TRAINWORLD
Model railroading is partly about trains, but it has more to do with larger themes: landscape, topography, the built environment. A modeler may lavish attention on his rolling stock, but the train is only the beginning of his project. It is the layout that fulfills his deepest aspirations. Without it, the elaborate games of operation might have the same charm as rolling marbles through a chute.
There are no iron-clad rules that control for this form. My own childhood layout, built by my father, was a smear of incoherent elements. There was a Flintstones village with giant Wilmas, and tiny 1960s rockets on a model launch pad. But a real layout will be nothing like this. The prevailing convention calls for a unified space with all the parts in scale with one another.
At this point, schools of modeling diverge. On the one side are gentle hills and water features. The modeler works toward a nostalgic meditation, a dreamlike landscape of perfect forms. On the other side is a kind of modeling counter-tradition: the ugly mining pool clogged by debris; the scruffy rail yard; the graffiti-sprayed bridge. The modeler is typically a restless artist, supported by a lively culture of tinkering. His hand is almost always visible in the half-finished hillside, the raw plaster edge.
These pictures are part of a larger body that attempts to capture the varieties of modeling. What these traditions share is a high-gloss mannerism, the painstaking effort to create an ordered miniature. The work of the modeler is almost always touching in its focused, demanding, heroic earnestness.
And the result can be a kind of visual triumph, achieving a brilliant monumentality. The modeler is a maker, a creator, a god. In the belly of his basement he brings a universe to life. The lights go on, the track begins to hum, and an animating vigor is suddenly revealed. The stillness of the landscape gives way to activity. These pictures explore not only the work of the modeler but, by extension, his temperament, his needs, and his power.
