As I leap out of bed (OK, slothfully) every morning, I try to be everything. Positive self-talk: Today I'm going to be an author, a railfan, a blogger, a photographer, a model railroad builder, a model railroad operator. Only one qualification is not on my checklist: I'm not a fully-formed layout designer. My idea of layout design is several drawings and laying down track as I go.
Who are the great layout designers? Those who are not only thought-leaders but who have successfully built layouts and 'walk the talk'? The late John Armstrong, Byron Henderson and Lance Mindheim in the United States come to mind. In Canada, it's tough to name as many. There are several great modellers and model railway clubs who have designed room-filling layouts: Jason Baxter, Jason Shron, Railview, HOMES, Waterloo and concentrations of great layouts in Ottawa and other cities. Blog partner Chris Mears has done great work in collaboration with James Hilton in the UK.
It was 1994 when Lance began this pioneering layout. An eye-level N scale representation of the Monon in a bedroom, later in a house and featured in Model Railroader magazine in 2001. The top photo is the one that launched a thousand layouts, the concept of 'negative space' and Lance's layout design business.
This post contains wisdom from Lance's last several months of blogging. 
Before Christmas, I had the opportunity to get hooked on Lance's blog posts. I was reading some writing I wanted to remember, digest and share. Here are the ones that rang true to me. A good read while we ring in 2025 (<--SNL 50*)! (As with most things I post here, I enjoy them, and if others, even one person, get something out of them, that's gravy!)
I did not actually sit down with Lance and a cup of coffee. I may have had a cup of coffee while I was reading Lance's comments. They appear lightly-edited below as answers to hypothetical questions and linked to the posts they originally appeared in. As a result, I don't know what Lance takes in his coffee. Based on his modelling philosophy, it will not be black. It will probably exhibit a shortened colour palette, probably adding in some milk to make it a dull, washed-out brown?
This post is a buffet-restaurant of model railway thought. I've given you a dollop of several dishes. Consider it your first trip after you've been seated and ordered your beverages and the server suggestively says, "OK, now you can go to the buffet!". The links provide you with that second, third, fourth trip back to the buffet once you've found something suited to your taste. I recommend all the linked posts. All you need to do is get up and get a fresh plate each time!
MODELLING THE PROTOTYPE
Layout room - feeling of fun or feeling of dread?
I’ve come to the point where my overarching goal is that when I walk into my layout room I want to feel like I’m in a place that elicits positive thoughts. Miami, LA, Brooklyn, Baltimore? So many positive memories and hopefully more to come. Next in line as for what the layout’s “job” is? I enjoy the building process. My ratio of build vs. ops time is probably 50:1.
Bright sunshine layout or more realism required?
You want to go to a place that actually exists, existed at one time, or very well “could” have been. The starting point is careful study and examination. What is it about a location that makes it what it is? You’re trying to unearth, nail down, and define “ordinary”. You’re doing the opposite of most and trying to edit out the one in a million element defined by shock value. You’re looking for elements with no shock value. It’s day-to-day, down in the weeds, revenue generating railroading. It’s a world typified by dull browns, charcoal blacks, and a dead flat finish on everything. Weeds not golf courses. Operations that tend to be pretty similar week in and week out.
Can I actually depict a place I've been?
The sensory disconnect - a vista lying in front of you and take a photo of it; you look at your screen and go, “hmmm that doesn’t capture what I’m feeling and experiencing right now”- is an unsolvable problem. There is only one thing that gets you pretty close and that’s visiting the actual place in person. Experience the sights, sounds, smells, and panoramas and register those sensory experiences in your mind. Create vivid memories. When you do this, your brain makes an A-to-B connection when you look at your layout. DESIGNING
Many modelers spend years, even decades, drawing various design iterations, hoping to avoid at all costs, God forbid….a mistake. It’s a fool’s errand. You can’t. You’re far better off sketching something up that makes reasonable sense, diving in, and making any necessary tweaks as you go. Mistakes are unavoidable. The ones I see the most? Not designing towards your true interests, biting off more layout than you have the resources (time or skills) to build, and not accounting for human comfort (aisles, reach in distances, etc). And the biggest error - in their quest to attain perfection before the first board is cut, modelers lose sight of the most catastrophic mistake - never building anything and gaining the necessary experience to make better decisions in the future. We're all human. We need a sense of making progress without getting bogged down - [it's the point at which] so many people leave the hobby. Get the track up and get it running, you've had some success, you're motivated. Instead of something that doesn't run with one difficult project after another. Momentum is really important.
Do we model the exception or the rule?
The key to achieving realism is to not just represent the ordinary, but to slightly overemphasize it. What would emphasizing the ordinary look like? Take an example where you have a city block with six mundane, white houses, one yellow one, and one red one. The white structures are the “ordinary” elements. The eye will be drawn to the red one. A stylistic approach of dialing things back would be to make the entire block white structures. If a section of town has a few faded, rusting corrugated, one story warehouses, you might emphasize those and give them more visual priority, more square footage, than something that is more eye catching.
How do we hone our eye for composition and realism?
If you want to be a good modeler, you're not going to get it in the sandbox of model railroading. All the answers have been in the art world. Visual literacy, composition and colour theory will take you everywhere. That's the path to improving your game and you'll build a sense of intuition for how to pull a scene together.
So theme is critical to that?
Theme selection is one of the most important strategic decisions you’ll ever make. Get it right and your enthusiasm will propel you forward for many years. Here are some of the things I look at. First and foremost I want something that “grabs me emotionally”, a place that I want to feel transported to. That’s the most difficult to find. Without that, I just have miniature technical exercise, that may be fun to build but won’t sustain me for the long haul.
What if I want the non-traditional smaller-than-a-basement layout?
Switching layouts, because of their size, are often viewed as substandard ventures by those who don’t have them. They’re looked upon with pity. They apologize for their work. If this is you, stop it, stop apologizing. Half of the switching layout owners I know are either financially comfortable. They have average-size to large homes. With switching, you can watch a single operation for twenty or thirty minutes, or hours in the case of a yard. It’s easier to create a higher quality level of modeling because you aren’t looking down the gun barrel of another thousand square feet of layout that needs attention. Many of the owners of switching layouts I know are successful professionally. Those professions don’t leave a lot of free time. Make your layout format decision based on the operational style you prefer and the amount of time you want to allocate to the hobby. Stand by that decision, do good work, and stop apologizing. TRACKPLANNING
Should the first step to draw a track plan, with software or just pencil and paper?
Drawing a track plan is the last, and easiest, aspect of layout design. Planning is the hardest because it involves doing some soul-searching and requires a level of self-awareness that we all “think” we have but often do not…myself included. Drawing, sketching, and daydreaming is easier and more fun than planning. I get it. However, if you don’t have a clear objective in mind as to what you want to accomplish you’re setting yourself up for trouble down the road.
Is a helix worth the trouble and space?
A double deck layout isn’t “slightly” more involved than a single deck one of the same surface area. It’s not twice as complex. There are so many factors in play that the complexity level is four, five, or maybe six times that of the single deck format. The compromises to human comfort are numerous. Construction methods are more complex. The published plans you see in the press? Many are thought exercises that have not been built. Many have significant issues that aren’t addressed in the article. [Another design consideration is] lighting. Life has gotten much easier in this regard. LED tape lights are bright, inexpensive, thin, and easy to work with. They're the way to go. SPENDING
What would change in your modelling if you won the lottery?
The hypothetical possibility of becoming suddenly wealthy and how to apply that change of circumstances to the hobby. My guess is that on the modeling side, the answers would depend on how much modeling experience you have. The fans of the hobby, those with little or no experience, would probably want to go large. The more experienced modelers would probably be less likely to simply because they know the tradeoffs and have more self-awareness. Experienced modelers are more likely to be mid-stream into a layout you’d need the jaws of life to pry them away from. What to do with all of that money? Hmmm. All I can think of would be buying three or four top-of-the-line locomotives and sending those out for boutique electronic upgrades. I could use a full-scale LED light upgrade in my basement. Now I’m running out of ideas. As a scratch builder, I spend less than a hundred bucks a month on the hobby. I guess that’s it on the modeling front. OPERATING
Why do so many modellers put operation last on their list?
I was a little surprised with the response I received from my recent Operations 101 YouTube videos. What it comes down to is that most of us don’t really know how to “play” with our trains. We put all of this effort into building our models….,we engage with the hobby community, and still it comes to “What in the sam hell do I do with all of this?!!”
So we shouldn't feel bad about holding our own operating session?
While they may not admit it publicly, many associate the phrase “operating session” with arbitrary rules, boring running practices, hokey gimmicks, complexity, stress, and fear of embarrassing yourself by making mistakes. There is ample justification for that reaction too. We can throw that distinction out the window though when we consider the reality that most of the time, especially with smaller layouts, we will be running by ourselves.
Should we allow the modelling community to live rent-free in our imaginations?
Running trains alone in our layout room is an escape. It’s the one setting where we can create our own world and do things the way we want. How I, or anybody else does things, is absolutely irrelevant. Let’s be real, nobody cares how another hobbyist runs trains in the privacy of their own homes. CONCLUSION...
Do me a favour and don't model any of Lance's layouts, be they in California, the Northeast US or Florida. Nobody should model someone else's layout, and it does regularly happen, from photos I've seen. Take the concepts and apply them. I don't want to see another Florida-based shelf layout unloading boxcars in the middle of the street! And whoever modelled the first carfloat or fishing wharf, I wish your ferry godmother had convinced you not to do it just for the halibut.
I'll end with another concept Lance has advanced. Taking a pause to enjoy a beverage, maybe a cup of coffee! He suggested it between switching moves, to sort of enjoy the moment. But I think it's useful at any point in our modelling. Better yet, sleep on it. The morning will have you (not slothfully) jumping out of bed and wanting to be...one of Canada's great layout designers!
Running extra...
Here's a layout view of my HO-scale Kingston's Hanley Spur layout (below). I'll probably never be able to live with the amount of negative space and the few tracks Lance prefers.
Lance's words 'just' and 'only' appear in December 2024 Railroad Model Craftsman! You tell me if I've taken any of Lance's comments to heart. (I do know I've taken my granddaughter to heart!) Though I've changed little on the layout since this photo was taken, she has changed a lot. I'm posting this photo here to give us something to reefer to!
The President's Club convened for President Jimmy Carter's funeral at Washington's National Cathedral today. The winds outside were so fierce that the sailor carrying the flag of the President was destabilized and blown almost sideways several times, even losing his sailor hat though thankfully it was replaced before the service began!
*Saturday Night Live 50th Anniversary Special will be broadcast on February 16, 2025 - a three-hour prime-time special celebrating SNL's 50th season. This special will assemble together a large list of current and former cast members, hosts, and musical acts from throughout the show's fifty seasons. I wonder if Mike Myers/Linda Richman will appear. Like buttah!
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