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Realistic Model Railroad Design: Your Step-By-Step Guide to Creating a Unique Operating Layout
Designing a successful model railroad calls for much more work than drafting a trackplan and arranging benchwork. Creating realistic towns, industries, and “work” for your trains to perform will improve any layout, regardless of its scale.
96 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 26, 2013
In this book, author Tony Koester shares tips and tricks he has learned over the years for creating a realistic model railroad. There are many good suggestions to be had, but much of the book is aimed at a tiny segment of the model train community that I would call "psuedo-professionals." These are the people who have an entire basement, plenty of funds, and a team of fellow modelers to work on their layout, or else have a "club" layout. Many of Koester's suggestions relate to how others will perceive your railroad, or how to organize large group operating sessions. For example, he devotes the final chapter (which is admittedly short) to developing jobs for a whole "operating crew," and he has several suggestions on how to build a "crew lounge" for the people who come over for your operating sessions. Although these suggestions are certainly sound, I can't imagine most people in the model train hobby have access to teams of operators who come over on a weekly or monthly basis to run trains. On the contrary, most of us have a small table-sized layout that can occupy at most 2-3 people at once, and I'd bet the majority of modelers operate their layout alone the vast majority of the time. If you are going about your hobby solo, large chunks of this book would not be applicable to you.
Additionally, although Koester does a good job of explaining how to make your model railroad look and act more like one in the real world, I question the reasons he proposes for why one would desire to do this. It's one thing if, as a modeler, you want a hyper-realistic layout. But although that is something he discusses, Koester seems mainly to address himself, again, to those who have teams of other modelers come over, and who are trying to impress those other modelers. For example, Koester describes how "jarring" it would be to a knowledgeable modeler if you had a layout set in 1956, but you had something on the layout that didn't appear until 1959. In many cases, his goal seems to be, as he says at the end of chapter four, to "convince careful observers" of the plausibility of our railroad.
This is not to say that Koester is solely focused on pleasing large operating crews of demanding modelers. He says in several places that he doesn't advocate "rivet counting," and he admits that if we "model alone in our homes, we can set the rules." But his book is clearly aimed mainly at people who do not model alone in their homes, but at people who want to "communicate their vision to others."
Therefore, although this book is generally good, it is clearly aimed at the high end, extremely serious modeler who seeks to impress or at least work closely with other modelers. This is not to say that Koester's techniques wouldn't make any railroad more realistic -- they certainly would. But Koester's ideas are extremely specific -- including suggesting that you not only nail down an era to model (such as "Transition") or a decade ("1950s"), but an exact season within a specific year. When this leads to statements such as, "I can't run this locomotive I really like because I'm modeling fall of 1956 and that locomotive wasn't built until spring 1957," we have gotten far too specific for the hobby to be fun, at least for me.
On the other hand, if building hyper-realistic railroads is your thing, this book will certainly help you do it. Koester provides tons of advice based on his experiences over the years, and has many photographs to illustrate his points.
Additionally, although Koester does a good job of explaining how to make your model railroad look and act more like one in the real world, I question the reasons he proposes for why one would desire to do this. It's one thing if, as a modeler, you want a hyper-realistic layout. But although that is something he discusses, Koester seems mainly to address himself, again, to those who have teams of other modelers come over, and who are trying to impress those other modelers. For example, Koester describes how "jarring" it would be to a knowledgeable modeler if you had a layout set in 1956, but you had something on the layout that didn't appear until 1959. In many cases, his goal seems to be, as he says at the end of chapter four, to "convince careful observers" of the plausibility of our railroad.
This is not to say that Koester is solely focused on pleasing large operating crews of demanding modelers. He says in several places that he doesn't advocate "rivet counting," and he admits that if we "model alone in our homes, we can set the rules." But his book is clearly aimed mainly at people who do not model alone in their homes, but at people who want to "communicate their vision to others."
Therefore, although this book is generally good, it is clearly aimed at the high end, extremely serious modeler who seeks to impress or at least work closely with other modelers. This is not to say that Koester's techniques wouldn't make any railroad more realistic -- they certainly would. But Koester's ideas are extremely specific -- including suggesting that you not only nail down an era to model (such as "Transition") or a decade ("1950s"), but an exact season within a specific year. When this leads to statements such as, "I can't run this locomotive I really like because I'm modeling fall of 1956 and that locomotive wasn't built until spring 1957," we have gotten far too specific for the hobby to be fun, at least for me.
On the other hand, if building hyper-realistic railroads is your thing, this book will certainly help you do it. Koester provides tons of advice based on his experiences over the years, and has many photographs to illustrate his points.
November 26, 2020
Emphasis is on large, realistic layouts and operations. Model Railroader obsesses about operations and have claimed that some layouts run operations, even when the owner says otherwise. This leaves out too much to be a good book on layout design for operations and is passable in some other portions.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews