Many serious modelers choose a specific era for layout or rolling stock modeling. Richard Hendrickson chose to model rolling stock, mostly for the Santa Fe, for October 1947. Jack Burgess’s superb layout depicts the Yosemite Valley Railroad in the third week of August, 1939, because that was the last period that the YV operated a through Pullman to El Portal, at the National Park’s entrance.
Of course many people want a looser time constraint. I can understand the person who wants, for example, to be able to model some prototype scrapped in 1965, and also to model some new equipment that arrived in 1968. That person might say “I model 1965–68.” But the danger lurking in looser constraint was well expressed once by Tony Koester, who said, “If you say that you model the 1950s, what you’re really doing is modeling 1959 badly.”
But however your choice falls out, especially if it is a period 75 years ago or more, how can you research its character, details, and style? We are all familiar with histories of railroads, locomotives and rolling stock, and likely also with histories of line changes, depot abandonments, etc., for our favorite railroad. What else do we need? What products can you include on billboards? What about clothing for the figures on you layout?
There have, over the years, been effort by various publishers to create “yearbooks,” books highlighting everything of “importance” in a particular year. (I put that word in quotation marks because one person’s importance is another person’s trivia). But certainly these books can provide some information, even if not exactly what we want.
I have such a book for my modeling year of 1953, and in fact that year is in its title. I show the title page below. This is a 6 x 9-inch hardbound book of 448 pages (Unicorn Books, New York, 1954).
To convey its coverage, I show the Contents pages below.
This kind of source is quite general. One may also need quite specific information. For example, let’s imagine that you want to put a builder logo on a transformer load. Your first choices (in the 20th century) would be General Electric and Westinghouse. But as you may know, the Westinghouse logo changed over the years. This is a good example today of how “Google is your friend.” You will quickly find on-line sources like this one: https://1000logos.net/westinghouse-logo/ .
This would then result in a correct pre-1960 logo on a load like this one (Richard Hendrickson built this Milwaukee model of a gun-type flat from a cut-down Roundhouse short flat car).
Another example is advertising. Some companies have retained essentially identical graphics for decades, and these are convenient to use. National brands have the advantage of great recognizability.
Consumer products are the most commonly advertised, so showing advertising images of that kind is appropriate. A good example for a product familiar to everyone is Coca-Cola. I have a period image in the form of a billboard alongside Bromela Road on my layout (one of my interchangeable billboards; see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/04/interchangeable-billboards.html ).
Another era-identifier is trucks and, especially, automobiles. For my 1953 layout, I have carefully avoided any later vehicle model year after that date. And of course you can reinforce the year with billboards like the one below, alongside Nipomo Street in Ballard on my layout:
Today, the internet contains astonishing amounts of information about the history of about anything you can image. Remembering to search on historical topics to make sure you have it right is important if you are going to accurately present your modeling era.
Tony Thompson
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