Opinion time!

There is a website for 1-scalers that provides frequent updates on new products, train shows, etc. that I visit about once a week.  It's www.spur1info.com, and even if you don't read a lot of German, the site owner takes excellent pictures and provides lots of updates on what's happening in the (mostly European) 1-scale community.  A recent post showed the following picture from a recent train show:

photo courtesy of www.spur1info.com

The article's author mentioned that he thought the layout shown in the image above was, well, "meh".  He's right. The structures shown are all commercially available kits, the trees only remotely resemble the real thing, the curves are too tight to be realistic, the rolling stock (and the crane) aren't weathered, the grass looks like it was spray painted, and the locomotive service facility is comically small and simple.

But I love this photo, and I am trying to understand why.

I think it speaks to the diversity of the hobby of model railroading, and how different model railroaders approach it.  Coming from an H.O.background, I found my enjoyment in watching trains proceed through scenery, and I replicated that in miniature as these pictures from my H.O. layout show:

So you can imagine how I feel when I see layouts like this:

Building a layout that ends within inches of the edge of the track roadbed is not the kind of layout I would ever want to build.  Now, 1-scale is a different creature, and the hillside that I built in H.O. shown in the first picture of my H.O. layout would be about four feet tall in 1-scale, and wouldn't fit in my SUV, so it's not a surprise that you don't see a lot of those on portable layouts like the Württemberg team's or the Wuppertal club's layout (above).  But I would never have any interest in those two layouts simply because the detail of the rolling stock, or the attention to trackside details like weathering the track and the bumpers, and replacing the plastic with real wood like the bumper on the right, have little appeal to me compared to seeing trains, in any scale, making their way through scenery.  And that even goes for scenery that may not be the most realistic.

So thank you, Marklin, for what is a decidedly pathetic layout that first introduced me to the possibilities of building something grandiose back in 2001 that caught my eye at the Modellbahnmesse.  If it hadn't been for this layout, one that makes even the picture at the top of this post look impressive, I may never have fallen in love with the King's Gauge...

- Carsten