Finished Island Model Works Silverliners Spotted in the Wild

I nearly spit out my decaf when this stunning photo graced the top of a recent Model Railroad Hobbyist blast email. The models and photos are the work of Tim Nicholson.  The modeling alone caught my eye: the colors and textures alone capture the look and feel of the Northeast Corridor in late spring or summer. Then I realized I was looking at an electric MU car under wire! Woo hoo! Photo and models courtesy of Tim Nicholson and Model Railroad Hobbyist. 

There's a lot of great modeling going on in Tim's deceptively simple vignettes. In addition to doing a bang-up job with a tough Island Model Works kit--the lights and the little details like wipers, marker lights, hoses, safety chains, of which modern passenger equipment seem to be full--the right-of-way and structures show remarkable craftsmanship. Details to look out for in this photo: concrete detail, station windows, and joint bars. Photo and models courtesy of Tim Nicholson and Model Railroad Hobbyist.  

And those poles and that wire. Notice the fine gauge wire, and the compound catenary (the prototypically correct double contact wire). The cantilever poles and insulators are also prototypically proportioned. Hoping to see more of Tim's work!

Modern Narrow Gauge, Another Persistently Obtuse Interest

Modern narrow gauge I have known:
PeruRail GE diesels in Aguas Caliente,
station stop for Macchu Picchu.

 When I was a wee lad reading Model Railroader magazine back in the 70s and 80s, there seemed to be a lot of coverage of narrow gauge modeling. Malcolm Furlow’s various project railroads and photography epitomized this 80s-period narrow gauge mania. Pretty quickly, I kind of lost interest--old Rio Grande steam locomotives, wood rolling stock, and lots of quaint and scenic and rustic things. It wasn’t the big time railroading I was growing up with in Northwestern Indiana, and narrow gauge modeling seemed to be set in cartoony scenery compared to my environs.

Nonetheless, the modeling itself intrigued me, and I especially gobbled up anything on Bob Hayden and Dave Frary’s Carrabasset and Dead River Ry. layout. The C&DR looked interesting while also looking workaday--it was a slice of life in rural New England in days gone by--instead of spectacular Rocky Mountain and Wile E. Coyote vs. Road Runner southwest vistas.

During this same time period, in the March 1979 Model Railroader, a "Trade Topics" review of a brass PSC HOn3 White Pass & Yukon DL535E appeared. Here was a weirdly proportioned, butch-looking Alco, vaguely reminiscent of an Alco C420, and I was intrigued. WP&Y information was hard to come by for this middle-school-aged Hoosier, but over the years I came to know more about this modern narrow gauge line and its second-generation diesel fleet.

A White Pass & Yukon DL535E narrow gauge
road switcher. It’s about the size of an RS3,
but is proportioned more like a C420. Note the
 ‘swole’ radiator and filter protuberances--some-
thing that the Alco/MLW engineers couldn’t
figure out how to shrink down to 3’ gauge
proportions.
Photo courtesy Wikipedia /Yufei Yuan

Even more interesting is discovering that there are even examples of narrow gauge heavy electrics, and one doesn't need to look far to find HOn30 (called HOe in Europe), HOm (HO meter gauge) or even, after a fashion, N scale narrow gauge electric railroad models. (Kato offers 1/150 scale models of modern Swiss meter-gauge Rhaetian Railway models that run on conventional 9 mm N gauge track.) Practically every issue of Continental Modeller covers at least one European or other international narrow gauge layout, and most are 'modern' if not post WW2.

I keep thinking about the possibilities of modern narrow gauge modeling. One obvious approach would be European prototype narrow gauge, of which there is an extensive selection of prototypes, models, and track. Another approach would be straight up modeling the WP&Y. Several key rolling stock items have been offered over the years in several scales.

But I've often thought about splitting the difference: how about a modern, updated C&DR? Turns out I'm not the only one with this idea. Ted Alexander's Norfolk Terminal (NT) layout, featured here on Nick Pautler's To Points East blog, is indeed an updated, modern C&DR. Ted has done an excellent job capturing the look and feel of what a modern Maine two-footer might actually look like. And unlike many model narrow gauge pikes, it has a sparse, industrial look and feel instead of a cute and whimsical fantasy junkyard vibe. Nothing against cute and whimsical fantasy junkyards--I certainly enjoy looking at them, especially those that seem to spring up among On30 model railroaders--but they just aren’t my jam.

Thoughts of a modern passenger and rock hauler, in an interesting, not-often-modeled setting have come back to me repeatedly over the years. That setting might be the Alps, a Caribbean island, a Latin American country, or even rural New England or eastern maritime Canada. Doing so in O, S, or HO would give me the chance to indulge a subsidiary interest in vehicle modeling that my recent N scale modeling doesn’t avail well. And of course, there’s the possibility of wires and pantographs over the weird little trains. Let’s see what turns up . . .

DCC, Complaining About

Bernie Kempinski admitted in a recent post on his USMRR Aquia Line blog that he loves to complain about DCC, and this wasn't his first run at this most evergreen source of model railroading disappointment. He unleashed a torrent of bile on DCC quirks and incompatibility back in 2017 or so, which I somehow missed.

Regular readers here know that I certainly have my own DCC grievances, but I usually frame my DCC dyspepsia by expressing envy for the European approach to DCC. (Like, why don't we North American model railroaders have graphic interfaces on our controllers, seamless compatibility with our consumer gadgets like smart phones and tablets, and for the love of all that is good, standard decoder plugs?)

Bernie lamented in 2017 that the rat's nest of incompatible programming specs and protocols that cause various combinations of models, decoders, programmers, and controllers to not work well with each other. He also noted that a number of DCC products intended to work with computers are actually only narrowly compatible with a few types of computers and operating systems.

I've certainly experienced those very problems in my own adventures with DCC, which I finally resolved by acquiring a dedicated Windows 10 computer and then my ESU ECoS controller, which has sufficent amperage and support for multiple DCC and proprietary control protocols.

In other words, I solved my DCC problems by acquiring some major DCC artillery worth around a cool grand, although I got lucky acquiring the ECoS and the Windows 10 computer second-hand for half that.

Solving ordinary DCC challenges shouldn't bust the hobby budget.

* * *

Another DCC observation: I've noticed that decoders are often defective right out of the package. Interestingly, the first DCC control system I ever bought, a Digitrax Zephyr, was also defective right out of the box. Are there perhaps low expectations for manufacturing quality in this space?

Fortunately, all of the DCC manufacturers I've dealt with have robust warranty policies. I haven't kept detailed track of my experiences with defective decoders, and I will freely accept that my own mishandling or misinstallation might have played a role, but I think around 10% of my 40 or so decoders--across several DCC brands--have had some kind of failure at or very shortly after installation. This failure rate did pick up with launch into N scale--maybe tiny decoders are more fragile and/or defect prone?

But I've had enough installation jobs stalled by the 2-4 week warranty return process to have noticed and make this complaint.

 * * *

Bernie's recent post reiterated his 2017 complaint that diesel sound, which he dismisses as "industrial noise," is the culprit behind possibly needless DCC complexity.

I agree with Bernie about industrial noise. Modern diesels and electrics do have a kind of sonic sameness, with some differences here and there. That sameness is exacerbated by the small speakers common to small HO and nearly all N scale locomotive models.

So that's where I will pile on to Bernie's specific complaint about sound--that (modern) locomotive sound is indeed so much noise, to which I will add that sound might just be a bridge too far for many smaller models. As a result, nearly all N scale and many HO models end up being expensive, unreliable little industrial noise makers.

One additional data point for this assessment is an experience I had at the 2018 O Scale convention here in Rockville, MD, last year. I was chatting with Tony Koester, and a sound-equipped O scale SW1500 that was running on a nearby modular layout was loud and high quality enough to interrupt our conversation! At this point, I realized that speaker size and installation make a critical difference to the model railroad sound experience.

I'm certainly not opposed to model railroad sound--I just think that tiny locomotive-based speakers might not be the optimal approach. On small layouts, stationary speakers--even cheap ones, like, say, computer speakers--would undoubtedly render sound more dynamically and faithfully than sugar-cube sized speakers encased in moving locomotive shells. They would also allow for other environmental sounds to be mixed in, such as right-of-way sounds (singing wire, something I've touched on previously), nature sounds (cicadas, for example, would be appropriate for the Old Line Corridor's wooded mid-Atlantic locale), and of course, Bernie's dreaded industrial noises.

The moral of the sound part of this story: maybe model rail manufacturers are expecting DCC to do too much, and maybe there are better ways to add the sonic dimension to our model railroads.