Friday, May 04, 2012

How not to do it (or 'don't look at the prototype, its not like the plans at all!')

Further help for beginning modelers as to how not to do things so that more experienced modelers don't pick in their short comings.

Here we see that our modeler has wired a DCC jumper between his lengths of rail. However these always look better underneath the layout away from the rivet counters. At very least they should be on the outside of the rail.

Tutt tutt tutt where to begin. The isolating groves in the PCB sleepering have not been filled in. The sleepers are not regularly spaced, nor are they all at right angles to the rail. The ballasting is also not symmetrically applied, with the sleepers on the right completely buried, while those on the left are exposed. This was repeated many times along this stretch of track on both sides of the line. maybe a better ballast spreader could be purchased (there were plenty of drag marks like this for most the walk).

Here the modeler has essentially 'phoned it in' and not bothered with the correct tunnel mouth shape. This is fine if its next to a fiddle yard, but not where everyone can see it.

Finally, make sure that all your rolling stock is the correct height, otherwise damage and poor running is sure to follow (Note the notches where someone tried to make a Hi-cube container fit into the tunnel mouth. Must have made a pretty noise.)

1 comment:

MaverickNZ said...

Nicely put and not nice photos of various things from a different perspective.

A friend of mine takes great pride in proving rivet counters wrong when they say "they never did that in real life". A recent example was proving someone wrong when they said ballast wagons never used to be put on mixed goods trains.