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I just received a notice from an email group that I wanted share with everyone. As it pertains to route (layout) design, I am posting it in this forum.On July 28th, John Armstrong, the Dean of Model Railroad Layout Design, passed away. Funeral arrangements are incomplete at this time.John Armstrong designed one of the railroads I regularly operate in Kansas City so I feel somewhat connected to him although I've never met the gentleman. Doug Taylor's Pennsylvania Horseshoe Curve railroad is an Armstrong original design and is representative of his style of design that started the move away from 100% visible railroads.The modeling community has truly lost one of the greats this past week.
Yep, he'll be missed. The Rio Grande Southern subdivision on the PO&N was based on one of his many interesting trackplans, hence the town named Armstrong on the RGS sub. Northland Grain 1 and 2 was also a section from one of his, I forget which.Linn Westcott also passed away several years ago, author of "101 Track Plans for Model Railroaders", which included the base track plans for my Port Ogden & Northern and Rich Garber's East Metro route.
Having been in HO Modeling for 51 years now, built a B&LE, Varney, flatcar in July 1953, when I was 14 years old, I remember the contributions of both of both John & Linn very well. Varney has been gone for years, but the B&LE flat car, now on it's third type of couplers, and 4th set of trucks is still running on the layout. When I started, the only good automatic coupler was the Mantua hook/loop type. Then I used the X2F for many years, and switched to Kadee about 15 years ago. Now that the Kadee patents have expired, McHenry and others have come out with compatible versions that especially make converting passenger cars easy. I have 35 American Beauty Line passenger cars - how many have ever heard of the brand, but in the 50s, that was hot, hot, premium stuff - cost a whole $5 a kit.At 65, I am still modeling, although I have a large stock of kits that I doubt I would have the dexterity to assemble well now - Ambroid, 1-of-5000 kits for example.Besides the passing of the old guard, one thing that greatly disturbs me is the move to "ready to run", especially when most of it isn't. I fear this will be degrading to the hobby over time. For example, I have several Walthers passenger cars (14 Superliners, and 3 of the Budd originals), and I had to regage the wheels on every one of them with an NMRA gage before they would track through switches okay.Now we have this !@#$%^&*()_ RE to play with. I hope PI comes out with one that is less likely to crash or corrupt, because I could probably do a route 25% faster if I didn't have to worry so much about the order of doing it, backing up (nearly every day, occasionally more than once a day to CD), ad nauseum. In a way though, I consider MSTS to be just another type of model, and having run real diesels, and the 4501 a little, I can say that it really is "as real as it gets".J. H. Sullivan
Hello Mr SullivanIn the past, I've found your posts all interesting to read although this time I think I disagree with you just a bit. (Remember this wink)You mention you don't like the newer "ready to run" stuff for the hobby. Then you continue with bad mouthing (can't even repeat the words you used!) the wonderful RE that we have with MSTS. I assume you have special, non-repeatable words for the AE too.Don't these two wonderful programs make MSTS much like kit-bashing of old, complete with missing parts? These two programs also manage to keep MSTS from being just a "ready to run" train set, just what you want, right? I'm one year behind you by the way, although just a bit of HO background.GaryG
GaryG, with tongue in cheek, I kinda agree with you, especially the missing parts. Well actually none of the parts were missing, you just might say that the instructions were a bit vague.J. H. Sullivan