I know this will probably start a shooting war … .but …
I don’t think the two are mutualy exclusive.
You can count rivets, and ensure that appropriate parts and systems are modeled … you can make a plausible operating scene, and operate prototypically, and not have a “prototype railroad” per se.
For example, just because the SP Narrow Gauge was the only line to use 50 ton end cab switchers doesn’t mean they COULDN’T have been reasonably used on the ET&WNC, the D&RGW, or the EBT, all of which survived well into the diesel era… and could have survived longer than they did with a little bit of creative revision of history. The model is technically correct, if a bit imaginative in paint scheme, and would have been appropriate for use on such a line… so modeling what “could have happened” seems reasonable. That’s different from a lot of ways to “play with trains” that don’t require the attention to detail in the making of the models or their operation to be “accepted practice” for a railroad of the type being ‘imagined.’
There is another school of model railroading that says that everything must be correct not only in model detail but in place and time … in other words, a perfectly accurate model of a New Haven RS-3 must not only have every bolt and weld in the right place, and the right shade of paint, but that it must be in a scene where the real RS-3 was, at a particular time on a particular date. So, if the 529 didn’t happen to be in Essex on July 4th 1954, and you model that day and time, your model is no good even if a photo of your model could be confused with the real thing. This is another EQUALLY ACCEPTABLE way of playing with trains … with a different focus.
For me, the plausibility of the railroad and the detail of the models and operations are the part I like best to model. Having been involved with “real” trains it allows me the “form and feel” of what I’ve always wanted to do and never could. That there never really was a “Slate Creek Railway” really matters very little to me … I try to build what “could have been” given a bit more ideal conditions, and some terrain that probably doesn’t exist exactly as I imagine it.
If that means I’m not modeling anything per se … I guess I’m just playing with toy trains… but they look a damn bit better than many I’ve seen, and behave a lot more like the real thing too.
Matthew (OV)
