Customer Reviews

Mid-Sized and Manageable Track Plans (Model Railroader Books)

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"Mid-Sized & Manageable" is a wonderful track-planning book that belongs on the shelf of anyone who is currently spending a lot of time thinking about model railroad design. Rice's entertaining writing style and his charming water colors of the layout designs make for an entertaining book. The layout designs themselves are nice, although the text descriptions are lacking for many of the layout ideas. After reading a few, I was left wondering if the Kalmbach editors had hacked away half the text in the interest of keeping the book short. If so, it is sorely missed. In addition, the layout diagrams are sometimes badly mislabeled, with missing titles and apparently misplaced arrows.

My greater gripe with the book is that it looks to me as though Mr. Rice, after his amazing and thought-provoking first Kalmbach effort "Small, Smart, & Practical", was asked to write a book that uses "American-style" layout design. (An impression that was backed up by the non-sequitur inclusion of vaguely related photos from old Model Railroader magazine articles.) As such, it is missing the space-saving and life-simplifying devices such as "cassettes", sector plates, modular design, etc. There's very little here that has not already been done by John Armstrong.

In short, it's a really nice book and I don't mean to be too harsh--I expect I'll refer to it every now and then as I plan my new layout. Very entertaining writing, good prototype (and not-so-prototype) inspirations, and I always look forward to the illustrations. If you are looking for a standard Kalmbach-style book chock-full-o' layout plans, it's a good one. However, I hope to see another book on the topic whenever Mr. Rice can get back to it, one that provides a more convincing answer to the question I had in my mind as I paid for this book--"What would Iain Rice do if he had an entire 20ft. by 20 ft. basement at his disposal for his model trains?"

Mr. Rice has an eye for elegance. His model railroad track plans lay a foundation for creating a distinctive feel of a prototype railroad in a small space. The plans in this book are well within the reach of the average person with a spare bedroom or corner of a garage or basement. They are small enough to be operational soon enough to stave off discouragement and challenging enough to keep an operator or three busy for several hours.

I suspect that everyone who really enjoys model railroads has a dream of building huge layout someday. Everyone knows that it almost never happens but, still, it's nice to dream. Even when the dream is not realized fully, there are stages that most go through. A small layout is built. With the experience gained in doing that, a medium sized one is built and from there a large one may be built. All of this is in preparation for someday building the whopper.

This book takes a dream killing but realistic approach. It points out the reasons why the dream will probably never be built. It also points out reasons not to build it even if time, money and space were available to do so. The arguments are well reasoned and cogent. The problem is that they help to kill the dream.

That is not the main purpose of the book, though. The main purpose is to provide track plans and ideas for mid sized layouts. That it does well. The pictures are nice and visually interesting. Most of the text, though, details the background of the railroad upon which the model is to be based. This too is well read.

The plans are nice but the dream has suffered.

Written by Iain Rice (a model railroad enthusiast and author of 11 modeling handbooks), Mid-Sized & Manageable Track Plans is a straightforward guide to creating track plans and track backgrounds to appropriate N & HO scales. Full color photographs, extensively detailed instructions, and no-nonsense advice combine to make Mid-Sized & Manageable Track Plans a first-rate addition to any dedicated model railroad hobbyist's personal reference collection.