Re: Summer Idyll

Posted by John Greenly on Jul 14, 2016; 10:14pm
URL: http://c-sng-discussion-forum.254.s1.nabble.com/Summer-Idyll-tp5549p5595.html

"South Park",
these thoughts are very much in my mind, having recently returned to model-building after 45 years off in the real (if that's what it is) world.  What got me started last winter was randomly running across a locomotive on Ebay that I had coveted as a teenager, so it was pure nostalgia at first.  But, largely due to this discussion group, I've become re-fascinated with the history of this railroad and all its associated technologies and societal consequences.   For me, building a model seems to be all about finding out how things worked, why they were done the way they were, how they affected people.  This seems an awful lot easier now than it was 40 years ago,  with tremendous resources like the collective expertise of this group, and all the wonderful photographs, drawings and other reference data available online.  It's good that people are doing this.  We so easily lose memory of earlier times, and lose appreciation for the highly mature and sophisticated technologies, like steam locomotives, that were the icons of an earlier age.  I think more and more as I get older that almost any human endeavour, carried out at its highest level, becomes indistinguishable from magic.  That's a way of saying that the hidden depth of experience that enabled people to build and run railroads over the impossible-looking terrain that the C&S traversed can look magical.  Building models is a kind of celebration of that magic.

Making replicas in 12" to the foot scale would be even better than these little itty-bitty things, yes, but the 100 ft pin-connected truss bridge I'm working on would pretty well fill up my back yard… not to mention bankrupting me.  Would be rather spectacular, though.  I could live underneath it and boil my cat food over an open fire.  

I have time to jump into this railroad world only for short periods, an hour here and there usually late in the evening, and the things I work on live in a semi-permanent (note the optimistic prefix) unfinished state, but I don't let it bug me.  I sit down,  look at the rolling stock, the loco I started to scratch-build as a teenager, the bridge, the paper model of a handsome small depot on the F&CC that I made decades ago, and I let my eye wander until it settles on a question: how should I do this, why was it that way, how can I construct it… and I'm off to the computer to dig into it.  So far, I am continually discovering big mistakes in pretty much everything I've done as I run across more information, but that's all right too, it's the learning that's fun.

So, I second the thanks to all of you for your information and your inspiration.

thanks,
John