Trains of Thought
Providing quiet zones
It’s always nice when you get a note from upper management telling you they enjoyed something you had a hand in creating. In this case, it was an email from David Popp, the executive producer of Trains.com and a friend since his days on the staff of Model Railroader. He’s also a contributor to Model Railroad Planning, the annual special issue of MR that I edit, as his busy schedule permits.
“I finally got to look at MRP 2021 today over lunch. It was a rare treat to sit quietly with a magazine while I ate instead of just to keep working. I really liked Chuck Hitchcock’s new layout, and I caught myself thinking, ‘Wow, it’s nice to see Chuck tackle a compact branchline railroad while downsizing in retirement. He’s done a great job, and it just looks right.’
“Then I looked at the footprint with the track plan – 28 x 30 feet! I realized that the reason it looks right is that he’s given the subject the space it requires to breathe.
“Not all of us have that much square footage to build a layout, but it got me thinking along the lines of ‘less is really more’ when it comes to modeling a railroad. Something as large as a train, even one on a branch line, needs to have the correct amount of space surrounding it. And instead of filling the space he had with as much track as possible, he chose to treat the subject accurately instead. You can switch any town on his new layout without having your train parked in the next town over to do it.”
Veteran modeler and Chuck’s close friend Paul Dolkos agrees with David’s thoughts about providing breathing room on sections of a layout. He refers to these sections as “quiet zones.”
“When I was building the Baltimore Harbor District,” Paul recalls, “instead of another switching area in the 17 feet between the Canton Yard and the rye distillery at the end of the room, I created a rather complex quiet zone. The gently curving track crosses a bridge on three deckgirder sections and a swing bridge and passes by an oysterpacking house that is strictly scenery. Nice to look at but nothing to switch.
“On Chuck Hitchcock’s Santa Fe branch line,” he adds, “the quiet zones give one a chance to stop and take a break. Quiet zones are an important layout element.”
Gerry Leone discussed allowing “spaces between places” in MRP 2017, suggesting that we give our eyes a treat and then allow them to rest as trains traverse less intensely scenicked portions of our railroads.
On my Nickel Plate Road, I didn’t think in terms of quiet zones or giving viewers’ eyes a break. But that comes naturally when you’re modeling granger country, as most of the track is spiked down through fields rather than urban canyons.
As I describe modeling flatlands railroading, the attribute I most often point to is the interchanges between railroads – socalled “universal industries,” in that any type and quantity of freight car can be exchanged there. This makes them far more valuable sources of tonnage than almost any conventional industry you can name, and you don’t even have to build any supporting structures.
But there’s an elegance to farm country that we have too long overlooked: the beautiful barns and farm houses, the stately rows of fence posts standing like sentries guarding the fields, the rows of corn and carpets of wheat standing proud.
These agrarian features are not so intense that they interfere with the quietzone principles. They do not require direct involvement of the railroad until it reaches the next small town and serves the grain elevator and perhaps a team track, lumberyard, and so on – exactly as Chuck Hitchcock’s railroad does. So does my own, in town after town between the two terminals.
Quiet, please!
Perhaps that should be a sign we hang on our railroads as we plan and construct our scenery. Like us, they need to breathe.