Sunday, September 27, 2015

Slaving over a Prototype

Everybody that model following a prototype, particularly one they known in real life, know how getting the essence of some location can be truly hard.

Recently, I browsed Denis Fortier's Facebook account. Denis is a well-known Quebec City area railfan and author of many articles in canadian railway magazines. He knows a lot about Murray Bay Subdivision and posted many pictures related to this interesting prototype.

Some of them are mindblowing because they show want railroading in the area was during the 60s, 70s and early 80s. Exactly what I need.

As I said precedently, I'm actually thinking we should seriously rename our Clermont station as La Malbaie because what we built on the layout is coincidentally an almost perfect match for our topography and track work. Sure, it wil have to be validated in real life before doing anything. Whatever our choice, in the end, it will just be a change of name with no impact on operation.

Montmorency Falls in the late 50s (credits: Canadian Rail)


Where things change the most is Montmorency. Denis published a extract from a Canadian Rail magazine article. That picture is the exact thing I try to reproduce with our scene: Dominion Textile plant, the sweeping broad curved track, the old depot and old electric power plant.

Up until now, I always thought it was impossible to model this very scene correctly. But I found out our benchwork may be more forgiving than I thought. In fact, if we use the Dominion Textile plant to hide the tunnel, we kill two birds with a stone. Better, the depot is now on the "correct" side to be fully appreciated.



Anyway, I find this new layout to make the mainline looks longer. Also, it's easier to blend carefully the topography in that way. The only shortcoming is to see if switching Dominion Textile could become a hassle... Only experiment will tell us.

We will see if other club members are agreeing with me, but that could be the answer. Next time, I'll try to mock up something and see if it work as well as in 2D.

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