If you want to intrigue visitors and draw their attention to your layout, make your layout tell a story. Many modelers put a lot of effort into making their locomotives, track layouts and operating schemes as realistic as possible. But not all of us think so much about the little plastic figures that populate our model trains. We think of our railways as replicas of the real thing, with wagons moving back and forth to serve industrial plants and stations. But railways are not built to serve industrial plants and stations; they serve the people who run those industrial plants and the passengers in those stations.
Don’t think of characters as mere stage elements that you can place anywhere there is an empty space on your layout. They represent people with lives, just as your freight cars represent the cargo they carry. By creating scenes that show these characters living their lives, you can make your layout tell a story that gives it depth, history, and interest.
Here are some tips on how to tell a story through the placement of characters in your layout.
David Arrell: Use familiar scenes to evoke memories
Hobbyists who model a specific prototype often invest a lot of time, research, and effort into recreating a specific area in a specific time period. They try to create recognition in visitors who are familiar with the area being modeled. But freelance modelers can also evoke memories of a place and time by modeling commonly known scenes. For example, David Arrell built his freelance trolley layout (seen in the March 2022 MR) based on his memories of visiting Philadelphia as a child. He didn’t try to recreate actual locations, but instead populated his city with characters engaging in such commonly known activities as grabbing a treat from an ice cream truck. Who doesn’t have a childhood memory like that? Modeling scenes that viewers of the layout can imagine themselves participating in is a great way to include them in the story of your layout.
Clark Propst: Make industries look busy
In his article “Every Figure Tells a Story” (December 2021), Clark Propst wrote about how to use figures to bring life to the branches of his HO scale Story City Branch (see Great model railways 2020). While the details around a building or a sign on the roof can help an operator identify what industry the company is in, Clark wanted to use numbers to show the results of the railroad picking up and dropping off rail cars there. For example, his coal dealers have workers move conveyor belts to unload delivered hopper cars, an oil delivery driver fills up his tanker car, and one worker at a grain elevator explains to another how to attach grain hatches to freight cars. This gives the operators of Clark’s model railroad a sense that their trains are performing an important task.
Don Ball: Shows the life of time
While it’s important to buy and use figures whose clothing fits the time period you’re modeling, it’s also important to depict the figures in activities that are appropriate for the era. The late Don Ball wrote in our March 2020 issue about how to “create interest with mini-scenes.” Don modeled the Stockton & Copperopolis in the golden age of the steam locomotive in 1895, so of course he made sure all of his male figures wore jackets and ties and the ladies wore long dresses and bonnets or fancy hats. But it also increased interest in the layout when those figures were engaged in interesting activities. Outside the general store, for example, a crowd had gathered to listen to a traveling peddler peddling snake oil remedies. Elsewhere, gentlemen were getting ready to ride on big-wheeled penny-farthings and passengers were boarding stagecoaches at the station. By placing these figures in activities of the era, he helped make his layout more interesting.
Ron Lane: Better than fiction
Instead of making up stories to tell on his HO scale Mann’s Creek Ry., model maker Ron Lane used his layout to tell stories of real people who lived and worked alongside his prototype railroad. Ron and his co-author Ted Schnepf spent 15 years researching and writing a book about the history of the real Mann’s Creek Ry. During that time, they made 25 trips to the area and interviewed more than 200 people about their memories of the railroad. When he built his HO version of the railroad, Ron made 195 figures representing these real people and had them placed on the track doing what they really did: working in the coal mines and coke plants, stocking up on supplies and shopping at the company stores, and cutting trees at the logging camp. Ron knows all of their names. Although most visitors will never know the backstories of all of these people, their presence adds an unmatched level of realism to Ron’s model railroad.
Pacific Southern Railway Club: Recreate dramatic scenes
From the subtle to the dramatic. One way to grab viewers’ attention is with a big, eye-catching, dramatic scene. Some modelers do this with a parade down Main Street, a fairground scene with animated rides, or a tall scaffold over a massive waterfall. Members of the Pacific Southern Railway Club in Rocky Hill, NJ (see November 2023 MR) have upped the drama by modeling a blazing forest fire on a hill above the main line. A thin line of rescue workers stand in front of the ominous, glowing clouds rising over the ridge. Flashing LEDs beneath the ridge give the fire a realistic flicker. There’s not a place for such a scene on every model railroad, but if you want to tell a story with your layout, there are few more eye-catching ways to do it.
