Any John Allen fans here??


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Thank You! That is great stuff. I had trouble finding the second page of the PDF but I totally get the idea and think the FEMO Clays would work really well on a wire armature made the way Allen describes.

I sometimes consider getting the entire MR on Disk but I am hesitant. I have a lot of MR's from the late forties and fifties and while the magazine has always followed the three year format for articles, some real jewels appear on modeling every now and then. Has anyone here gone ahead and bought the entire magazine that way?
 
Allen's Stegosaurus appeared in a number of the Varney ads that featured scenes from the G&D back in the 50's. The Stegosaurus sometimes carried a road number on its flanks to designate it as a local switcher!

I never was much of a John Allen fan myself. Although his style of modeling (basically whimsy, if you look at the illustrated stories about the G&D) was quite popular at the time and John was indeed a master modeler, I'm sure it would be a flop today in the era of far more serious and prototypical model railroading.

NYW&B
 
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"Serious" is a tricky word to describe what we are doing here. I don't know that I want to be all that "Serious". I think John Allen was remarkable and was an artist in a true sense that he took the material as a consummate craftsman and interpreted it in his own way. A straight craftsman wouldn't do that. They would follow a blueprint and follow it well but it would not have the spark of madness that I like to see.
 
I never was much of a John Allen fan myself. Although his style of modeling (basically whimsy, if you look at the illustrated stories about the G&D) was quite popular at the time and John was indeed a master modeler, I'm sure it would be a flop today in the era of far more serious and prototypical model railroading.

NYW&B

I've got to agree with you. I've been doing this since the late 60's, and have looked over John Allens layout pics, and Malcolm Furlows too and I must say, I don't get it.
Then if you compare it to layouts by Sellios, Koester, mcClelland and the like, I really don't get it!

Its like comparing a Model T to a Corvette, Yes they are both cars, and at 1 time, claimed state of the art, but they, like we, evolve.

YMMV
 
Large multimedia site devoted to the G&D:
http://homepage.mac.com/doug56/G&D/

And at the other end of the spectrum, my little N-scale layout based on the original G&D track plan.

- Jeff

CR_2010-08-20.GIF


track_laid1.jpg
 
I understand the references to Sellios etc as being "current state of the art" and that phrase is an excellent description of the evolution in modeling.
In my own field, we look at the studio glass being made in 1962 and wince frequently at the naive nature of what was being made. It was "state of the art". Now fifty years later there are suppliers of color and tooling that the early guys in glass could not imagine.

So it is I think with railroading. In the 1950's, Lionel , Athearn and Varney were it. The detailing was quite crude, accessories came from plasticville. Now there are racks of brass accessories for engines off the shelf that anyone with some coin and soldering skills can take advantage of. Plastic injection has come an incredible distance. We have DCC instead of rusted old MRC units. We have laser cut wooden kits. The support industry will sell you whatever you can afford.

John Allen didn't have that. He pretty much had his hands and a vision. I have copies of MR from the early '50's with people trying to run engines on dry ice. The layouts on the cover were really crude. Comparatively he was way out there. The fine scale modelers of today are standing on the shoulders of the giants from that period and Allen was clearly one of them in both vision and application. This needs some perspective.

Be nice.
 
Yeah, I would disagree with you on that. Based simply on the fact that there are many facets to this grand hobby of ours and "whimsy" fits right in with all of them. Case in point: http://whymsical.com/

Of course, my statement was meant not as a criticism of John's actual work, but rather made in the sense of pointing out the fact that the whimsical/fantasy style of HO model railroading has long since passed from the scene. It was decidely a phase from the late 40's and the 50's and simply would not be found as broadly magazine acceptable in today's hobby.

In fact, can anyone point to when the last truly whimsy/fantasy style layout appeared in print? I cannot recall any specific example beyond Malcolm Furlow's efforts in the past 30 years and Furlow WAS widely criticized in print and on-line about his style!

NYW&B
 
Even though JA had whimsey and humor on his layout, He was doing things that are now considered "normal" in the hobby. Have you seen his structures and the detail that they have? How about his locos? All of his locos were steam and were either kit-builts, kit-bashed, or brass. He wasn't afraid to take a brass loco and turn it into something totally different from anything else available at that time. His 4-10-0 was a good example of this. Here was a loco that had no prototype, but he built it and it was built to prototype practices. None of the detail on this loco was out of line with any other prototype that could be found on the rails. He also required that his locos pull extremely well and run smoothly. If they didn't, and he couldn't correct this, he eliminated the loco.

He also, as has been mentioned, ran strictly to a schedule, and realistic operations. Sure he used tabs on cars, a now primitive mode of operations, but the movements involved with all trains were done in a very realistic manner. I believe that if DCC had been available to him, he would have used it without hesitation.

He was a planner and builder par excellance. He placed wires when installing scenery, that he knew he wasn't going to use for many years in the future. In this case it was wires for signals that he knew wouldn't be installed and operational until after construction was basically finished. Some signals he had gotten installed before he died, but others, just the pads they would sit on got installed.

He was a forward thinker and innovator unlike any that has been seen in the hobby before or since.
 
Although not specifically stated, I think maybe the Stegosaurus was made from scratch, also.
I don't believe so. I have a stegosaurus that looks identical. I got it in a set of plastic dinosaurs that were a very common in the 5 and dime stores of the time. Of course that does not mean that John did not use that particular readily available item as a model for a hand carved one either... I suppose we could speculate forever.

On the more general topic that is one thing I did not think was very unique about John Allen's #13 Emma. dinosaurs were a regular feature of my layouts, they provided a reason for the army me. Someone had to protect Plasticville from the raging herds of prehistoric terrors. I'm guessing almost every kid in the early 1960's with a model railroad had at least one dinosaur on it. I had a box car with the roof cut open (like for the circus giraffes in Dumbo movie) for the brontosaurus' head to come out of. I guess my only surprise was that it was on an "adults" layout.

I first discovered John Allen in 1970 when I started reading Model Railroader and then by mistake I got a copy of Model Railroad Craftsman. After reading them time and time again I noticed some similarities in the pictures and began to wonder if it was a picture of the same scene from the other magazine just from a different angle. So I began researching the contents of the captions on the pictures (pretty heavy research for a grade school student) and discovered the unifying thread of the G&D. I had no idea how to pronounce it until the special issue when he died in (1973?). It was that issue that really made all my prior-primative research come together into an understanding.
 
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On the more general topic that is one thing I did not think was very unique about John Allen's #13 Emma. I'm guessing almost every kid in the early 1960's with a model railroad had at least one dinosaur on it. I had a box car with the roof cut open (like for the circus giraffes in Dumbo movie) for the brontosaurus' head to come out of. I guess my only surprise was that it was on an "adults" layout.

Quite correct. The placement of small, commercially made, dinosaur figures on even adult layout in the 50's - an era that saw quite a bit of whimsy in layouts - was nothing unusual. Whit Towers, a long ago acquaintance of mine and a member of the orginal G&D operators, had one too, along with some other "odd critters" as I recall. The former was still there on his once famous Alturus & Lone Pine (the ALP) layout when I last visited it in the early 1990's. And, yes, most certainly, both he and John employed store-bought dionsaurs.

NYW&B
 
...The former was still there on his once famous Alturus & Lone Pine (the ALP) layout when I last visited it in the early 1990's. And, yes, most certainly, both he and John employed store-bought dionsaurs.

NYW&B

This is another pioneer that is sorely missed by me.

IIRC, both Whit and John used altered, (the spring was removed from the coupler hook) Baker couplers. This showed how much prototype operations were important to both men. When they started, there was no such thing as a reliable prototype looking coupler on the market. They went for a coupler that was the most reliable at the time other than the old Mantua hook and loop couplers. Although they were the most popular, and some say, reliable operating coupler on the market, they didn't have even an outline that vaguely represented a prototype coupler, Bakers, which if you squinted in dim light;), did have a boxy outline vaguely similar to a real coupler.
 



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