Model Railroading Limitations Can Become Positives

Sometimes I become convinced that it would be possible to build a decent model railroad in a maximum security prison. Maybe I'm stretching it a little bit, but I have heard stories of model railroads with virtually no space, money, or even access to supplies. No space is no excuse, we in the model railroading community often say, well perhaps nothing is no excuse. As a guy with little space and little money, some of the stories I've heard about extraordinary modelers have inspired me and they can inspire you.

Case in point is an article from the March 1994 issue of Model Railroader (which you might be able to find as a back issue at hobby shops or online). The article detailed the conditions that Russian model railroaders faced. I'm sure conditions are marginally better now than they were only three years after the fall of the Soviet Union but I doubt that they're anything near to what model railroaders in the USA are blessed with. Not only that, but there was a small model railroading community even in the Soviet era, dating back as far as the 1960s. Apparently these Russians labored without a single hobby shop in the entire Soviet Union, which is geographically the largest nation on Earth and in 1991 had a population slightly under the USA of 2009 (after the breakup, Russia alone has only about half of the USA today). One of the largest nations on Earth, and no hobby industry to speak of! But they did not give up. According to the article the Russian railroaders went so far as to barter for auto paint in place of hobby paint, small airplane parts to cobble motors, and a fluid used to clean printing press plates in place of non-existent plastic glue. They even had to measure the prototypes themselves in order to scratchbuild them since the government provided none, and scratchbuild everything since nothing was for sale (other than some engines made in East Germany, which nonetheless cost more than most Russians earned in a month). In other words, they did it in spite of having basically no supplies.

Oh my, oh my. For all those who said they could not do it, there is hope. If those resourceful Russians could cobble up this hobby from nil so can you. But what about space? Sure, if you wanted to you could go to the trouble of scratchbuilding and have a truly rewarding experience, but what about space? Space is one of the trickiest things, but I believe firmly that short of living inside of a capsule of some sort, that everybody has space. I've thought of a few places where space could be gleaned for a model railroad (some of them very creative!) and a temporary working area created, in the tiniest apartment or the most crammed house.

I was actually inspired to write this article as I stood looking into some of the closets at my house. I've got a bathroom closet that is fairly deep but has the width of a common hollow-core door. I know an HO layout would never fit inside, but I began to theorize about a layout in N which I could put in there. I could, for instance, place an N scale layout measuring just over two feet deep and just over three feet wide and have it situated fairly high up. I could then put a workbench on a shelf right below there and have a folding chair or something like that I could work with and put away. In a bathroom no less!

I also began to theorize about a model railroad that could be built up and lowered down to a bed for operation. I'm sure I could somehow engineer a mechanism that was sturdy. Now, the only trouble with this one is the danger of it collapsing and falling on you while you are sleeping, which is always going to be a reality no matter how well you engineer the mechanism. However, I believe that a better location would be over a table or in the middle of a room, such as a TV room. While people are sitting you could have it raised and when people were out and you wanted to operate it you could lower it down. Once again the most practical scale here would be N or Z, although I think somewhere I heard about an O scale layout that could be raised and lowered, although I'm not positive where. I've certainly heard many times about people who have built layouts that can be raised up into shelves and collapsed down, of course its only what I've been told and what I've read and nothing I've ever seen. Thankfully I have room for a 4 x 8, but should circumstances ever force me I wouldn't mind trying the whole collapsible approach.

Certainly one of the philosophies I've always held is that in limitations there are strengths. If I don't have the money, supplies, or space I need to be creative. In being creative I find that a universal rule is that different things you never thought of come up in the process, sometimes for worse but very, very often for better. You might have an idea you never thought of before. Now for a long time I always thought that it would be great to have millions of dollars, a large mansion, and a trove of ready-to-run brass equipment but now I'm not so sure. It stifles creativity. I can see the point that busy rich folks have in hiring professional layout builders to build layouts for them, and some of what these professional's create are absolutely dynamite. I begin to think of Clarke Dunham who spent his entire career in Broadway set design and moved into model railroading. I'd love to have one of his beautiful albeit incredibly expensive layouts in my basement, and this man is a genius. However, I think Clarke probably has a lot more fun building his layouts than his clients do owning them. I'm sure they have fun, but I think they are missing something, and it is probably unknown to them but I know for sure that I could never crack it. It's one of these reasons that I'm one of the few people who has actually worried about the dangers of if I were to ever become rich. I know it sounds crazy, but I really do worry that riches will sap my creativity by making me complacent since I will have everything available to me by money. Of course, I'm not rich yet and I have a LONG way to go so I can rest easy.

The bottom line is this, in model railroading there are always going to be limitations. Sometimes those limitations are huge but the simple fact is that you can ALWAYS overcome them somehow. You might not be living in model railroading Nirvana, but you can at least live out the creativity and ingenuity that make this hobby, and indeed being human, so amazing. I actually think that being a god would be somewhat boring, because you would never have to work or think hard. It's kind of like those reality shows about rich people, in fact if you look back on the Greek gods they pretty much were a prototypical reality show about rich people, only with magical powers, and like all reality shows the Greek gods were really mythology masquerading as reality. Of course, I'm on a huge tangent there, or am I? The lessons of model railroading can apply to all of life. I know that a saying like, "In limitations there is strength to be found," may be totally lost on the modern American culture, which embraces ease, excess, and convenience. Sometimes I think we are missing out on something. I think that those Russian modelers would agree. It kind of goes along the lines of how Sartre said that the French were freer under the Nazis than they had ever been, since under the Nazis it made every choice deliberate and so we were condemned to take our freedom of the will as human beings even more seriously. I always laughed at that, but finally got it when I opened up my old magazines and saw that article about those Russians. Now I know that this whole thing became tied up in philosophy, but then again what philosophy needs is to be brought down to Earth a bit. And model railroading is a great connection. Odd but true.