Contest room

[PDX 2015 posts]

The contest room is were modelers show their work to the attendees, and the NMRA judges. I took photos of some of the excellent models here. Above is a wooden tank car in 1:20.3 scale, and that little thing in the background ...

... is a snow-plow in Nn3 1:160 narrow-gauge. Yes, there are tiny chains connected to the trucks of the snow plow.

I really enjoyed the various caboose entries, especially since most of them have interior detail, too. It's hard to take photos of the interior and have the details show. This one is HOn3 (1:87 narrow-gauge) if I remember correctly.

I was very impressed by the super-detailing on this Great Northern caboose.

Due to the lack of a background this diorama of a track gang taking a break was very hard to photograph so that the details would show. The photo doesn't quite capture the laid-back ambiance I experienced when standing in front of the diorama. Very well done.

A multi-level diorama of a Colorado mining railroad (several, actually) in O-scale is so full of detail, that taking a photo of the whole thing doesn't do it justice. So I focus on a couple details I really enjoyed.

There were two dioramas of saw mills. One had lights and used them very effectively. The other didn't.

Sawmill with the saw gate visible (bad photo)

The machinery to power the saw gate.

Saw mill office

When I walked into the contest room I wasn't that impressed ("huh? that's it?"). A bunch of tables  with white table cloth and cars or locomotives on them. However, when I started to look closely I was blown away and spent much more time in the room than I had intended.

What else did I do?

So far I focused on clinics that I hoped would inspire me or show approaches for modeling in small spaces like my Welztalbahn layout.

Yesterday I attended sessions on making photo-realistic backdrops, signs, house fronts, etc. and got some good ideas out of that: shop windows, and even factory interiors, which is an idea I was toying with both for Werner & Soehne, as well as the paper warehouse at Silicon Valley Lines.

Today I started off with Lance Mindheim's "Achievable Realism" clinic, which focused a lot on scene composition, colors, and texture, as well as (again) using photos. Next was Kermit Paul's "Adding perspective to layout" clinic where he talked through 3d modeling with forced perspective. This was interesting, but I need to stick to working with photos on the Welztalbahn. Craig Bisgeier's talk about "Truss bridges" was not a revelation for me, but he is a good speaker and I did enjoy his excursion into options for bridge kit-bashing. I wanted to do the clinic on the Baltimore & Ohio Chicago Terminal RR by Henry Freeman, and Rob Spangler's scenery clinic, which ran at the same time, but ended up in the SIG room chatting with Andrew about his planned layout and talking through track arrangements in his main station area, which was a lot of fun. Byron Henderson's "Small Layout Design" clinic had a lot of familiar material, since I had seen several of his talks at the LD/Ops Sig meets before, but it was still an enjoyable hour.