This put a huge smile on my face – Mike’s HO scale helicopter fly through.
A wonderful bit of fun – but you eyes are soon glued on the scenery.
HO scale helicopter fly through:
If you missed Mike’s last post, it’s here. Some stunning pics and another video too.
And I was right, a lot of Mike’s pics are in the Beginner’s Guide.
Not all of Mike’s buildings are from the printable buildings buy you’ll see the ones that are.
Now on to Fred, who has some worthwhile tips:
“Hi Al,
I’ve only been reading your blog for a week now, but have enjoyed it immensely.
As a relative newcomer to railroad modeling I can’t offer any “how to” tips, because I haven’t really had the experience for years (I’m 70 now – last electric train I had was the Lionel “standard Gauge” monster I inherited from my dad!)
For years I was an RC aircraft modeler, but eventually got worn down by the violent destruction of years of work from control mishaps or a lost radio signal!
So I approach railroad modeling in my dotage with the hope of less heartache from my creations. As a newcomer I can still give you my recent impressions about this wonderful hobby, nonetheless.
As a professional architectural modeler of the 1970s and 1980s, the most important thing to me (then and now) was the issue of scale, and all of us designing buildings developed a pretty good eye for something that was out of whack in our models.
Whether or not people understand their sensitivity to scale, most viewers have it. And I would guess that all RR modelers share a real sense of it.
After all, for many modelers that’s really the whole goal, isn’t it – to achieve success with the illusion that you have created a miniature world (or a piece of a miniature world) that evokes the real thing.
And few issues are as important as scale. Texture of materials has scale. Color has scale – look down at a “real life layout” some time from an airplane and notice how the colors fade as a function of their distance from the eye, even without apparent help from air pollution.
Movement has scale – a flashing light on a police car is not the same as a flashing anti-collision light on a power plant stack. One flashes rapidly, the other in a lazier “on/off” sequence, since the larger bulb filament takes its time to completely go dark. (The current day electronics for reproducing scale lighting effects are really remarkable.) But one careless decision on track ballast can undo all the well executed aspects of your model so far.
Developers often use scale phenomena deceptively to make a building site look larger and more commodious than it really is – simply by changing the size of a piece of architectural vocabulary that offers some fundamental insight into scale – the size of the bricks or concrete block in a drawing, for instance.
When I built models I always spent a lot of time fashioning scale human figures on my foam cutter. I made sure that their heads and hands were the correct size. Although I sometimes used them in the final presentation model, where they helped me was in their placement within various portions of my designs – Is there adequate room in the lobby of a building? Does it feel cramped? Or does it feel cavernous? At the end of the day the human figure was the perfect yardstick, not only for my model, but for my design behind the model.
I would suggest that scale figures can help in RR Modeling as well……not necessarily as end participants in the layout as much as a visual aid during the decision making process. An aid at choosing and building structures, spotting an offending detail from kits (I find that ladders and railings are a real problem in N Scale, and have already started pitching what came with my kits for a wire brass and solder solution on my part.
My tip is this: spend as much time as you can fashioning a couple of human figures at 1:160 scale (for N scalers) and then use them as you model. Use them to design your refineries, your feed lots, your Victorian neighborhoods. It will really help you envision your miniature world!
All the best,
Fred
Boston”
That’s all for today folks. Please do leave a comment below if you enjoyed Mike’s HO scale helicopter fly through.
Please do keep ’em coming.
And if today is the day you get started on your layout, the Beginner’s Guide is here.
Best
Al
PS More HO scale train layouts here if that’s your thing.
