EDITOR’S SOAPBOX: Selective Compression Turning less into more ... Reader Feedback
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L Charlie Comstock has been a regular columnist, author, and editor of Model Railroad Hobbyist
Magazine since its inception. To learn more about Charlie, click here.
et’s face it. The vast majority of us will never have enough space to model everything we want to include on our layouts. Over time, and through many counselling sessions (referred to by some as “hanging out with the trainheads”) we learn to deal with such realities and move on with life – and our layouts. Maybe the mantra “it’s not what you’ve got, but how you use it” applies here? When it comes to dealing with our limited spaces we resort to various techniques and ruses. Shortening the mainline to make room for more towns. Reducing the size and number of towns and picking a handful of key structures or features. We include those to clue visitors in on where we’re modeling and omit lots of the humdrum surrounding them. Resorting to trickery such as strategically placed mirrors to make it seem as though the layout extends beyond the walls. Building a series of microvignettes to seduce the eye into dawdling over each area of the layout,
Page 8 • Issue 11-11• Nov 2011
Editorial
making it feel bigger when viewed up close. Modeling large structures at a reduced scale.
switch crew, a two man local switch job in Redland, and two man road crews. The first reductions are road crews. Locals, which do a ton of switching, keep two man crews, but other trains run with just an engineer.
The list goes on. With operations we face different problems. Sometimes we look for ways to justify more traffic than would be present on our tracks. Those modeling heavy duty mainlines are not likely to have sufficient staging to permit running 100 trains a session so a subset of trains is selected. Our all-too-short mainlines present us with runs that end too soon. Either we run more slowly to savor the mainline, or some of us park trains in a tunnel for a few minutes to represent running up mainline miles somewhere. One compresses time, the other real estate. A fast clock compresses the appearance of elapsed time. The most recent op session on the Bear Creek and South Jackson was interesting – there were only eight operators present. I consider a full crew to be 14 to 18 people though it’s possible to run all positions with 10. What are the crew positions and how did I compress them?
I made more cuts by dropping the second man in the switch crew at Redland and making the yardmaster run his own switch engine. The next step is using single man crews for locals. This lets the railroad run with a crew of 10 people. But I only had eight, what now? The dispatcher got a throttle and dispatched from a cab instead of his office. Instead of TWC (track warrant control), trains ran on verbal authority. The fast clock was turned off and trains departed in sequence as space and crews became available. “Is there room in the destination staging area? Is the track where you need to go clear enough? Then go!” The result? We ran a 3.5 hour session in about 2.5 hours, with a pint sized crew. Sometimes less really is more!
The “bare creek”, as I sometimes call it, uses a dispatcher, a yardmaster, a yard
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