No this article isn’t about people in funny hats coming together, but about principles of fiction writing (and theme park design) that you can use to improve your visitors’ enjoyment of your garden railroad.
Imagine for a moment, that you are watching Murder She Wrote reruns. In another room the children are watching a Christmas fantasy. Then, in the middle of your program, Santa whisks in, gives Jessica Fletcher a present, then literally flies off on his sleigh. Wouldn’t you feel cheated, as if the program had somehow "broken the rules?" Yet it wouldn’t bother you to see Santa flying around on the other program. That’s because the "rules" are different for a murder mystery than they are for a fantasy. In the literary world, we call these rules "conventions," and authors learn how to play by the appropriate rules if they want to keep the audience’s good will and attention.
This pre-arranged agreement between author and audience to play by the rules of the genre enables the audience member to set aside a certain level of skepticism for the purpose of enjoyment. Critics call this voluntary credibility the "willing suspension of disbelief." Put even simpler, the author and audience are playing "let’s pretend" together. "Let’s pretend that a fairly normal woman keeps encountering murderers who resemble has-been television actors." Or, in the case of the Christmas program, "Let’s pretend that Santa and his flying reindeer are real." Once you’ve established the ground-rules, everybody can sit back and enjoy the show.
Now let’s apply these principles to your garden railroad. If the railroad is working at all, it’s fun already, and it may well be a focal point of your personal kingdom. But could you make it more enjoyable for visitors by helping them adopt a "willing suspension of disbelief" and engage more of their imaginations?
Start by trying to be objective about what conventions you use and expect your visitors to accept. By default, we are asking our visitors to "pretend" that people are less than three inches tall. Frequently we ask them to "pretend" that we have been transported to a different place and time as well. But beyond that, what are we asking them to "swallow"?
Sometimes indoor railroaders dismiss outdoor railroading as a less "serious" element of the hobby. But those same people ask us to believe that bushes and trees seen from a distance resemble lichen and foam rubber, that water resembles resin, and so on. What makes a great indoor layout great is that, once you accept such basic conventions, the rest of the layout makes "sense" within that context.
In outdoor railroading, we may ask our visitors to believe that bushes and trees seen from a distance look like thymes, sedums, and Dwarf Alberta Spruce. But is that any sillier than using lichen and foam rubber? Of course not. It’s just different (and to my way of thinking, better).
We may also ask our visitors to "pretend" that railroad track is made of oversize brass rails and plastic ties, or that railroad cars are coupled too far apart for a scale person to step from one to the next, or that mainlines regularly use curves that would be more at home in a switchyard. But those conventions are hardly unique to outdoor railroading. Rather, they’re so broadly accepted that ninety-nine visitors out of a hundred will overlook such things as a matter of course.
To the horror of some modelers, the same is even true of the scale and scale/gauge mismatches that plague segments of our hobby. Purists may cringe at 1:29 models on "1:32" track, for example. But no one outside our big-trains "club" will notice anything wrong with such scale/gauge mismatches if you don’t point it out to them. One way to "point it out" to visitors inadvertently is to start adding 1:32 cars to your 1:29 train (or adding 1:20.3 cars to a 1:24 train). The new equipment will look out of place to even the most casual observer. Visitors will sense that something is "wrong," even if you’re doing it with the good intention of "phasing in" equipment that is "more prototypical."
This demonstrates another principle of literary conventions: consistency is more important to "willing suspension of disbelief" than the believability of the individual details. As a result, any convention you use throughout your railroad will become "ubiquitous," that is, so omnipresent that it eventually falls beneath the observer’s notice. Oversize brass rails and plastic ties, even landscaping materials like 1:1 railroad ties and cedar mulch sink below most people’s attention in a few moments, as their eyes are drawn to the models they support and surround.
You don’t even have to be consistent throughout your empire, as long as each "scene" or aspect of your layout that is readily visible at a time is consistent within itself. A railroad recently profiled in Garden Railways has an American region, a Bavarian region, and an English country region, each separated visually from the others by distance and foliage. When you’re enjoying each section, you appreciate it for what it is. If you think about it, theme parks do the same thing. You don’t see Fantasyland elements in Frontierland, or vice versa. Consistency and appropriateness of details within each section separate a good theme park from the old-fashioned amusement park where the Alpine Racer sits next to the Western Roundup. Walt Disney probably knew more about willing suspension of disbelief than any person of our era. If we learned anything from him, it’s that consistent use of conventions is more important than the conventions themselves.
That’s why using brass track and plastic ties is less damaging to the credibility of your railroad than, say, mixing American and European prototypes in the same scene. And this may be even harder for the die-hard model railroader to accept: most visitors are more likely to be "put off" by a mismatch of period, region and scale of your buildings, people, and accessories than by a mismatch of railroad prototypes. After all, many visitors know next to nothing about trains, but they’ve lived around buildings, people, and "stuff" all their lives.
That doesn’t mean you have to discard your Old West buildings if you want to use a Victorian station. Just don’t use them in the same town. Pay attention to the real towns you drive through. How many of them have clapboard store fronts next to brick store fronts? In Ohio, the clapboard stores that originally stood in the high-rent districts were replaced by brick or stone by 1910. So my 1929 "bustling" Ohio cities can’t be full of clapboard.
If you already have a mish-mash of structures and accessories, cluster them by period, place, and scale. The fact that you’ve got a New England town doesn’t mean another town can’t have something of a frontier look. Just skootch it down the line a little and plant some miniature trees so people can’t see both clearly at the same time.
Once you’ve decided what time and place each scene represents (and what scale characterizes this particular cluster), you can fine-tune it by being selective about details such as appropriately dressed (and sized) citizens, appropriate street lamps, advertisements, and even appropriate telephone poles.
So you accumulated a bunch of Old Western buildings and now you want to model mid-20th century? Try modeling how a one-time frontier town might have looked during the Depression. Weather the buildings; shred the posters; board up some windows; paint over the business names with other, less-reputable names; put the LGB wino to good use. Attention to such details will capture your visitors’ imagination beyond what you thought was possible.
What if your structures and accessories vary wildly in scale and level of detail? Hard as it is for many modelers to accept, most visitors won’t notice that two buildings aren’t the same scale or don’t have the same quality of detail unless you put them next to each other. And what’s wrong with a little forced perspective, anyway? If possible, put the bigger people, buildings, and accessories in the foreground and the smaller ones further back. Or find other ways to camouflage the inequalities. For example, the people on my stations’ platforms are all too tall to climb onto my 29:1 trains. But when the train’s in front of the station, you can’t see them anyway. Also, I know that my PRR heavyweights look silly crossing the timber trestle, but I make it a point not to stop them there.
A related issue is the relative size of your buildings. To keep from dwarfing our trains and accessories, most of us model relatively small prototypes: small farmhouses, two-story storefronts, etc. There’s nothing wrong with that. If you drive through small old towns often, you’ll notice that most of the buildings on the same block are roughly the same size, whether you’re in residential or business districts. One thing that will make your layout look silly, though, is adding a model of a very large building to a street or town of "dinky" structures. It may, technically, be in "scale" with the building next to it—that is, its doors and windows could be the same size. But it could throw off the visitor’s sense of proportion and draw unintended attention to itself.
An exception might be, say, a one-industry town where dinky houses and stores exist in the "shadow" of a factory or mine. Then the structure becomes part of the "story" that you’re trying to tell. But try to avoid having a structure whose sheer size draws attention away from its surroundings unless you’ve planned it that way. There’s just something incongruous about a three-story railroad station in a one-horse town.
Ironically, once you understand the principles of conventions and willing suspension of disbelief, you can get away with things that would make "serious modelers" cringe. The buildings I’ve bought and built (with issues of period and proportion in mind) come in between operating sessions. On the other hand, people keep giving me those quaint wooden "bird-houses" with the hand-scrawled signs and oversize details glued on. At first I put them in the "back" for the same reason you hung Aunt Martha’s paint-by-number wedding present in the guest bedroom. But, obscured by distance and greenery, they actually seemed to "fit." Inadvertently, I had created a fading backwoods town that I didn’t have to take in at night! So I revisited the place and made sure the arrangement of the buildings made "sense." I even doctored and added some cheap old O-scale accessories. Some of the 1:29 Life-Like workers fit right in. Sure, if you walk around when a 1:22.5 train is sitting there, it looks a little silly. But from the "normal" viewing positions, it looks like a functioning little community. And the "town" adds character and perspective to the railroad as a whole. I just know better than to add a 1:22.5 general store, even if it is, technically, a far better model than the old birdhouses.
Many of you have already developed an intuitive understanding of the principles of "conventions" and "willing suspension of disbelief." You just didn’t know what they were called. To you, most of what I’ve discussed here is "common sense." But visits to a few garden railroads I’ve seen may having you agreeing with Mark Twain, that "common sense" isn’t nearly common enough.
Next time you walk out to your railroad, try to see it from a visitor’s eyes. What does your railroad ask visitors to "swallow" before they can engage their imaginations? Then, if you see the need for some changes, don’t just rip things out and replace them wholesale. Instead, try different groupings, arrangements, and locations, until each piece fits in with its local surroundings (no matter how out of place it would be in the town across the pond).
If, after several attempts, you still have some pieces that look out of place, or just make you "uncomfortable" for some reason, trade them off. The next person may have just the right place for them.
Best of luck, and keep those imaginations (and those of your visitors) active.
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Note: Family Garden TrainsTM, Garden Train StoreTM, Big Christmas TrainsTM, BIG Indoor TrainsTM, and BIG Train StoreTM are trademarks of Breakthrough Communications (www.btcomm.com). All information, data, text, and illustrations on this web site are Copyright (c) 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 by Paul D. Race. Reuse or republication without prior written permission is specifically
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