{"id":34459,"date":"2017-11-10T01:00:07","date_gmt":"2017-11-10T06:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=34459"},"modified":"2017-10-30T08:21:42","modified_gmt":"2017-10-30T12:21:42","slug":"qotd-dissing-model-railroaders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/11\/10\/qotd-dissing-model-railroaders\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Dissing model railroaders"},"content":{"rendered":"

I hate it when nonmodelers talk about model trains.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-3264325\/My-favourite-tracks-ones-trains-says-Rod-Stewart-Singer-reveals-books-second-hotel-room-models-play-tour.html<\/a>
\nhttp:\/\/www.therichest.com\/expensive-lifestyle\/money\/rod-stewart-model-train-collection\/<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not a lover of rock music so when Model Railroader<\/em> did a writeup of Rod Stewart\u2019s layout a few years back, I said who? Then I read the article and said wow, that\u2019s great work. Especially when it was obvious that Mr. Stewart did the work himself. A great model railroad isn\u2019t something you can just buy, no matter how rich you are. It\u2019s a labor of love that involves developing real skills and tens of thousands of hours of painstaking work. Most model railroads are never finished and disappear when their builders pass on, making them more or less ephemeral works of art.<\/p>\n

To call what Mr. Stewart does, \u201cplaying with trains\u201d is a direct insult. Nobody says about even the crappiest painter or sculptor that they are just \u201cplaying with paint\u201d or \u201cplaying with clay.\u201d The same for all sorts of hobbies Yet the tone that you get when you admit to modeling trains is almost always the same. Somehow building model train is playing with toys and you are doing something childish. Somehow the idea that trains come in \u201csets\u201d never seems to go beyond the train around the tree.<\/p>\n

Which couldn\u2019t be farther from the truth. Model railroading involves a great number of skills that most hobbies don\u2019t have. For instance, you don\u2019t get too far before you realize that your favorite prototype train is just not being made, or isn\u2019t being made in your railroad\u2019s paint scheme. So you get out the saw and cut up that train set locomotive and add other parts, ending by repainting the engine in your colors. Now you want a spur track on your railroad to service an industry. You might need to learn how to make your own track. That industry, well that might involve digging into historical archives to figure out what the building did before it became a shopping mall. As for how the railroad looks, those train set trees and vacuum formed tunnel get old fast, so you learn how to form hills and rocks, filling the hills with trees, that look like trees. You research that stuff too. In fact model railroading involves researching, photographing and studying far more than just the trains because the train need a reason to run and country to run through.<\/p>\n

Almost no other hobby than model trains gets the kind of ridicule that model railroaders do. Some of that is, unfortunately, self-inflicted as model railroaders aren\u2019t above poking a little at each other. Still, I\u2019m not sure what causes the stigma that goes with small trains. Yet no other hobby requires the number of skills that model railroading, if done well does. You work with more kinds of tools, frequently through magnification than just about anything else. I\u2019ve seen hobbyist machinists for instance talk about having to deal with \u201csmall parts\u201d that were larger than a typical modeling project.<\/p>\n

J.C. Carlton, “Rod Stewart And His Trains”, The Arts Mechanical<\/em><\/a>, 2016-03-17.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hate it when nonmodelers talk about model trains. http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-3264325\/My-favourite-tracks-ones-trains-says-Rod-Stewart-Singer-reveals-books-second-hotel-room-models-play-tour.html http:\/\/www.therichest.com\/expensive-lifestyle\/money\/rod-stewart-model-train-collection\/ I\u2019m not a lover of rock music so when Model Railroader did a writeup of Rod Stewart\u2019s layout a few years back, I said who? Then I read the article and said wow, that\u2019s great work. Especially when it was obvious that Mr. Stewart […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,41,237],"tags":[86,951,200],"class_list":["post-34459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-quotations","category-railways","tag-criticism","tag-modeltrains","tag-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8XN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34459"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40655,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34459\/revisions\/40655"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}