I have seen model railroads at various museums, Conneaut RR Museum, Altoona, B&O Museum, Steamtown, etc. Here are some of the things that I have seen on museum layouts: 4-4-0s in a siding while a double stack train passes by, freights running 250 scale MPH, F7s running backwards hauling a couple of cabooses, all tell me that the layout is just a toy to pacify some modeler members of the musuem.

I think the one at Steamtown, a model of the locomotive shops was the best I've seen in terms of educational value. It was an actual reproduction of the appearance of the shops in the days of steam. That was useful and educational. If a modeler creates a faithful reproduction of a certain scene, facility or route then it would behoove a museum to attempt to acquire and display that model. However if the layout is just freelanced does it really represent anything more than the modelmakers art? That fine if you are showing an exhibit about model railroaders, otherside its a distraction.

As one of the "museum people" and speaking just for me and my museum, we have tried to encourage model hobbists to work with us and "remember" us when the time comes to get rid of their models, their layouts and their documentation. We have met with minimum success though because after a person dies, the family, or the auctioneer involved with the estate, only sees the $$ associated with selling everything off.

It has been "my" museum's practice to encourage all aspects of the hobby, from the rabid railfan, to the family with children, to the preservationist/historian, to the modeler of 7.5", and every other gauge/scale. To us at least, it seems you get a better sound out of the orchestra when all the instruments are contributing and playing.

We currently do not yet have a dedicated place for the model side of the hobby and that is a huge negative for us. However our long term plans specifically spell out a "creative yet sensitive restoration" of about a 1/4 of our 1869 Freight House building (the ex-waiting room) into a model train layout and model train museum. The plans for the kind of layout and models is still undefined, but we have talked and drawn a lot and a thread coming out of it all is for a volunteer/member effort to create a permanent layout (probably HO) that will be able to have modules plug into it to expand it. The other gauges and scales would be represented and demonstrated, but due to space, HO would be our operating model focus.

I do not know how to make the model side of the hobby feel included in the grander scheme, but somehow we must do so.

Another idea comes to me as I thought I was about to wrap up this response. It seems that the model railroad periodicals/publications coming out for the common person are far more detailed in the look, design and application of the prototype than the popular publications coming out FOR the prototype. I note the detailed drawings of classic railcars that appear in the model magazines compared to the slick modern photography in the two major prototype magazines. I confess to studying those MODEL drawings to fix, repair, restore actual full size pieces at our museum.

rayg

Ray Grabowski, Jr.
Lake Shore Railway Historical Society
North East, PA

TechShop http://www.techshop.ws/ will let you use their rapid prototyping machine for $30 per cubic inch of material. Noting that the interior areas of a piece are printed as a honeycomb, not solid.

As far as the skilled computer draftsmen, they're around and are making drawings of railcars. Most of what I see involves the use of obsolete computer-aided-drafting software. However, excellent full 3-D modeling software is becoming readily available to everyone. Google Sketchup is free, and Solidworks is $99 for students. In this software, when you make a 3-D model of a part, you're not making a digital draftsman's drawing, you're actually defining the shape of the part. You can take it straight to a rapid prototyper that way. The software also allows you to fit parts together, test their fit and display the assemblage.

One other ugly problem rears its ugly head: security.

I was recently informed that a couple one-of-a-kind models were stolen from a regional museum's model collection. This was not an "inside job," but apparently an outsider exploiting a temporary security hole.

Regrettably, said museum is now rethinking the security of what it has in model displays, and may have to do some serious re-tweaking and reconstruction to secure things totally. (These were not off-the-shelf models, but closer to customized brass models.)

Folks,

Not only railroad museums but maritime museums can benifit from models. They are both working with large artifacts that can be shown in scale size with great benifit.

But when we built the new visitor center displays at S F Maritime Park we had to fight the "professional" exhibit designers to be able to incluude ship models.

We have a large collection of models and when the new exhibits are put in our museum building I hope that models are part of them.

Getting back to rail museums, the diorama of the Central Pacific's rail yard in Sacramento, California which was part of a recent exhibit at the California State Railroad Museum was an amazing piece of work. It showed a long gone piece of history an industrial space that photos just do not do justice to.

More museums should use models to show their visitors something that is gone or difficult to get to.

The Forestry Museum in I think, Duncan, BC has a wonderful large scale model of the Donkey engine powered wire system of timber harvesting. Non many of our visitors can climb a mountain to see such a thing today! Even if one still existed.

As reported above most modelers live in their own world mostly in HO scale. We have a model club in our museum in San Francisco. But the only railroad museum that I know that has a model club in house is the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden, Colorado.

Does anyone know of any others?

Ted Miles

Don't know if it's the work of a model railroad club or not, but the museum operating out of the depot in Everett, Pennsylvania, had a very ambitious model of the local territory, showing the relationship of the railroads to the surrounding topography. If I remember aright, this is in HO and is uncompressed - that is, in perfect horizontal scale. Like I said, ambitious, but they were well along with it when I saw it about 3 years ago. (When I was back about two years ago nothing had changed to the work in progress on the buildings and wood caboose, and display 2-6-2, and I didn't get inside the museum.)

The well-done museum of the Tri-Cities Historical Society in the GTW depot at Grand Haven, Michigan has begun a simple model of the GTW carferry yard that once occupied that city's waterfront (and is now the home of PM 2-8-4 No. 1223).

Does anyone know if Mark Smith finished his model of the PRR Altoona Test Plant? That is one vanished facility that certainly deserves to be re-created in model form.