Famous Train Layouts

[jbsmith]

Famous Layouts or the layouts of Famous People is the theme of this new thread.

To Start things off, The layout of Gomez Addams.
I like to think there is a little bit of Gomez in all of us.

First this one shows a recreation of the 1960s' TV show layout

http://www.toytrains.info/info.asp?t=Trackage&colnum=10&submit=go

This layout plan is the one used in the movie

http://addamsfamily.com/addams/addamstrain1.jpg

The TV layout in Action!  From 5-Minutes 40 seconds to about  6-Minutes 24seconds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOJRHeF0Jas

Myuh HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSQymg0UHvk

[Jim Banner]

Two words say it all:

John Allen

Jim

[jbsmith]

John Allen?

Eventually i found this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Whitby_Allen

[jbsmith]

Rock N Roll Singer Rod Stewart

http://www.trains.com/mrr/default.aspx?c=a&id=2167

[jbsmith]

Rock N Roll Singer Neil Young

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UENULIH0Ks

http://findmodelrailroads.com/neil-young-lionel-model-train-company

http://www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/Features/Smokestack%20Lightnin__%20Neil%20You/

[jbsmith]

Found this List!
wow!
Ringo Star, Micheal Jordan, Walt Disney, James Doohan [Mr. Scott] ,Winston Churchill, Hermann Goring, Tom Brokaw,
plus others, am surprised to see so many!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rail_transport_modellers

Here is challenge;
Find some photos of their layouts!

[J3a-614]

Photos on John Allen and the Gorre & Daphetid--glad to oblige!  (Easy, too.)

http://www.gdlines.com/

http://gorre-and-daphetid.witt-family.com/

[pdlethbridge]

I remember ads showing Mel torme and didn't sam posey have his layout shown in MR?

[J3a-614]

You're right, P.D.  Mel Torme was in at least one or two ads for Akane if I recall correctly (and I seem to remember him as admiring a B&O EM-1 2-8-8-4), and Sam Posey's road was in MR twice, and I think may have made the cover both times. . .who has the magazines handy (not buried in boxes like mine) to confirm this, and perhaps supply dates?

Not mentioned so far--Frank Sinatra and Eddie Anderson ("Rochester" on the Jack Benny show), both Lionel men.

Because he was such an icon (and the trains are such an important part of the parks), there is plenty on Walt Disney, and the various Disney park roads.  For this, though, we'll stick with Disney's personal operations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolwood_Pacific_Railroad

http://www.sci.fi/~animato/rail/walt.html

http://www.burnsland.com/index.shtml

http://burnsland.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=481

http://www.burnsland.com/sdra/cprr.shtml

http://www.carolwood.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5kUY4zLWU0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1Rf7Ygy6TA&feature=related

The late Ollie Johnson was one of Disney's animators, and an influence on the backyard road back in the day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crHlOYmzWTA&feature=related

The late Ward Kimball was also a rail enthusiast, with full-sized 3-foot equipment!  Here is some Disney (and Kimball)footage--but don't ask me why it has a horribly mismatched Pentrex video soundtrack, this is just how I found it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9LnZ52KTKg&feature=related

Not exactly model railroad, but had to include it--Casey Jones as interpreted by Disney and Jerry Colonna with The King's Men:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbTBk4pDIHA&feature=related

We can't ignore a very well-known traction fan:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Rogers%27_Neighborhood

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Rogers

Whew!

[Guilford Guy]

Buster Keaton had American Flyer in his backyard.

[Jim Banner]

Looks like I got the subject wrong.  I thought it meant famous train layouts, not the layouts of famous people.  John Allen himself was not famous except in the model railroading field.  He had not only the best known layout of his generation but introduced innovations that today we consider model railroading standards.  Things like selective compression, forced perspective, the use of mirrors, weathering, dimming of room lighting to simulate day and night operation, just to mention a few.

Perhaps John Allen was forgotten during the period when modeling steam was out of fashion (John hated diesels and would not allow them on the Gorre and Daphetid.  Thus the scene with the fellow hanged from a trestle.  When asked about him, John had a terse two word answer - "Diesel salesman.")  Or perhaps because every few years, someone reinvents the wheel and neither the "inventor" nor the model press who publishes these "new ideas" wishes to mention that they were scooped by 50 or 60 years.  I must plead guilty to this myself.  In the late nineties, I built the hardware and programmed a computer to dim the lights in the train room at a rate to correspond to my model railroad fast time.  I was quite proud of my innovation until I found it had already been done in the early fifties  using motor driven rheostats.  By John Allen, of course.  But in my books, being scooped by John Allen was like losing a baseball game to Mikey Mantle.  To be a bush leaguer in the same game as the man was already an honour and a pleasure.  If you detect a bit of hero worship here, you are right.

Jim   

[jbsmith]

Looks like I got the subject wrong.  I thought it meant famous train layouts, not the layouts of famous people.  John Allen himself was not famous except in the model railroading field.  He had not only the best known layout of his generation but introduced innovations that today we consider model railroading standards.  Things like selective compression, forced perspective, the use of mirrors, weathering, dimming of room lighting to simulate day and night operation, just to mention a few.

Perhaps John Allen was forgotten during the period when modeling steam was out of fashion (John hated diesels and would not allow them on the Gorre and Daphetid.  Thus the scene with the fellow hanged from a trestle.  When asked about him, John had a terse two word answer - "Diesel salesman.")  Or perhaps because every few years, someone reinvents the wheel and neither the "inventor" nor the model press who publishes these "new ideas" wishes to mention that they were scooped by 50 or 60 years.  I must plead guilty to this myself.  In the late nineties, I built the hardware and programmed a computer to dim the lights in the train room at a rate to correspond to my model railroad fast time.  I was quite proud of my innovation until I found it had already been done in the early fifties  using motor driven rheostats.  By John Allen, of course.  But in my books, being scooped by John Allen was like losing a baseball game to Mikey Mantle.  To be a bush leaguer in the same game as the man was already an honour and a pleasure.  If you detect a bit of hero worship here, you are right.

Jim   

tis alright Jim!
Can be either one, there is room for both

[J3a-614]

That criteria would have to include the late John Armstrong of track planning fame:

http://home.comcast.net/~j.sing/Eulogy_for_John_Armstrong.html

The Armstrong eulogy is from this site, which I've included partially as a reference to a source site and partially for its photo links.

http://home.comcast.net/~j.sing/

Armstrong's road was an interesting combination of ahead-of-its-time planning elements (staging, including "reverted" turning loops) and some antiquated technology (outside third rail--common back to the '40s or so but not so much later).  Other early fellows, mostly working in O scale, included Minton Cronkite (a big AT&SF man, and the builder of the orignal Chicago Museum of Science and Industry display road), and Frank Ellison (a former theater man who understood the tricks of illusion to make a railroad look real, and the drama of operations and railroading itself that draws us in).

Armstrong, Cronkite, and Ellison are all in the O scale Hall of Fame, sponsored on the the web by 48/Foot O Scale News.  That list is here; you can click on individual names for more information:

http://users.foxvalley.net/~osn/HallofFame.htm

This humor page is included because Mel Torme is in it:

http://users.foxvalley.net/~osn/Laughing1.htm

I don't have a link handy, but Gary Coleman would also be a famous person who is into model railroads.

[Steve Magee]

If we take a whole world approach to this, one of THE guiding lights in the hobby was John Ahern. He was building fully sceniced layouts in the 1930's and they would be quite acceptable today.

His Madder Valley branch is displayed at Pendon museum in the UK - and Pendon is a work of art in itself. Have a look at John Aherns layout at:

http://www.pendonmuseum.com/maddervalley/index.html

Steve Magee
Newcastle NSW Australia

[J3a-614]

Beautiful!  Just wish there was more of it to see online, including a track plan.

This fellow has an interesting opinion.  Wonder how the idea would go over with the art field's establishment?

http://users.skynet.be/pro-rail/ukca10ea0.htm

Your message got to tickling my brain cells, and perhaps we should recall J. Harold Geissel and his O scale Chester Valley Railway (actually, if I remember, it wasn't 1/48, but something like 17/64th scale to correct for the slightly wider than scale track gauge common in O then and now).

http://index.mrmag.com/tm.exe?opt=I&MAG=MR&MO=8&YR=1939&output=3&sort=A

http://index.mrmag.com/tm.exe?opt=I&MAG=MR&MO=12&YR=1941&output=3&sort=A

Geissel, who was known for all the equipment drawings he had over the years in Model Railroader, for a time had the Chester Valley in a basement in a house in Philadelphia.  This model railroad went around three walls in a long skinny cellar, and had a classically simple trackplan that consisted of a point-to-point main line with three towns, each of which included at most two or three rail served businesses (plus small engine houses at each end) and a passing siding or runaround track (I think the British term is passing or runaround "loop"--didn't someone say Britian and the USA were two countries divided by a common language?), and featured the operation and scenery of a shortline road in Pennsylvania with small, second-hand engines and rolling stock.  Between the limits of what was available and the level of appearance Geissel was pursuing, everything had to be scrathbuilt.  There were no turning facilities; engines had pilots and headlights on tenders for extended reverse running.  Power consisted of two custom-built steamers (by Harold Icken? ), one of which was a PRR D-16 4-4-0 (prototype 1223 survives today in the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania), and a Reading-based Camelback 2-8-0.  Long after it had been dismantled, MR editor Lynn Wescott liked to use it as an illustration that not all model layouts had to feature main-line railroading and track plans that looked like a plate of pasta.

There were a number of other roads that were famous back then and featured in MR; I've got to look some of them up, and list them here to see if they meet the criteria.  One was an enormous British road that made the cover around 1964, and was well known in the British press at the time.  This was either 7 mm. to the foot or 17/64th scale again, and featured beautiful sweeping curves and flowing trackwork, on a layout depicted a junction with very heavy traffic in the pre-WWI era.  Depth of scene was impressive; part of the trick was that access holes in the layout were so well finished (think fascia, although technically this technique wasn't used here) that they looked good, and camera angles minimized them, too.  Scenery was neat and tidy looking, partially a reflection that Britain is probably the world's greatest gardening country, partially a reflection of railway maintenance prior to 1914, and also a reminder that not every location is crusty with junk.  Some of us do overdetail some of our scenes!