Design influences: Maps, Progressions, Prototypes, and Freelancing

For as long as I can remember I've had a fascination with maps. Road maps, topological, geological, panoramic, satellite -- you name it.

I love studing existing maps, but I've also loved drawing maps of imagined places. Some of these fantasy maps were quite involved and took literally months to complete. Usually I'd work on these in idle situations, such as listening to lectures in college or while on long plane flights.

My one driving interest in maps has always been the historical angle: how did things progress to where they are today? Every now and then I'll stumble across a book some like-minded soul created of the map history of a given area and I'll buy it and closely read every page.

This interest in maps, history, and progressions definitely influences my railroad design, although in different ways depending on whether the layout has a "prototype" or "freelance" theme:

1. Prototype
   
   Model railroaders refer to a real railroad as a "prototype" and what we build as a model. So a prototype layout is one that attempts to duplicate a real railroad at a real time in history as closely as possible.
   
   For my outdoor layout I've chosen to model the Denver and Rio Grande circa 1884-5 between the cities of Salida and Leadville in Colorado. A love of maps is extremely helpful in creating this kind design because you'll need to conduct a ton of research -- including lots of maps -- from a variety of sources. Fortunately, the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden and the Leadville Public Library are both rich sources of information. Once you have that information you can walk around the towns today and see abundant evidence of what existed over a century ago. The joy of prototyping is learning in great detail how a railroad (and its environs) used to be, or how it is today, and recreating that in minature.
   
   
2. Freelance
   
   If you choose to invent your own railroad to model -- or perhaps a fictional division of an existing railroad -- you are "freelancing". Prototype modeling has gained a certain snob appeal amongst the model railroad elders in recent years, which is unfortunate because a great freelance road like the Utah Belt is as fascinating as a great prototype model railroad.
   
   For me, the joy of freelancing is similar to that of the joy of playing a "God" PC game like Sim City or Civilization -- only in far greater detail than any PC game could model. You are in effect the founder and owner of a railroad and its setting, and you can make the decisions as to how it evolved up to the era you are modeling. Of course, the more realistic your assumptions and constraints are, the more interesting your design challenges will be and the more realistic your result will be.
   
   So, when I started the preliminary designs for my N scale layout a year or so before we moved into this house, I recalled one of my favorite map-drawing scenarios from years earlier. In this scenario a town is founded on a central north-south river (usually, but not always, the Mississippi) in the central U.S. in the mid 19th century. A common occurance, only in this scenario the town leaders are unusually wise, plus a bit wealthier than average. The leaders choose to attract railroads to their town using the lure of a link with the river traffic plus a ready-built bridge across the wide river. From that point forward the town progresses to become a hub city in the transcontinental railroad network with only one difference: the city planners (me) have a bit more foresight than usual.
   
   This became the basis for the history of my current N scale layout. And although the layout is set in the present era, every single scene on the layout includes evidence of the history of the city and the railroad over the past 150 years.

Maps and railroads -- they seem to go together.