Operations – Why would you?

It ought to be obvious that I am advocating for operations. From my perspective, operations is the solution to the eternal problem of building a layout, finding that layout doesn’t quite meet your goals and then tearing it all down and starting over.

I know because I was the hamster wheel of layout building for years. I thought bigger would make me happier, but surprise, it didn’t. There was always something missing for me, and that was purpose.

Understanding what I really wanted out of my hobby took me a lot of years. But even as a teenager, I knew just driving a train wasn’t enough. I needed a purpose for doing that.

And that secret sauce for me was doing work.

Model Railways are unique

Model Railroading is unique among all of the scale modelling disciplines. Not only do you get to build and admire your models, you also run and interact with them like real railroaders do with their full-size counterparts.

Most prototype locomotives use electricity to move, in the case of diesel-electric and pure electric traction. Others use live steam, while smaller locomotives and critters, over time, have used stored steam, gasoline/petrol, diesel-hydraulic or diesel-electric power plants to do their work.

No matter what the prototype powered their locomotives with, as modellers, we generally deal with electric traction, no matter the outline (steam/diesel/electric) of the locomotive.

Whatever the scale of your models, whether they fit in the palm of your hand or are big enough for you to ride on, you interact with them in a way that, for example, plastic aircraft, armour, and figure modellers cannot.

Some modellers may at this point say that a tank or a plane can be remotely controlled. Which means that they get to operate with it too. But an aircraft modeller’s fighter or bomber, no matter how well detailed, does not do what it was designed for. They are not allowed to blow up targets, carry high explosive ordinance or shoot other aircraft out of the skies. Although if that changes in the future, I might go all in.

Operations (purpose) = Secret Sauce

Our trains, on the other hand, in all their many forms, can do almost everything that the prototype does.  The only exception is that we cannot get scale-sized people to board or alight trains, nor can we get them to load freight cars, close and lock doors and assist in shunting moves on the ground or in the cab. These parts alone are static. Everything else on our model railways mimics the prototype.

For example, you, as the driver/engineer, can take a train from town A to town B. Once there, you perform the work outlined in the timetable or switchlist, or under the direction of signallers or dispatchers, according to the rules set out in the rulebook.

Once you have finished the work at Town B, you move on to the next location as required and repeat the cycle until, at the end of your working day (or operating session), you return to your endpoint and sign off.

This is operations. Moving people and freight in trains from one point on the rail network to another, doing work, and then moving to the next point before repeating ad infinitum.

The level of complexity involved depends on you. Your desire, knowledge and layout all play a part in these choices. As a small layout builder and designer, I want to focus on the work, not the paperwork.

Depending on your tastes and desires, you can add complexity to make gameplay more realistic or simplify it.

For now, I hope this has whetted your appetite for more. If it has, we’ll get into more details in the next section –>: 103 – Ops as a design goal.

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