As soon as you mention the formation of another scale in model railroading, people roll their eyes (the current iconic body language) and assume the glazed look of a person who is no longer listening to you.
"With all the choices, all the options, open to modelers, why another scale, with all the baggage that a move like that carries?" cries the Voice from Under the Benchwork.
"Weren't you and this BLOG just talking about GH Scale, in which four inches = one foot. Now, suddenly, you're bringing up P Scale, in which two inches = one foot. When do you plan to stop proliferating scales ? "Why are you doing this? "
The Voice of Reason and Daring replies,
"Because these Mega-Scales have a kinship based on a model size beyond the scales that are currently called "Large Scale", i.e., G gage (there is arguably NO G Scale, despite what some modellers and manufacturers tell you.)
"Because a large infrastructure of houses and figures exists in one-sixth size;
"Because it distinguishes P Scale as another model railroad scale in which the models are meant to be looked at, not ridden upon from Live Steam ride-on . We strenuously object to anyone riding upon P Scale models;
"Because 9 1/2 inch gage --- and its oversize big brother, 10 inch gage --- already exists and is readily accepted in Great Britain for miniature live steam railways;
"Because it allows modelers to venture into new territory --- always a challenge, always an adventure"
With the proliferation of scales and gages in model railroading, you'd think that the number and diversity of options and opportunities are enough to satisfy anyone. Yet, consider the scale of 2 inches = 1 foot:
1. endorsed by Mattel, through its line of Barbie dolls, arguably one of the biggest leisure-product manufacturers in the world;
2. supported by an infrastructure of military action figures, dolls, and accessories;
3. modellers can use prototypically correct, readily available one inch high rail (scales out to 6 inch high prototype);
4. big enough to stand out anywhere
5. reasonable size when modeling trolleys, interurbans, and streetcars, with their tight turning radius and their relatively modest space needs; good for light rail, subways, and rapid transit
6. distinguishes it just enough from live steam's inch-and-a-half scale, which has never really produced a line of non-rail-oriented products to be a viable off-the-shelf leisure line. You're expected to be a skilled metal worker, a fast-fading ability and uncommon among modellers under thirty.
7. contrasts history and nostalgia with modernism and high technology in hobby activities and interests. It's very pleasant to be able to take a mental break from text-messaging, cell phones, and video games by immersing yourself however briefly in the era of your parents and grandparents.
8. If artisans and small scale manufacturers pick up on this, this provides scope for them to populate an entire world, or as I would have it, a Miniature Universe .
I recommend calling this new scale / gage "P Scale" and "P Gage". This reflects subliminally the PlayScale that Mattel endorses, and avoids duplicating any other name. I also recommend a gage standard of 9 1/2", which differs from one-sixth of the prototype 4' 8.5" by 0.886%, (an error of less than 1%, not bad for modeling), a prototype distinction of about one-half inch --- we wish that full-size railworkers and tracklayers could keep their tolerances that close.
DISCLAIMER: I am not an employee of, nor a stockholder of, the Mattel Corporation. I do not receive any benefits, funds, rewards, or support of any kind from them or from any other manufacturer. If you search, you'll find that there's a huge international subculture of independent workers in one-sixth figures, model structures, dioramas, and accessories. Join us.
Monday, April 30, 2012
Sunday, April 29, 2012
PICTURE THIS --- OUR FIRST NATIONAL TRACTION MEET
An Idea for a Universal Module for a T-to-the-Fourth Power National Show
This is a photo of a track arrangement called a Grand Junction (or sometimes a "Grand Union"), not uncommon in street railways of the Reminiscence Age (1900-1950) .
Picture some skilled model trackworker in, for example, P Scale --- two inches to the foot, 9 1/2 inch gauge --- working assiduously at home to build that trackwork to pre-arranged, pre-determined track standards and clearances, and mounting that trackwork on a three-quarter-inch plywood base .
He then brings it with him in his pickup truck or small trailer*** to the Grand Transit-Traction-Trolley-Tram Model Electric Railways Meet at the Magnificent Resort Hotel and Conference Center in Center City, Florida [You'll notice that I refuse to get specific at this time ! ] , sets it up on a sturdy chest-high table in their Grand Ballroom, and waits for the other pre-arranged modules to show up.
Each of them brings their connecting straight line of a street scene OR even a trolley barn, conforming to standards in the widely distributed 2"=1' P Scale Module Standards Manual, connects one module at each compass point. Then everyone else excitedly places their Birney or Peter Witt on the tracks and our First Annual Grand etc. Meet gets off to a spectacular start.
Swarms of brand new garage-based entrepreneurs bring their scale accessories; building fronts; trackside details; 10- to 12- inch high miniature (action) figures, accurately dressed in their best NON-MILITARY 1937-era street clothes; some spectacular, highly detailed, large scale model automobiles, including the new Chrysler Airflow and the slick new Buick ("Ask the man who owns one") ; accurately uniformed street railway figures, such as motormen, conductors, track workers with tools; PLUS trolley and tram books, videos, recordings, and pictorial history books; and any other traction memorabilia limited only by their imagination and the size of their collections .
Trolley museums and model traction clubs desperately seeking new members will have set up information stands around the hall, staffed by bright, cheerful members, the very best representatives of their club . The Grand Junction would be placed in the very center of the huge Exhibition Hall to greet the awestruck public, press, and other visitors as they swarm around the exhibits . Smaller modules and display stands will show the very best of a wonderful hobby, models that most people had never witnessed in the original prototype size . Also present would be celebrities who have been keeping their shameful secret interest in traction and miniature modeling to themselves until now. Dozens of professional videographers as well as members of the hobby press and the Mainstream Media, including 60 Minutes and Fox News, would be running busily around interviewing hobbyists and politicians hoping to associate themselves with this wholesome, hometown, nostalgic vision of a previous, peaceful age. The thousands of miniature hobbyists, until now used to smaller scales, will stagger back in shock and admiration when seeing P Scale for the first time.
If you guys can pull that off, I promise to be there !! ... and will Blog about it for months !
*** If the best track builder is not the person with the biggest pickup truck, it may be possible to send the Grand Junction Module to Florida by a delivery service or trucking company.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
WHAT AN EXCELLENT APPROACH TO EDUCATION
Remember how boring the subject of history was when we were in school ?
... and the eternal (meaningless to many) tangle of x's, y's, and z's that many of us encountered in algebra ? There must be a better way to perform this necessary process called "Education" , one would think !
Just consider an independent school program focused on transportation in general, and on electric railways, in particular .
Start with automobiles (yes, we know that they are decidedly NOT electric railways) . We would be hard put to find a more interesting --- think 'obsessive' --- topic for many youngsters. That gets them through the basics of internal combustion engines, lots of basic science ...
Then : electric railways --- electricity, magnetism, radio (communication, control), safety, geometry, geography (why railroads are sited -- situated -- where they are) and on and on and relevant on ! economics, supply chain and transportation, basic bookkeeping and accounting, metal trades, construction, engineering, and programming languages
The basics of English or other appropriate native language(s) for those written reports that they'll be composing for the rest of their lives, foreign languages to get through those travel books and manuals about the French Metro or the Deutsche Bundesbahn .
General history up through the history of transportation history : starting with nostalgia, reminiscences, through the history of electric railways --- horse cars, electric street railways, trolleys, public transit ...
... and then through the history of rail technology, through monorails and even magnetic levitation --- that never seems to fail to elicit amazement . Remember that it was the magic of magnetism that first stimulated Albert Einstein to think about the basic forces of the physical universe.
In relatively little time, and with rapt attention, students would be exposed painlessly to a very wide spectrum of the basic foundations of a good education. Let's not leave education to the dry expository curricula of the theorists. We've got a wonderful world of history, right here in our favorite subject matter.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
PUTTING MY IDEAS AND MY REPUTATION (such as it is) ON THE LINE
Well, talk is cheap (and so is writing BLOGS) . It was relatively easy to make recommendations to our faithful readers (Press the "FAITH" button on your keyboard for information on which faith) based on a long life of ... well, life .
We have suggested pathways to success of T-to-the-Fourth-Power (Trolleys, Trams, Traction, and Transit) organizations, and we can (and have) sat back smugly waiting to hear your success stories. We're going to submit our suggestions to the ultimate test, putting them into action, and see just how they work for us.
This past week, I witnessed personally how a small hobby group at a 2,000-person community --- in a modest retirement area of Florida --- have grown, from scratch, a program of events and amateur sales, using only volunteer assistance from a small total membership --- maybe 40 or 50 --- into a fund-raising sales event at which people started lining up early in the morning, hours before the announced opening, to browse and buy goods donated by residents of the community, and jammed the aisles until closing, carting away a very high percentage of the goods of mixed value and utility, to have a large group of volunteers carefully pack everything up, leaving behind a clean, empty activity hall as mute witness to a frenzy of buying that reminded us of nothing so much as the pre-Christmas retail panic buying of Black Friday.
We smiled to ourselves as we recalled comments made by some of our correspondents :
1. "Florida ? It's too warm !" (the outside temperature this January was 60 degrees Fahrenheit) ,
2. "We prefer holding our events in places that are easy to get to" , (like the gymnasiums of universities that require that maps be published to find)
3. "No one will come that distance", (this from a group that scheduled their event in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and were surprised (we imagine !) when they had to cancel the program for lack of pre-attendance registration
Our visitors / buyers came from Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ontario, New Jersey, and on and on and on ... Build it and they will come ! .. maybe not the first year, we were not present, or the second, but building on what they had, year after year.
We understand that many appear to have headed afterward to nice restaurants in the vicinity, based on their questions to us. Nice for the neighborhood, and the economy, too.
The other example dangled before our eyes this past week was a show and administrative meeting held by a State organization of highly specialized collectors in a luxury beach-front resort in St. Pete Beach [official short name for St. Petersburg Beach, Florida) where these collectors (in their 50's, 60's, and 70's) showed up a week early in reserved rooms and suites, where they held informal in-room trading and buying sessions before the official show itself, and then stayed for the four-day-long State Show, which was advertised in national periodicals and so-called house organs.
We said to ourselves : If those people can do it, and if we can talk about it to you as our audience, why can't we try it --- on a small scale at first. Maybe hold a free Trolley Film Festival, if we can get a suitable venue; order some good traction videos from Jim Herron, up in the Greater Tampa Bay area, and try to launch a small club.
We envision using that club as a base :
We have suggested pathways to success of T-to-the-Fourth-Power (Trolleys, Trams, Traction, and Transit) organizations, and we can (and have) sat back smugly waiting to hear your success stories. We're going to submit our suggestions to the ultimate test, putting them into action, and see just how they work for us.
This past week, I witnessed personally how a small hobby group at a 2,000-person community --- in a modest retirement area of Florida --- have grown, from scratch, a program of events and amateur sales, using only volunteer assistance from a small total membership --- maybe 40 or 50 --- into a fund-raising sales event at which people started lining up early in the morning, hours before the announced opening, to browse and buy goods donated by residents of the community, and jammed the aisles until closing, carting away a very high percentage of the goods of mixed value and utility, to have a large group of volunteers carefully pack everything up, leaving behind a clean, empty activity hall as mute witness to a frenzy of buying that reminded us of nothing so much as the pre-Christmas retail panic buying of Black Friday.
We smiled to ourselves as we recalled comments made by some of our correspondents :
1. "Florida ? It's too warm !" (the outside temperature this January was 60 degrees Fahrenheit) ,
2. "We prefer holding our events in places that are easy to get to" , (like the gymnasiums of universities that require that maps be published to find)
3. "No one will come that distance", (this from a group that scheduled their event in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and were surprised (we imagine !) when they had to cancel the program for lack of pre-attendance registration
Our visitors / buyers came from Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ontario, New Jersey, and on and on and on ... Build it and they will come ! .. maybe not the first year, we were not present, or the second, but building on what they had, year after year.
We understand that many appear to have headed afterward to nice restaurants in the vicinity, based on their questions to us. Nice for the neighborhood, and the economy, too.
The other example dangled before our eyes this past week was a show and administrative meeting held by a State organization of highly specialized collectors in a luxury beach-front resort in St. Pete Beach [official short name for St. Petersburg Beach, Florida) where these collectors (in their 50's, 60's, and 70's) showed up a week early in reserved rooms and suites, where they held informal in-room trading and buying sessions before the official show itself, and then stayed for the four-day-long State Show, which was advertised in national periodicals and so-called house organs.
We said to ourselves : If those people can do it, and if we can talk about it to you as our audience, why can't we try it --- on a small scale at first. Maybe hold a free Trolley Film Festival, if we can get a suitable venue; order some good traction videos from Jim Herron, up in the Greater Tampa Bay area, and try to launch a small club.
We envision using that club as a base :
- working towards regular meetings;
- discussing construction of traction equipment in the larger unappreciated scales --- yes, larger than O and G scales
- moving toward acquring a regular meeting place
- attracting new, young people to the hobby
- asking skilled old-timers to teach building skills to teenagers and youngsters, perhaps through Scout groups
- seeing if we could work with the school system, currently in under-funded disarray
- Public Relations
- Public Relations, and
- Public Relations (our equivalent of the Real Estate : Location, Location, and Location)
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Working Together to Achieve Growth and Purpose
I was encouraged by the readership and response to our Blog about getting together. The reason that we held up the model airplane field as a Role Model (pun NOT intended) is its effective use of the Academy of Model Aeronautics as a unifying principle.
That being said, there are negative aspects to an AMA-type (some politically-oriented modelers might say, a United Nations-type) of organization. People in our post-modern world are not happy about being told what to do. The American Tea Party movement, the Arab Spring revolts in the Islamic world, and so on are examples of a reaction to authoritarian structures that lead from the top down.
Nonetheless, it might pay to look briefly at their accomplishments..
Basically, if you want to "play with model airplanes", as we are sometimes accused of "playing with model trains", you MUST join the AMA, and carry your little membership card about with you if you want to participate in a meet OR have some semblance of a voice in governance.
Non-card-carrying members of the public are welcome (even encouraged) to attend programs, but if you want to fly an airplane at an organized club meet, Join the AMA, period. The AMA then prescribes a series of --- essentially --- safety rules and uses its best efforts to encourage new members and organized, nationally-publicized programs. There are many other very good outcomes, but that's pretty much it.
National AMA events are well-publicized (when was the last national Trolley Meet?). There is a palpable sense of 'belonging' evident among members. A recent trip to the small local post office here in Florida, U.S.A., disclosed AMA decals proudly displayed on automobiles. Again, as mentioned in a previous blog, non-hobbyists on a casual visit to the local flying field were treated much as a welcome guest would be in your house.
I used to think that the insularity displayed by traction fans was the result of the many small streetcar lines that existed, a very local phenomenon so that a SEPTA fan was restricted in his own mind to a narrow mindset --- who cared about California interurbans?
But, alas, it's more than that. A national group like the AMA can swing a lot of influence in publicizing events, in ensuring favorable stories about the hobby, and even in focusing on full-size history, photography, image treatment and archiving, about programs that bring new people - especially our yout' -- and in many more areas of growth and exposure (the two go together) .
The insularity is even more evident when it comes to drawing distinctions between, say, North American streetcars and UK trams, OR between heritage trolleys and light rail vehicles. ... but most of all, if we want to encourage small garage-workshop manufacturing, in expanding the horizons of participants to someplace beyond their hometowns.
Basically, nature's Grand Program mandates "Grow OR Perish". As our ranks age in place, as we count the number of obituaries, we must realize the need to replace and increase our numbers. Unite or Dwindle might be a valid motto.
By the way, Giant Scale model airplane people, much like many live steam model railroaders, will hitch a trailer onto the family vehicle and load the very large components of their models into a trailer, then tow it to a regional or national meet. This comment is in response to the comments I received about a national program, when hobbyists asked whether we expected them to bring their trolley modules to a national program. Well, yes ! Can you imagine the media coverage? Speaking of which, how much use do we traction fans make of the Social Media. Frankly, I'm a complete novice there, but do as I say, not as I do, as I'm not a good role model there.
Anyway, you have my strong support for a national (or international --- do our people have any appreciation for the incredible light-rail networks that have spread across Europe, Asia, and ANZAC territory recently ?) organization that would unite instead of divide our ranks --- Unite or Dwindle !
That being said, there are negative aspects to an AMA-type (some politically-oriented modelers might say, a United Nations-type) of organization. People in our post-modern world are not happy about being told what to do. The American Tea Party movement, the Arab Spring revolts in the Islamic world, and so on are examples of a reaction to authoritarian structures that lead from the top down.
Nonetheless, it might pay to look briefly at their accomplishments..
Basically, if you want to "play with model airplanes", as we are sometimes accused of "playing with model trains", you MUST join the AMA, and carry your little membership card about with you if you want to participate in a meet OR have some semblance of a voice in governance.
Non-card-carrying members of the public are welcome (even encouraged) to attend programs, but if you want to fly an airplane at an organized club meet, Join the AMA, period. The AMA then prescribes a series of --- essentially --- safety rules and uses its best efforts to encourage new members and organized, nationally-publicized programs. There are many other very good outcomes, but that's pretty much it.
National AMA events are well-publicized (when was the last national Trolley Meet?). There is a palpable sense of 'belonging' evident among members. A recent trip to the small local post office here in Florida, U.S.A., disclosed AMA decals proudly displayed on automobiles. Again, as mentioned in a previous blog, non-hobbyists on a casual visit to the local flying field were treated much as a welcome guest would be in your house.
I used to think that the insularity displayed by traction fans was the result of the many small streetcar lines that existed, a very local phenomenon so that a SEPTA fan was restricted in his own mind to a narrow mindset --- who cared about California interurbans?
But, alas, it's more than that. A national group like the AMA can swing a lot of influence in publicizing events, in ensuring favorable stories about the hobby, and even in focusing on full-size history, photography, image treatment and archiving, about programs that bring new people - especially our yout' -- and in many more areas of growth and exposure (the two go together) .
The insularity is even more evident when it comes to drawing distinctions between, say, North American streetcars and UK trams, OR between heritage trolleys and light rail vehicles. ... but most of all, if we want to encourage small garage-workshop manufacturing, in expanding the horizons of participants to someplace beyond their hometowns.
Basically, nature's Grand Program mandates "Grow OR Perish". As our ranks age in place, as we count the number of obituaries, we must realize the need to replace and increase our numbers. Unite or Dwindle might be a valid motto.
By the way, Giant Scale model airplane people, much like many live steam model railroaders, will hitch a trailer onto the family vehicle and load the very large components of their models into a trailer, then tow it to a regional or national meet. This comment is in response to the comments I received about a national program, when hobbyists asked whether we expected them to bring their trolley modules to a national program. Well, yes ! Can you imagine the media coverage? Speaking of which, how much use do we traction fans make of the Social Media. Frankly, I'm a complete novice there, but do as I say, not as I do, as I'm not a good role model there.
Anyway, you have my strong support for a national (or international --- do our people have any appreciation for the incredible light-rail networks that have spread across Europe, Asia, and ANZAC territory recently ?) organization that would unite instead of divide our ranks --- Unite or Dwindle !
Friday, April 13, 2012
Gordon Hatch with a one-fourth size 15-inch gauge Birney
Gordon Hatch with a one-fourth size 15-inch gauge Birney :
The picture says it all
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