Friday 4 January 2019

"Model Railroads" the book 1954

My friend Brian Small gave this book Model Railroads that was printed in 1954 which would have been nice to have a long time ago. Brian thought I would find it interesting and a good fit to have a book writen close to my era. Having said that, if I had seen it for sale I most likely would have dismissed it as being too old and maybe plain. Here is a picture of the cover and on the spine the only words are Model Railroads. The copyright is 1954 and the Library of Congress number is 54-12466.

The part that amazes me about this book is that the operations portion of the book could have been written in the last 10 years. It is amazing to see the vision Frank Ellison had for modelling operations that advanced back then. The only thing that would give this books date away to the reader would be some of the rolling stock and some of the scenery techniques.
I guess my point is that if I had had this book I could have skipped a lot of the other reading that I have done around track planing and operations. I also could have skipped the fatal error that just about everyone makes by not paying attention to operations.  We really have not invented anything new over that time period, Frank Ellison really had a grasp of this topic with his diagrams, text and pictures. It is too bad that it is not available as an ebook or PFD because every person who is starting a layout or rebuilding one should get to read this book. It did use some reprinted material from Model Railroader magazines from 1949, 1950 and 1951. It is another gem that I happen to have in my collection of books. I have started putting it out during operations sessions for ops to look at during down time.


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