What’s that smell?

My good friend Mike Cougill has made another insightful post, on finding the “magic bullet“. But regular commenter Matt has provided a blinding observation on the need to find the right inspiration.

When it comes to layouts, I have no problem coming up with designs – got them coming out of my ears, to be honest (as several unfortunate friends can no doubt attest*, and indeed do) – but I find myself inspired by three or four different themes, each mutually exclusive, each identically time-consuming. Each appealing for for different reasons, and none getting ahead of the others by a large enough margin to square the circle.

Finding that spark is the hard bit: unlike layout design issues where “analysis paralysis” can take hold, this is more fundamental. Emotional constipation?

What fires me up the most? Sound and movement and smell. Movement is about quality of construction, leading to smoothness of motion and not quantity of “operation”. Sound is relatively simple to arrange with high quality digital systems, although I wonder if a duplicate sound card should be driving a sub baseboard woofer – just a few watts. But smell?

Yes. Smell.

It’s the smell which stumps me. It is the most evocative sense when it comes to memory, yet we pay so little attention to it. I have no desire to sit inhaling the fumes of a dirty diesel engine as it revs up after idling for a few minutes (I am not suicidally pre-disposed in my modelling!) but if I could somehow generate just a hint of that odour, I would be transported back to my teenage years. (The slightly acrid smell of steam engine smoke, on the other hand, I tend to find a little off-putting.)

When I find my muse, I’ll let you know: I will also be able to blog about modelling, rather than philosophising about it!

* What they don’t know, is just how many plans they don’t see…

Dearth of Leadership

Cast around the web and you will find numerous postings about the decline of the hobby and its impending demise. A particularly frequent remark is about declining magazine readership figures, and how they are “dumbing down” and not interested in “finescale”, to which someone with connections with the printed hobby media responds by saying that finescale is too small a market, etc. (On which basis, how is it that Model Railay Journal is approaching its thirtieth birthday?) This is the marketing tail wagging the editorial dog. There has been an interesting discussion on Iain Robinson’s blog, in amongst the excellent modelling he displays.

Here’s a contrary thought, based on the concept of action rather than reaction.

Forty years ago the Railway Modeller – about as mainstream and middle of the road as they come – had an audited circulation of 100,000. It was the first hobby magazine which I took on a regular basis, from the age of ten, and much as I now dislike the appalling strap line they used at the time (“For the Average Modeller” – who wants to be average, when average is an alternative word for mediocre?) they struck a good balance. Some featured layouts were frankly somewhat lacking in finesse (unballasted track with missing sleepers at the rail joiners) but others were leading edge. Indeed, the P4 layout “Heckmondwyke” came about when the then editor of the magazine, the late Cyril Freezer, stated the criteria for proving the concept of P4, sufficient to get a layout featured as “Railway of the Month”. Given the links with the parent company, Peco, it is perhaps not surprising that I cannot recall articles on how to make one’s own track, but it was not a requirement that all layouts used Streamline in order to feature in the magazine. My first issue contained articles on a variety of subjects, including EM gauge and a drawing of a prototype goods wagon. On balance I think they got things right. I also improved my standard of grammar and my vocabulary. I am told that CJF did not amend articles as such but he did discuss the writing style with authors and helped them to improve via suggested alternatives and positive feedback.

I believe that the circulation is 40% of that figure now. Quite a decline!

I know that hobby interests have changed, but we now have more free time, more spare cash, and we also offer a hobby which we all agree has more to offer than most (except by way of instant gratification – you still need to build a layout on which to run the trains which came out of the boxes; even if you pay someone to build it, it will take time). If the hobby is declining, then I suggest it’s more to do with how we present ourselves than anything, and I think magazines do have an important part to play here: how to get the best out of modern RTR (including putting new sides onto existing bodies). How to complement the “out of the box” models with a bit of variety via modification, kit-building and scratchbuilding to create more interesting trains. How to create a believable setting – which means we need articles on making buildings from scratch), how to operate it properly – and how to put signals on a layout to aid this. And ultimately, how to develop a trained, critical eye for things – and how to go about getting things right. There is plenty of potential material for this: just look at the blogosphere.

My wife buys “crafting” magazines. These are full of useful ideas which she regularly puts into practice. They also seem to be flourishing, and no one bemoans declining numbers nor do they say that they are simply interested in buying things – unless they be tools or raw materials, and ideas from the magazines. Why can’t we be more like that?

There is a massive opportunity here. Not necessarily for the mainstream magazines to grow, at least not immediately, but an opportunity for them to stabilise their circulation prior to leading the hobby to new growth, with the obvious ultimate benefit to all.

Overcoming stereotypes

To quote The Beatles, and (with more relevance) Mike Cougill, “Tell me what you see”.

More years ago than I care to remember, I graduated in psychology. One of the things which really interested me was the processing of data. If we take vision, there is so much information streaming into our eyes and yet we can only process a fraction of it at any one time. To cope with this, we have evolved strategies to filter out the usual, and attend to the unusual, on the reasonable evolutionary basis that we need to identify things that might be food, friend or a threat and everything else is background. (When in a state of heightened anxiety, colour vision can cease to function as it requires a lot of energy to process the data, energy which might be needed for the purposes of a fight or a flight.)

A consequence of this is that the human mind is very good at forming stereotypes, particularly when it comes to uncommon things (like, for instance, someone not in the family group, or someone who models to finescale standards). If we see a coincidence of uncommon things, for example most railway modellers are normal people, and that includes finescalers, so a finescaler with a somewhat obsessive attitude becomes doubly unusual, then we form a stereotype based on the distinctiveness, but wrongly attribute the cause: so finescalers are seen as somewhat obsessive. The real problem comes when this becomes an archetype, and unfortunately this happened many years ago in our hobby. What the human mind then does is to look for confirmatory evidence to back this up, to preserve the distinctiveness, and myths arise and the “evidence” is routinely put forward to bolster the opinion of those who are threatened by things which do not conform to their way of thinking.

But it doesn’t end there: we do it all the time, and model what we think is there, rather than what actually is there. Hence, I think, the number of poor models of trees out there. Ask any young child to paint a tree, and you will be surprised to see omething which is not a variant on a theme of brown stick with a green blob, yet trees rarely have a brown bark, and the foliage is anything but a single colour blob. Clichés abound on layouts: “clutter” is added to improve the “atmosphere”, and we see lengths of rail (in anticipation or consequence of relaying work) left in yard areas where railwaymen on th night shift would trip over them. The result is inauthentic and, well, cluttered.

It is possible to train oneself to become aware of these processes, and to counter the negative stereotypes which can arise, but it isn’t easy: in fact it can be very difficult. This is one of the first things that art students have to learn: how to un-learn their preconceptions. When it comes to our hobby, I am afraid that lazy acceptance of the norm (well, it is a hobby and therefore supposed to be relaxing) is the norm, but for those who can be bothered to overcome this hurdle, the world is a much more interesting place!

I began with a quote, and will end with another fom the same song:
“Open up your eyes, now.”

Railway modelling is not fun

My friend Mike Cougill has made a few posts recently about model railroading and “fun”. He even went so far as to pose 20 questions on the subject. As he has recently revealed, these reflect his self-questionning, and he has answered some of the questions. I had a problem with the questions, as Mike had (intentionally, I am sure) left out any sort of definition as to what fun might mean. It got me thinking – I am sure that getting people thinking was Mike’s aim. It usually is.

“Fun” is an interesting word. Originally the way to have fun was to play a trick, hoax, etc on someone – so fun came at another’s expense (for example, the bawdy and riotous story “Tom Jones” treats it this way). Definitions change over time (awful used to be a major compliment!) but the element of spontaneity is still a key part of most current definitions of the word “fun”, although playing tricks on others is not the usual meaning. It is also lasts for only a relatively short-term, so activities need to be repeated, or replaced with new ones. “Retail therapy” is a good example of this: and being of short term effect, it needs repeating. There is nothing wrong with fun, but it is rather ephemeral.

Enjoyment, is something more enduring albeit possibly at a lower intensity than fun. If we don’t enjoy something, we generally don’t want to do it. After a spot of retail therapy, we might enjoy the fruits of our purchases – maybe a spot of operating with our new purchases. Maybe a bit of weathering. You get the point: something which is enjoyable.

Satisfaction, though, is something altogether more permanent and rewarding. It is the reward that enables us to overcome obstacles. It does not deny fun, nor does it preclude enjoyment. Far from it: many things that go towards satisfaction may be fun and enjoyable, but when we find that we need to acquire and hone a new skill, it is the promise of eventual success that keeps us going. It also enables us to challenge our assumptions, and deny our frustrations, indeed these are essential requirements: without obstacles, assumptions, frustrations and lack of skill to overcome, where would be the satisfaction?

I mentioned enlightened impatience last year, the point being that one can turn impatience to advantage by using it to enforce discipline. If I know a job should take, say, 10 hours of careful work, and spend 8 hours on it, then I have sold myself short. Not only that, but I will end up redoing it – properly this time – and at the of the process will have spent 18 hours on a 10 hour job. That really annoys me, hence the discipline. The result, knowing that even though some parts of the modelling job may not have been enjoyable at the time and maybe none of it was “fun”, is very, very satisfying. And I know that when doing it: it keeps me going.

Fun is superficially attractive: it shows we have a sense of humour. Really? Do we really need to patronise our audience and ourselves by bringing things down to the lowest common denominator? I think the famous phrase “Model Railroading Is Fun” is glib, and ultimately misleading. The only people who gain from it are manufacturers, magazines with a vested interest in encouraging retail therapy to keep the advertising revenue coming in (no accident that MRJ, which is not dependent on this source of income is the most “finescale” magazine out there, and this is even more true of “The Missing Conversation“), and the lazy and superficial which can’t be bothered to try harder and are looking for an excuse to hide behind. I may get some flak for that last remark, but if you read it in context there is nothing pejorative about a considered choice.

Building a model railway, be it a small one with a few highly detailed scratch-built items of equipment or a large empire with the focus on operation (for which purchasing a lot of RTR equipment is necessary and not purely “retail therapy”) is a hobby with the opportunity to provide a life-time of satisfaction, with enormous benefits for one’s mental, intellectual and physical well-being. And on top of that, I have learned so much about the outside world. Not just the physical environment, not just the technical side, but things like social and economic history, different cultural impacts.

No, one thing the hobby isn’t is fun. It’s far more than that – although we can and do have our fun moments.

Calling it “fun” sells railway modelling short.