The “literature” of model railroading

What do I mean here by “literature?” I don’t mean novels or other creative literature. I mean it in the sense familiar to any professional or academic: the published work in and about the field. This ranges from professional journals to books, volumes of conference proceedings, and monographs. And in professional fields, having a submitted paper accepted for publication will require it to contain adequate citation of the literature, in the sense just described.

What is the point of this? To give credit to the work of predecessors, to show that you understand where the paper you have submitted fits into that literature, and even to mention viewpoints that may conflict with the one you have espoused in your paper. One becomes accustomed to having the citations in mind while writing or reading a professional paper, and checking submitted or published citations to see if they seem appropriate. Having been both an associate editor, and then editor for five years, of a major journal in my field, metallurgy and materials, this used to be a completely instinctive process for me. My late friend Richard Hendrickson’s professional experience as an English linguist was entirely parallel.

But model railroaders, relatively few of whom are professionals in the sense just described, usually have no such experience and usually don’t even have any idea of the concept. Richard was in fact the one who pointed this out to me, and I immediately understood what he meant.

I guess my professional background died slowly. I’ll give one example. When Jim Hediger reviewed the First Edition of Pacific Fruit Express for Trains magazine, he commented thus: “Here is a superb illustrated history of the company whose name is synonymous with perishable freight. Rounding out the work is the most complete bibliography and index I have ever seen in a rail history book.” 

Having acted as editor for that entire book, and collected references from my co-authors as well as researching those for my own chapters, I can take credit for creating that bibliography (and I indexed the book, too). To me, Hediger’s description was a real compliment, and we included it on the dust jacket of the Second Edition of the PFE book. 

This came home to me more recently when a reader of one of my “Getting Real” columns in Model Railroad Hobbyist noticed a long bibliography, and wrote an email commenting on it. And in fact the same would be found in all volumes of my book series, Southern Pacific Freight Cars. Obviously to any experienced researcher, such bibliographic resources can be a gold mine in pursuing information beyond the publication in hand.

Incidentally (I’ll say more about this presently), nearly all that literature cited in those books is the literature of professional railroading and railroad history. That is obviously part of the literature of our hobby.

But in model railroading itself, what comprises the literature? The most obvious answer combines not only books, such as the familiar Kalmbach Media soft-bound books on practically every aspect of the hobby, but also the magazines: Model Railroader, Railroad Model Craftsman most obviously, but also the defunct titles, such as Mainline Modeler, superb resources with many timeless items of information. Today, we need to include on-line resources such as blogs and museum archives.

Many modelers, of course, discard magazines after having paged through them, much as one would do with a weekly news magazine. That means they have no personal archive of magazines, except maybe an occasional helpful issue or article that is saved. But increasingly, magazine archives are appearing on-line, making it unnecessary to keep your own shelves of old magazines. (Though the on-line material often has been digitized at pretty low resolution, meaning that photographs are a complete loss; and on-line archives have a distressing tendency to suddenly disappear.)

As a single example of something I was able to retrieve from archives and greatly enjoyed and benefited from reading, below is the first page of Frank Ellison’s landmark series of six articles, tellingly titled “The Art of Model Railroading,” which appeared in Model Railroader in the issue for June 1944. And yes, I’m old, but not old enough to have read this when it came out.

In these six articles, Ellison was promoting the idea that operating a layout went far beyond building locomotives, laying track, or creating scenery. Instead, he suggested, it would need to be a coherent whole, not only with all those “construction” aspects, but also having flexible electrical control and above all, a realistic operating scheme. This was a pioneering idea, and tracking it down in the “literature” to appreciate it is part of what I’m writing about.

One more example of a magazine article from the distant past that is still worth reading is Doug Smith’s article on freight car forwarding, published in the December 1961 issue of Model Railroader. Smith not only reviewed a number of proposed systems for car forwarding, he went on to suggest ways to update the Ellison car-card system, ideas which are relevant today. And most important, he emphasized prototype practice as the guide we should follow.

It remains my opinion that there is a literature of model railroading, and awareness of it should be the hallmark of any serious modeler, particularly those who write articles — though I wouldn’t foresee serious lists of literature citations in model magazines. The further literature is that of professional railroading, both operations and history. It too is important to modelers, and I’ll have more to say about that in a future post.

Tony Thompson