Model Railroad Bug
For a long, long time I’ve been an armchair model railroader. Part of this was due to a lack of space, part due to a perceived lack of time and part due to lack of inspiration; I didn’t know what, who or how to model what I saw in my own mind. Then again, part of it was due to wanting to do more–and less–than what conventional model railroading consists of–realism.
As most people in model railroading will tell you, if you’re modeling a railroad, you’re trying to duplicate in miniature real scenes and real operations somewhere around the world; anything else isn’t modeling, it’s ‘playing with toy trains.’ Personally, I disagree. Yes, you may be trying to model a ‘realistic’ scene, but it doesn’t have to be based on any real operation or even based on our world as we know it; just like novels and storytelling aren’t necessarily based on our world as we know it. In my opinion, it opens the hobby to real imagination rather than just trying to copy what everybody else has done for so long.
Of course, to do this I’m going to be unusually busy this summer trying to clear out a very cluttered basement of something like fifteen years of hoarding things “I can still see a use for” yet never use. I’ll probably post pictures off and on as I build, but the first picture I post will be an example of where I’m starting.
Oh, I am going to have one bit of fun–just where am I going to get the miniature people to populate my layout? They’re not all going to be human, probably not even a majority.
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