The fourth audience

Gary Hinshaw pointed out that I’d missed an important fourth audience in my post about art and model railroading: the layout builder themself. How do they respond to the layout? To be sure, I have difficulty thinking of myself as the audience of my layout. I spend too much time behind the curtain to expect […]

Hilton’s Art

From the moment James Hilton announced his latest book, “The Art of Railway Modelling,” I knew a copy would take up residence on my bookshelf. In the buying frenzy of Black Friday, my mouse blundered onto the Titfield Thunderbolt page, and before I knew what was happening, it had completed checkout without any input from […]

The more we made it boring…

In Hindsight 20/20 this morning, Matthieu Lachance, who presented an entertaining and of course beautiful clinic about his group’s modelling journey, dropped this amazing juxtaposition: “The more we made it boring, the more it stood out.” He went on to elaborate that people were excited by the mundane because they recognized it. This thought meshes […]

Pembroke87 Joins the Fediverse

I first became aware of the idea of a decentralized social network through Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction novel, The Ministry of the Future. Here is his fictional account For everyone else, using these sites means they’ll control their data, rather than it being used and mined. That privacy can then be a resource to […]

Optimism and Industry

On Thursday, my friend, Mark Dance of Columbia and Western fame invited a few of us over for an evening of pizza and beer and talking about model trains. The question he wanted to discuss was whether model railroads can be art, and what are the implications if they are. It was a fun evening, […]

Dogs and Tennis Balls and Math

In Lance Mindheim’s post this week about simple layouts, he likens himself to a dog with a tennis ball. He’s happy to repeat the same moves time and again, much like the professionals. But what if you’re not like a dog chasing a tennis ball? How much complexity does it take so that you will […]

The Stars of the Show

A couple of weeks ago, Trevor Marshall mentioned Jonathan Jones’s intriguing article in the 2023 issue of Model Railroad Planning, specifically Mr. Jones’s* assertion that if everything is important, then nothing is important. I’ve been wanting to write about this article since it came out, as it is the most innovative thing I’ve read in […]

A Lesson in 3D Composition

During March Break we took a weekend break in Victoria, a short Ferry hop across the Salish Sea. We found ourselves sitting beside the statue of Emily Carr sketching on her corner opposite the provincial legislature, when a little tour group came by. The guide gesticulated vertically toward the statue, and enthusiastically expatiated in some […]

Model Railroad Planning 2022: All in the Family Room

Model Railroad Planning 2022 is finally at McNews on Lonsdale, and with it, buried near the back cover, my little article about Pembroke. You should really pick up a copy if you haven’t already. There are several thought-provoking articles that could help you see the hobby in a new way. And then there is mine. […]

The Images that Draw Us

In the silent auction of Ken Chivers’s estate almost forty years ago, I won the book, Fairy Tale Railroad, the story of the Mohawk and Malone Railroad in upper New York State. As my modelling interests matured, the danger of modelling New York dissipated and the book was a candidate to re-home. It was nearly […]