That thread about the PIKO starter set got me thinking.
I have to admit to having mixed feeling on this. On the one hand, I love to see the work of people who do really realistic modeling. It’s extremely impressive and you also have to educate yourself in how locomotives actually work and on what the little “fiddly bits” actually do. You need to think about how wear happens and what it looks like. It’s a lot of fun and there’s something pleasurable about getting it right. Properly sized trains on properly gaged track just look “right,” and even people who don’t care see it and notice unconsciously. I’ll probably drift that way over time
On the other, it’s a miniature imitation of a train, it’s not a train. Perfect imitation is boring–psychologists who study visual perception say that what catches the eye and holds the attention is the difference between imitation and reality–things are interesting when they are “not quite like” the original. My wife tends to like trains that are “cute,” and what she means is that they are like but not like the original; they’re cute in the way a caricature is cute and holds the eye–it’s “just like”/not like the original Or there’s the dreaded “wow” factor–stuff is (so Lewis claims) more visually appealing when it’s out of scale. I can see what he means although I’m always wishing I’d gone with 1:32
I’m new at this and my layout includes a lot of code 332 track and 1:29 stock, so the realism horse has already left the barn. But I tend to run a mix of styles–some relatively more “realistic” and prototypical stuff and some more toy like stuff. It’s interesting to watch who likes what. Some people love the 1:29 mainline stock, some people are just delighted when the more cartoonish (and I mean that in a good way) LGB stock rolls out.
That PIKO set is cartoonish, but I imagine it will draw people in