban cars by a gentleman in the Cleveland area that was lost close to 35 years ago. The modeler had been an employee of the Lake Shore Electric, which went out of business in the late 1930's, so this guy was really old when I met him in the early '70's. A local fan (and character in his own right, some older fans here might remember "Windy" Al from Cleveland, known for his audio recordings of Mid-Western steam, and his NYC "steamboat" whistle that graced a certain Reading T-1 in the same era) set up the open house and photo session, and I persuaded my father to take me up to East Cleveland to see his layout.

It was the first time I had really seen a well-done private layout. The owner had worked as a sub-station operator for LSE and had scavenged electrical switching gear and other controls, and used a controller from a car to operate the layout.

The connection to this thread is that before he died he had offered the whole thing to the Western Reserve Historical Society, about the only local organization that could have done anything with it at the time. The little old ladies who went and looked at it didn't see the value of it and passed on it, so it was all lost when he died.

I definitely see the value in using well-done model layouts and dioramas to represent in miniature what is impractical to do 1:1. A prime example of that is the N-Scale diorama of the Dennison, Ohio PRR yard, circa WWII, in the Dennison Station Museum. I'll admit "N" is a little small for a lot of people to properly see, but given the space available, they didn't have much choice, and they did a decent job of representing the extensive facility that was there then and has been pretty much wiped out.

The transportation museums I recently visited in Europe make extensive use of large-scale models and operating layouts, and I think it does wonders to enhance the museum experience.

Excellent comments, gentlemen. I can particularly appreciate the observation P51 made, that if you just "ask for models" you are likely to get buried in junk, and there is a lot of junk out there in the model railroad world.

It seems to me that there are a number of subjects in railroading that are particularly adaptable to presentation as a diorama, and fortunately there have been a variety of useful accessory items produced by the model railroad manufacturers that make it easier to model them than ever before. Some that come immediately to mind:

Railroad Marine operations, including float bridges, tugs, and carfloats.

Isolated "big city" freight terminals served by railroad marine operations.

A fairly complete presentation of a steam locomotive servicing facility. Very few model railroaders ever do this on their layouts, most of them stop at a partial presentation.

It seems to me a pretty decent replication of a steam backshop could be done by creative adaptation of model railroad parts and accessories.

Diesel Locomotive servicing shops, ranging from small running maintenance facilities to medium sized running maintenance and backshop combinations.

And of course snowsheds, unless your display area has a lot of room for a full sized replica.

Others?

PC

I doubt that if the WRHS has acquired the models that they would still exist either. The WRHS has a reputation for acquiring historic industrial equipment and artifacts and then later selling them off to the highest bidder on ebay. So the artifacts that you worked hard to save, store and donate would later on be ever so callously discarded. So much for preserving Cleveland history.

The Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor in Youngstown, OH owns several steelmaking models. Models are the only real good way to explain the steelmaking process, as photos and diagrams just do not do it justice and obviously its difficult to save BOFs and hot strip mills.


Here is a view taken inside a 3/8" scale model of a continuous caster. This model was an engineering model, built to verify the location of machinery and equipment before construction would commence. The model is huge, measuring about 12' square.


This is a Loewy forging press model, standing about 5' tall. There are two Loewy press models in the collection, the smaller one is fully functional, works on either air or hydraulics and forges the company's name onto a small medallion.


The gem of the collection is a fully functional model of a hot strip mill built in the 1930s. This model rolls slabs of lead into coils of lead strip. Each of the ten mill stands actually rolls the product and a miniature coiler at the far end rolls up the strip. I've been working to get it functional again and someday we will use it in demonstrations. There is also a working seamless tube mill,which will require a few missing parts to be replicated before it is placed back into operation.

I am a firm believer in the value of models, but the models must serve a purpose.

These models perfectly illustrate what modeling can show in perspective to what would be impractical in protoype. They also display very clearly that a museum model probably is best custom made, not a well decorated commerical offering (which is not to say that some of those items wouldn't have a place and/or use)

If nothing else, this entire discussion also points out a very good and inexpensive alternative option to the previous long discussion of "sectioning" a steam locomotive.
A model can be produced, showing the same results for far less expense, and requiring far less exhibit space, upkeep, etc.

Having once built a grand piano out of Gatorfoam for a stage set that I could lift with one hand, I wouldn't ignore the possibility of modeling a sectioned steam locomotive in one to one scale either. It could be moved in handy to assemble sections and assembled on any ordinaly display floor if made like stage scenery. Interesting travelling exhibit?

dave

This subject sounds like a good use for so-called 'rapid prototyping' technologies that make use of 3-D computer models.

DPK

The "rapid prototyping" modeling is still a relatively expensive way to do things, certainly well beyond the means of the average modeler, and as likely beyond the typical cash-strapped museum setting. Over and above this equipment, you of course also need the skilled computer draftsman !

My company handles the North American logistics and distribution for one of the top companies in the world making this equipment, a company out of Israel called Objet Geometries. It is truly amazing what they can produce with their machines. They sell
their equipment (and the resins) to companies such as Apple, Ford Motor Co, Daimler Chrysler, Honda, Oakley, and Nike, amongst others. They recently just completed
work on the new animated movie release "Coraline". Many of the models in the movie
are made using their equipment, resins and technologies.

Someday, maybe, hopefully,,, but sadly, not just yet !

Every once in a while, these prototyping technologies get put to museum use. Especially on the night shift when no one is watching the computer draftsmen, and there's no one to notice that a resin pattern for a steel mandrel for manufacturing Nicholson thermic syphons is a trifle too big to sneak out in a lunch box.

B. Lamar Spruell
Cadillac Ranch, Michigan

At this point I will try to turn the discussion back to the original points and ask whether any of the museums are attempting to encourage talented modelers in the railroad enthusiast and preservation communities to develop or work with them on models or other displays.

To put some specific names and examples with this, over the last few years we have lost some superb "industry insider" modelers like Bruce Meyer, Ed Sammler, and Mark Lagomarcino, all of whom were EMD employees and worked on specialty modeling projects for their employer and built models for their own use. As far as I know only some documents from Bruce Meyer's collection are preserved, those by the NMRA, not by a museum. I don't know of any models from their collections that made it to museums.

No effort to preserve models produced by people like these gentlemen?

PC

On a related note, does anyone know what became of the archives of the late George Hockaday, In addition to time spent within the industry (Monon, ALCO, D&H), George was a modeler (dating back to his days at Purdue), in addition to being a fairly prolific railroad photographer.

The D&H 150th Anniversary Train had a display car stocked with Georges' models.

DPK