Forgot Login?   Sign up  
Saturday, November 30, 2024

O Brother!

     Since NOBODY will be reading this I guess I can vent here.

     Same thing other people have griped about in the past, and actually people have said I have been guilty of. It's the "Why don't company X build Y" vs why don't YOU build X yourself. 

     I have NO skills at building, painting or decaling a model railroad car or engine to look like anything but homemade mud. Nope. Never ever going to happen. I will have to buy it ready made and that means either hope that the X I am wishing for gets made, or find someone with the proper skills to make it for me. 

   I am not that skilled with landscaping and a lot of other things dealing with model railroading, but most of those type of things can be redone and mistakes hidden. 

  While poking around on another site that I wont mention by name, I seen where someone wanted a store bought, ready made, modern highway bridge.  He was kind of desperate because he needed it to go further with a project. (I know what that is like, I am stuck because Ii need about 8 dollars worth of MTL parts, and well I am just flat out broke) 

   Now of course I had to throw in my 2 cents, that it could be easily built and would help his modeling skills, but someone else had to throw in 2 more cents and compare building a modern concrete highway bridge with handlaying track or building a steam locomotive from scratch.

   How could anyone compare the 2? I could build a modern bridge from scrap wood and perhaps 5 bucks worth of parts and hit it with some rattle can grey paint, and come up with a pretty decent highway bridge. Of course I cant make a steam engine with the same stuff.

   If you have the skill sets to build a module,  you can build a highway bridge. 

  Why would a company make a highway bridge? Wouldn't they be specific to the terrain, the landscaping, the era, the road, the height, the length, the width and the angle and slope? Would it be adjustable where you could add to it or cut it to size? Would it be only in one size and we now will have to design the layout around the bridge? This seems kind of backwards and silly, not that that has stopped companies from being backwards and silly.

   In the time it took me to write this out, I could have had the span built, with strips of wood or styrene, and would be working on the pylons.  They might take some time if I was being fancy and using dowels, and then the next tricky part would be the sloped concrete abutments. 

  If I had 5000 bucks or so, I guess I could buy me a nice ready built Z scale layout, where all I would have to worry about is putting the cars on the track and turning a knob. 

Documenting a build
Proto vs Fanta-zee
 

Comments

No comments made yet. Be the first to submit a comment
Already Registered? Login Here
Guest
Sunday, 01 December 2024
If you'd like to register, please fill in the username, password and name fields.