Homage

“Homage:” I think it’s one of Brian Rudko’s favourite words. For years, he’s been producing small shelf-top displays that consist of a model on a plinth with a backdrop that explains the model and why it’s important to him along with a photo or two, all artfully arranged, because that’s the kind of guy Brian is. He calls them “homages.”

So, when I got the call to come and visit his new modern-themed layout, I should not have been surprised to find it called “Simpson Terminals.” It’s an homage, he explained, to our dear friend, Marc Simpson, who we lost prematurely a few months ago. It incorporates a logistics warehouse that belongs to Dance and Pate Logistics, an homage to Mark Dance and Brian Pate, two other friends who we also wish were still snapping styrene and thumbing throttles.

Brian’s new layout is actually his old layout with the 1950’s-era plugins replaced with a tip-up warehouse and a transload. A clip-on scrap dealer hangs off staging, and an engine house appeared briefly at the beginning and end of the session. The transload is flexible, and in my operating session, it included a conveyer to empty a covered hopper and a ramp and forklifts to serve a bulkhead flat. All the track and the bulk of the scenery remained untouched from the previous two incarnations.

Where the previous versions of the layout represented a through station, the modern era version represents a short line that pulls cars from an interchange five imaginary miles distant and distributes them to customers at the terminal.

It was a slow-ops evening, with Jamie Neilson playing the part of conductor, and imagining himself riding the steps of cars or locomotive or walking. Push pins represent details, and all switches are unlocked and locked with real locks on the fascia. Brian was our acoustic engineer, and played sounds on his phone at nearly the right moments to represent coupling and applying hand brakes and pumping up the air.

Everything ran just the way you would hope, and I enjoyed the operating puzzle very much, though I would have enjoyed it more if the interchange tracks had been about two centimetres longer. However, the highlight of the evening was reconnecting with friends while flouting rule G, and paying tribute to friends who have passed.