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The Model Railroader's Guide to Industries Along the Tracks 4
Fourth in a series, Industries Along the Tracks 4 features specific industries that were served by rail. Modeling tips and track plans are included to help modelers incorporate the featured industries into their layouts. Historical photos make this appeal to railfans.
- GenresTrains
88 pages, Paperback
First published October 29, 2010
5 people want to read
About the author
Jeff Wilson
138 books6 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 31, 2012
This fourth installment of Jeff Wilson's series provides information on six trackside industries that can be modeled for those of us who build model train layouts. The industries covered this time are Coal Gas, Salt, Brickyards, Quarries, Lumber, and Waterfront Operations. As usual, the book is organized into a single chapter for each industry.
This book is informative about "prototype" (real world) information, but as with the previous entries in the series, it is lacking in hints about how one would actually turn the prototype information into something one can model. Mr. Wilson admits with several industries that one could not build a full scale model on one's layout without much more space than most of us would care to devote to it. Therefore, he suggests, one should model a small part of the industry. This is where the book falls short -- what part should be modeled? Which parts can be left out without sacrificing realism? How in the world would one translate aerial black-and-white shots of a 1950s lumber industry into a model on the bench? For all but chapter 1 (Coal Gas) such advice is conspicuously absent. Only for Coal Gas does Mr. Wilson provide us with a schematic of how one could build a gas plant on the layout, including where the tracks and various buildings would go. For the rest of the chapters, we get photographs of the real thing, but no schematics we can use to translate into modeled trackwork.
One change I didn't really like from the first installment in this series is that there is no longer a table in the back of the book for HO and N scales showing what available commercial products can be used to model the industries. The information is instead distributed throughout the book, in paragraph form, at the end of each chapter. I find this format much more difficult to use than having a tabular listing in the back of the book.
Overall, this book is informative for helping one to choose which industries to model. It tells us when the industry started, when it peaked, when it declined (if it has). But the book is lacking when it comes to showing us how to actually model these industries. Therefore, although it's certainly useful, it's not quite as helpful to the modeler as it could be, and is less so than the first book in the series was.
This book is informative about "prototype" (real world) information, but as with the previous entries in the series, it is lacking in hints about how one would actually turn the prototype information into something one can model. Mr. Wilson admits with several industries that one could not build a full scale model on one's layout without much more space than most of us would care to devote to it. Therefore, he suggests, one should model a small part of the industry. This is where the book falls short -- what part should be modeled? Which parts can be left out without sacrificing realism? How in the world would one translate aerial black-and-white shots of a 1950s lumber industry into a model on the bench? For all but chapter 1 (Coal Gas) such advice is conspicuously absent. Only for Coal Gas does Mr. Wilson provide us with a schematic of how one could build a gas plant on the layout, including where the tracks and various buildings would go. For the rest of the chapters, we get photographs of the real thing, but no schematics we can use to translate into modeled trackwork.
One change I didn't really like from the first installment in this series is that there is no longer a table in the back of the book for HO and N scales showing what available commercial products can be used to model the industries. The information is instead distributed throughout the book, in paragraph form, at the end of each chapter. I find this format much more difficult to use than having a tabular listing in the back of the book.
Overall, this book is informative for helping one to choose which industries to model. It tells us when the industry started, when it peaked, when it declined (if it has). But the book is lacking when it comes to showing us how to actually model these industries. Therefore, although it's certainly useful, it's not quite as helpful to the modeler as it could be, and is less so than the first book in the series was.
Displaying 1 of 1 review