Manhattan Modelers | Save The Date | First In Person Meeting
Apr 06, 2023 2:01 pm
Newsletter | April 2023
Hopefully nobody was too taken in by an April Fool’s Day prank or this wild whip-saw weather.
In the last month our little group has been growing solidly. We have our first Zoom Meeting under our belt and another one planned for later this month. Ten Manhattan Modeler Members made it to the first meeting. Heath Hurwitz, Jonathan Jones and I were zooming in from Heath’s Layout and YouTube Studio. The meeting went very well. We started with introductions and shared some modeling projects. The conversation flowed until there was a hiccup with the Zoom and we realized how late it had gotten.
We also have an in-person meeting planned for May at Phil Monet’s amazing layout in the Bronx. [More info below in this newsletter]
To keep the conversations going Manhattan Modelers has made a Discord channel as well as a YouTube channel. Several members are already on the Discord channel and there have been conversations on small space solutions and sharing modeling progress. If anyone needs help getting onto the Discord please feel free to reach out to us.
Manhattan Modeler member Dan Free (a lawyer in his civilian life) and I traveled to an operating session on Thom Radice’s wonderful Civil War Era layout in suburban New Jersey. During the long train ride, we fleshed out some group by-laws we will put into effect soon. They will be posted on the website.
One of the lessons I have learned from Thom’s layout is if you are worried about slowing down operations on a small layout consider operating in the early 19th century era. Nothing slows down operation faster than operating these early trains in a prototypical way. Trains tended to be shorter because of the traction abilities of the engines but they were also more frequent (kind of ideal for a model railroad). The small steam engines need to stop at every water tower and wood fuel rack to refuel. Switching cars with link and pin couplers as well as using the drawbars on the engines pilot really can extend your operation time. More modern railroad technology has done a lot to improve speed and efficiency but, in our case, maybe slower can make the layout seem larger.
Thank You. I hope to see you all at the next Zoom or chat with you in the Manhattan Modelers Discord Channel.
Andy Estep
We are very excited to announce that we have scheduled our very first in person meetup of the Manhattan Modelers.
The word is spreading about what we are creating and a NYC based layout owner graciously offered his layout space to hold our first meeting. We will meet at 7pm on May 1st in the Spuyten Duyvil area of Riverdale. There will be approximately 45 minutes of social time, getting to know everyone that can attend. After that we will get a tour of the layout, exploring how the creative use of space allows for a long mainline runs and long HO consists. We will wrap up around 9pm.
Please save the date, as this is an meetup that you will not want to miss.
Heath Hurwitz
Manhattan Modelers | Online Meet and Greet
April 17th @ 7pm ET
Meet and Greet and how to Join Discord for future online meetings
Join Zoom Meeting - https://us05web.zoom.us/j/84474941877?pwd=TkYrVFBJRUZqS0RDcFo1REordEJ0dz09
Meeting ID: 844 7494 1877
Passcode: g0LdjK
Island Ops 2023
April 28th- 30, 2023
Preregister for open model railroad operations on layouts in the NYC and Long Island area.
Manhattan Modelers | First In Person Meetup
May 1st, 7pm to 9pm ET
Location: Private Layout near the Spuyten Duyvil Library in Riverdale, NY (Exact location to be provided only to attendees)
Transportation: Up the hill from the 1 train at 231st Street
Clinic: Layout Tour demonstrating how creative use of space allows for the ability to run long trains over extended mainline runs.
Small Layout Design Egg-Streme!
Andy Estep
I first became interested in small layouts and their designs when I realized that if was ever going to have a layout it would have to be a small one. I have been what you would call an “Armchair modeler” for many years. The history, research and planning has always been an area that has fascinated me when it comes to model railroading.
The first small layout that I can point to and say this one is special is John Allen’s first small “Gorre and Daphidid”. This little layout was definitely a product of its time, a lot of fun in a small space. Two times around over and under round and round but it could be operated as a point to point from the town in the valley to the camp at the top. I still find the design interesting how it tries to cram so much into space smaller than a 4 by 8 sheet of plywood.
John’s “Timesaver” small switching layout idea must be one of the most influential and replicated layout designs ever. A switching puzzle with very complicated trackwork in a very tight area. Perfect for those of us with small spaces. The other switching puzzle layout that must be in the close running for most popular is the “Inglenook Sidings”. A far simpler design with a switch lead, two switches and three tracks, all arranged like a fork. There are a given number of cars, the sidings are specific lengths dictated by the car lengths and the point of the layout operation is that the cars are rearranged into specific orders for a later departure to “somewhere off layout”. It makes for a fun little mental challenge.
British exhibition based layout design I find fascinating. The way a layout can be a small slice of a bigger railroad and inventions like staging yards, track cassettes and transversers seem like a perfect way of making a layout fit into the limited space available to me. My own layout follows early British prototype following some ideas I learned from studying UK layouts.
More recently in the early 2000’s there was a website made by Carl Arendt called the Micro Layout Design Gallery. Carl curated a monthly gallery of submissions of very small layouts. Some very whimsical and some based on very small prototypes. Usually, the prototype-based ones were industrial operations. He coined the phrase “Pizza Layout”. A pizza layout is a layout that is a circle of track usually the whole thing is small enough to fit into a pizza box. Recently at the Amherst Train Show in Springfield this year, the NMRA announced their Pizza Layout initiative to inspire new modelers by creating their own. They are silly and fun but an achievable goal.
Carl passed away several years ago but others have maintained his website. It can be found at www.carendt.com.
For a bit of April fun, I am sharing some pictures of my Pizza Layout I made in 2013. It was 3 rail O scale and was about the Egg Island Black Jellybean mining operation. Egg Island is a small oddly shaped island that is part of the Easter Island Archipelago. It has the only naturally occurring veins of black jellybeans in the world. A mining operation was set up to move hoppers of the jellybeans from the mine to waiting ships.
The layout was made of big plastic nesting eggs I found at a dollar store and some foam core holding up the track and worker walkways. The water was painted aluminum foil and the rockwork was painted bark. This layout is currently stored away worse for wear but I like the idea of revisiting it and updating it into an On30 layout with some better scenery.
Upcoming Project #436.
Small layouts can be fun and whimsical or more studied and serious but I do feel like there is definitely some room for small layouts in the hobby.
Call for Articles
We would love to have some articles from our members to include in upcoming newsletters. We want more voices heard and more ideas raised. We have several upcoming articles that I know will be very interesting to members in the works, but more are always welcome. Please contact us with ideas so we can work them into our plans.
Join us on Discord
We have setup a Manhattan Modelers Discord as a place to share projects & ideas, post events, ask and answer questions and make connections.
We have chosen Discord because it is organized around specific interests instead of providing a unified newsfeed. Discord is focused on real-time interactions between people, whereas other social media options function as internet message boards.
Discord also has a Zoom like video conferencing feature, but without the limits of the free Zoom.
Click on this link which will ask you to either create an account or login to your existing account.
Once you join, you will see the logo for the Manhattan Modelers "server" on the left and the various "channel" topics on listed to their right.
Please take a moment to introduce yourself in the #introduce-yourself channel
