Wow Neil!

I think you warped my brain with that post. Or I should say warped further than it already is.........I'm hoping that with the time clock factor and a small scale(HO) my brain is not affected all that much.

 Dazed and confused in Atascadero

Deep Thoughts?

Way to deep for me Neil.   I'll just have a Margarita instead!  John

MHB

MHB = Must Have Bourbon after reading your post.  And I have two hours until Happy Hour!  Great post!

Agreed

I think future modeling will continually veer towards more switching-oriented layouts in real time, "Lance Mindheim's layouts are in keeping with this." Mainline action is hard to capture realistically unless you can fill a basement. Many try to compress a 100 mile railroad between division points in less than 1 actual scale mile of track which seems ridiculous to me. Why not capture a 5-10 mile section of track between two staging yards and model in real time? 

I think modeling any of the Class 1 railroads with unit trains is a bit boring and stale at the present. Short lines, regionals, and Class 1 branches still have the most interest and action. I think if you really want a glimpse into the future of model railroading, take a look at all of the phenomenal, Iowa Interstate layouts. 

http://www.iaisrailfans.org/gallery/MLayouts?page=1 

All are modeled with realistic compression and all are focused on mixed trains and industrial switching. No fast clock necessary!

The answer is 42

..

The answer may be 42....

....but what is the question? 

Methinks we thinks too much. Unless we're thinking on a fast clock, in which case we make our decision sooner, making it on-time. Right?

I personally don't put much stock in clocks and simulated distances. The only clock near my layout is the one that tells me I should've been in bed a couple of hours ago. When I do operations on my layout (which, admittedly, is rare) when I reach a siding, I'll check my waybills, do my dropoffs and pickups, reassemble my train, then amble off to the next siding. Operating under deadlines on a fast clock, well that just sounds too much like my day job.

Jim

What is the question? What is 6 times 9?

https://www.quora.com/The-Hitchhikers-Guide-to-the-Galaxy-creative-franchise-Why-does-six-times-nine-equal-forty-two

Smiles and time clocks????

No thanks. That is way to much like the pre retirement life. Nor will I sit/stand around while waiting for the invisible brakeman to walk down to the turnout to throw the thing. Spent way to much time waiting for management types also while working.

On the other hand there are folks like Tony Koster sp? who seem to thrive and want big mainline operation and have the space,time, and dollars to go after it. More power to em.

Tony and a few other popularized what I think is called a LDM. Layout design module where a real place is shrunk down into a small space and built realistically as possible. Lance does something similar and Ian Rice has shown how to spread 2-4 separate scenes in a bedroom with a bit of space in between No smiles just pleasure watching the train roll through and then doing a bit of switching. That works for me.

Jack

All of the above

My guess is that there will always be a segment of the hobby that will go towards ISL's and there will always be a segment of the hobby that will go towards the larger layouts.  There always has been a segment that built ISL's  and there have always been people that went larger.  Manifest Destiny. MRH is slanted towards the ISL (or TOMA or whatever acronym you want) because the publisher is pushing it that way.

All you have to do is look at the ads to see that the manufacturers are pushing the big mainline direction.  How many 4-8-4's, 4-8-8-4's, 2-10-4's are being made?  How many 0-6-0's?  You don't switch a Lance Mindheim industrial branch with the MILW 261. 

Everybody I know that can build a basement sized empire is building a basement sized empire.  At some point (hopefully not for a couple decades) I will get too feeble to maintain a large layout and I will probably have to settle for an Inglenook in my future assisted living apartment.  Until then I am going to go large (which is kinda a misnomer since I model 1900-1905 so my biggest engine is less than 9" long.)

"Any thoughts?"   

I think guys that have the space and  like lots of mainline trains figure out ways to run them and the yard jobs too. Things can be scheduled to work once one knows the time it takes to do the various tasks on a layout....DaveB  

I have the space for a large

I have the space for a large layout.  Mine is going into a 30x40 outbuilding I have. Finishing the inside, heat and AC for climate control.  I am modeling the IC mainline from Centralia, IL north to Effingham, IL in 1955, the last year most mainline freight on the IC in this area ran behind steam.

I originally thought that 30x40 would be plenty of space to model what I wanted to model.  I obtained track charts, division profiles, Sanborn Insurance maps and made field trips and took photos.  I spent a lot of time with my copier and printer and came up with what I thought was a good plan.

Then I started reading articles in MRH and other publications and watching videos of operating sessions from links here and on other boards and realized that I had compressed many things way too much to operate the way I want to operate.  For example in my original plan, I had compressed the section of the layout that models the IC freight house and the industries around it (a lumber yard, a wholesale grocery warehouse, a wholesale tobacco company, a small ice house and the city public works department) into an area of 48x50 inches.  That section, which is the first I have started is now 4x12 feet.  I does taper to about 1 foot at one end as it follows the track.  

It's still compressed, it would have to be half a gain as large to be scale.  But it will allow me to switch those industries in a more realistic manner and the scene will have the open areas between things properly represented.  The part of Centralia I am modeling, from the south end of A&F yard to Branch Junction in the north, an area of about 5 miles in the real world will be about 100 1:1 feet on my layout.  I'm still going to have room for a couple long mainline runs. 

So I'm with Dave, I think that people who have the space they can dedicate to a large model railroad will continue to build them.  I'm trying to have realistic switching in Centralia and a long mainline run to Effingham with a couple small towns (less then 1000 population, one or maybe two industries) along the way.

But without what I've seen here and other places, a lot of industries would have been one or two car sidings with only a few inches between them.  I will be 60 next month and I hope that I can see this large project finished.

I'm still going to use a fast clock.  Even with close to scale distances in the industries I will switch, my HO scale crews will do it a lot faster in real time then a 1:1 scale crew would.  I posted a question about switching the IC freight house area on another forum and was told by a 1:1 railroader that it would take 4 hours to switch the freight house something I can do in about 35 minutes on the section I have built.  Of course that doesn't include things like waiting for air pressure to build up that the prototype would do.

TT&TO

More deep thoughts on a rainy Friday morning (Tropical Storm Darby):

If I had my druthers, time, space, and money then this would not have been on my mind. While coming to a point on my line that will allow some operation as I envisioned it, the fact that the mainline is all to short is very clear and the time to travel between towns on any schedule will be extremely short. Yes, I would spend what it takes to create a long mainline and still have several towns because my idea of a railroad is running a train from the terminal or division point out and back to do it's work. 

It's time to wake up Neil! Few have any interest in operating a layout here so I will be running trains by myself. Aside from the twice daily passenger train / milk run, all trains will be run as extras and "real time" or "fast time" doesn't matter. The setup is merely to create an illusion of a world in miniature that exists when I step into it above my workshop behind a closed door. The layout is a vehicle to support the trains, buildings, and bridges that I enjoy building. But I want to "run" trains and model that aspect of a railroad as well.

I have long considered JMRI as a railroad crew that runs alongside me, or in conflict with me, as I start the clock and do the next job. This may not be quite possible yet in reality. JMRI might be able to select the next train in the timetable order and bring it out of staging to the yard where the crew would go to beans while the hostler (me) cut out the cars, turns the engine, and readies the outbound train to leave when scheduled. No one needs to think about the fact that the train actually only travels thirty feet to a balloon loop and back into a staging track. 

What about cameras in the engine that, via wifi, could be seen online - in real time - with a computer interface for an operator across the world to run the local? Yeah, crazy. 

For those who wondered the answer was 42. Thanks for playing. Today's question: "What is the average ground speed of a coconut laden swallow?"

Neil

Jimmy B...

Salted rim thank you very much...

Now about that...whatchamacallit timetable thingy...

What do you mean?

African or European? 

One, Two, Five!

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Call me Tim.

Do elderberry or shruberries . . .

That's all you've got?

It's only a flesh wound!

Now it's my turn. Spank me!

Bring out the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch!

Brother: (reading from Book of Armaments): And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade that, with it, Thou mayest blow Thine enemies to tiny bits in Thy mercy.' And the Lord did grin, and the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies and orangutans and breakfast cereals and fruit bats and large chu--
Brother Maynard: Skip a bit, Brother...
Brother: And the Lord spake, saying, "First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shalt be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thou foe, who being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.
Brother Maynard: Amen.
King Arthur: Right.

Once the Holy Hand Grenade . . .

. . . of Antioch has been brought forth and the feasting on breakfast cereals under way, Deep Thoughts are pretty much out of the barn and down the road.

Let's see, we were in Hawaii, weren't we, Neil? Are there swallows in the islands? 

@Paul

Right then. Let's get back out of the deep end and back where reality can breath. 

I am developing a timetable for the railroad, a common carrier on the island of Hawaii (with a great deal of influence from other islands), that has a right-of-way that is typically all too short for a model so the travel times are equally short - unrealistically so.

Do others here use a TT and run by TO? (Rene - I'm sorry I missed your presentation but thank you for posting it online)

How do you you schedule trains? Certainly not by the second hand. 

In O scale, narrow gage or otherwise, the distances are not quite double that HO requires (180%) but still take a lot of room. A mile in HO is about sixty feet. In O scale the same mile is 110' or the entire length of my mainline. 

A 10:1 fast clock would simulate about 10-11 minutes between station stops - not bad. I'll give that a try. With stops, switching, and waiting for superior trains, a trip up the line and back would / could take six scale hours.  An 8:1 clock makes the "smiles" (scale miles) ridiculously short but a schedule could be, and often is, based on arrival times and not departure.

Given an hour for switching a mill and team track at 8:1 time, or 7-1/2 real minutes, then a timetable might work well except for passenger trains unless I give them work to do as well as a mixed train or express, mail, or sleeper set outs. In reality, switching a small town could take 20-30 minutes actual time depending on the work - 3-4 hours fast time.

The OR&L used K-27's and ran fully signaled and by dispatcher control. This may not be possible on a small pike but a layed back branch may still be fun regardless. 

So back to the question of how would you operate a small branch line with a couple guys based on what you now know I would like to do? 

Neil