The Tragedy of CAD-Too-Soon

[Cjcrescent]

While I agree CAD won't make you a better designer, I think it can be helpful to new model railroaders for a couple reasons.

First of all, very few folks can lay out a ladder with pencil and paper and make it as long as it works out to be in reality. Turnouts take up a LOT of space, and often the space allocated is nowhere near enough.

Secondly, the ease of changing and modifying designs will help them experiment and learn. It's a lot easier than starting over on a graph paper.

Granted, to learn they have to ask question and/or read books, but that's also just as true if you're using pencil and paper. They're all just tools, no more, no less.

Very true Bob, Very true.

Still got most of my mech drawing stuff from High School. Up until a couple of years ago, it was all I used. Had stacks and stacks of layouts drawn with that stuff.
It was amazing how my designs changed after a two hour talk and lunch with John Armstrong twenty years ago. He told me several things that I have followed as best I could since then. The most important thing was, "If you observe the prototype, and design from what you see there, you won't go wrong."

 

[hminky]

Very true Bob, Very true.
It was amazing how my designs changed after a two hour talk and lunch with John Armstrong twenty years ago. He told me several things that I have followed as best I could since then. The most important thing was, "If you observe the prototype, and design from what you see there, you won't go wrong."

Or observe what John Armstrong did.

There was the Mainline Modeler articles by John Nehrich about the RPI layout. THe group designed their Troy, New York yard freelanced model railroad style. They found that it was unworkable. They then compressed the real yard and it worked wonderfully. Seems the real railroad planners knew something about railroading.

I prefer the paper turnout cutout and rearrange them to fit yard and town areas in real size. It is much quicker and is easier to visualize.

Just a thought
Harold

 

[cuyama]

While I agree CAD won't make you a better designer, I think it can be helpful to new model railroaders for a couple reasons.
<snip>
Secondly, the ease of changing and modifying designs will help them experiment and learn. It's a lot easier than starting over on a graph paper.

You're right, CAD is helpful in that it suggests how much space components actually occupy ... and that's always a rude awakening.

But the pendulum has swung too far, in my opinion, because CAD makes everything look good when the design is really very poor.

What makes it worse, of course, is that so many have the knee-jerk reaction on-line to receommend CAD to everyone without suggesting the foundation knowledge needed for a good design.

The one good thing about paper-and-pencil is that it forces one to take their time and think between revisions. John Armstrong did all his designs with paper-and-pencil over the years, as did all the noted designers of the past up until Don Mitchell, who was the first well-known designer to make the transition.

My overall point is that newcomers to layout design would benefit much more by some time of study than by moving directly to CAD. A chain saw is a great tool, but if you hand it to someone who doesn't know the basic elements of tree-trimming, they are liable to do a lot more harm than good.

Regards,

Byron

 

[cuyama]

Hello my name is Coyote and I am a CTSS sufferer...

GC,

I wrote the article a while ago, so it certainly wasn't directed at you, but I think your experience is a good example of what can happen.

As others have noted, the railroads built the real thing based on knowledge gained over decades of engineering. Folks like John Armstrong have distilled that knowledge into a comprehensible form for modelers. We're all well-served to rely on that knowledge instead of simply plunking things down in CAD.

But that process takes time and study for which most of us lack the patience.

Best of luck on your design journey (and lose those switchbacks, huh?)

Regards,

Byron

 

[SpaceMouse]

I prefer the paper turnout cutout and rearrange them to fit yard and town areas in real size. It is much quicker and is easier to visualize.

Just a thought
Harold

While this works well for already built benchwork and set parameters, if you have a space with multiple possibilities, benchwork planning (and track planning), whether paper and pencil or CAD, is called for. Obviously, once you build the benchwork, you are much more limited to possibilities--unless of course, you don't mind tearing out and starting over.

 

[SpaceMouse]

My overall point is that newcomers to layout design would benefit much more by some time of study than by moving directly to CAD. A chain saw is a great tool, but if you hand it to someone who doesn't know the basic elements of tree-trimming, they are liable to do a lot more harm than good.

Regards,

Byron

The trouble is, and I fit this category when I started, is that there is so much to learn and there is really no good single source to learn even the basics. Not to say that reading Armstrong, Koester, etc. aren't valuable, it's that they don't make a lot of sense if you don't have the schema. Here is a clip from a recent post from over there.

Last summer before moving into a new house I spent probably 100 hours on Cadrail designing my new layout. I read a bunch of the track planning books and used the tools in them but it still requires a lot of effort and many iterations to pull everything together. Moreover, while the plan is largely done I still worry that in practice it won't meet my goals. In part this is because the hobby seems to lack decent rules of thumb on many important questions for layout design such as:

1. How many passing tracks should you have per feet of single track mainline?
2. What is the right ratio of industrial sidings to layout size?
3. How many staging tracks should you have?
4. How far apart should passenger stations be?
5. What should the car capacity of industrial sidings be?
6. What is a good ratio of track to layout size?

These are complicated questions especially when you think about them and the reaction you often get in this forum is something along the lines of "it depends on how many trains you want to run or what kind of layout do you want." This may be an appropriate answer for an advanced modeler who can draw upon their experiences to figure out how staging capacity relates to # of passing sidings and # of sidings. But for a serious beginner, how can you figure these things out? Even the best track planning books, like Armstrong's, only give us design tools: how to use squares, standards on curvature and turnout angle, and sample diagrams of things like passenger stations and freight yards. But I've never seen anywhere someone give systematic advice on how to pull these elements together. Maybe this can only come from developing a "feel" for what a layout should look like but this is hard to do, especially for a beginner.

Going from the beginner stage to having even a rudimentary concept of track planning is a huge chasm.

 

[cuyama]

The trouble is, and I fit this category when I started, is that there is so much to learn and there is really no good single source to learn even the basics.
<big snip>
Going from the beginner stage to having even a rudimentary concept of track planning is a huge chasm.

That's why the Layout Design Special Interest Group's publications have been so useful to me. But I read and re-read to get some concepts down. I've read and re-read all of Armstong's books. And Chubb's How to Operate Your Model Railroad (Kalmbach, out of print) was very helpful.

But there were some concepts I didn't learn until I had done a design for someone else and had to crawl around inside their Gs&Ds (Santa Maria Valley RR here and in MRP 2004). And a number of concepts I didn't really learn until I had the chance to set up operating sessions on a well-designed layout (Rick Fortin's ATSF 5th District).

Maybe I'm just a slow learner.

But I don't think that there are any shortcuts to a great design -- the "rules of thumb" vary so much based on concept, era and prototype, space available, etc.

Once when talking to a client I likened the process to designing a kitchen. For a home kitchen remodel, there are only a few elements (fridge, stove, sink, etc.) and an already-defined space. But the average homeowner still has some challenge getting a useable design together. He or she might need some knowledgeable help; there's also a chance they could muddle through with decent results. But no way would we let that tyro design a new commercial restaurant kitchen -- even if they have the CAD templates! We want someone who has designed a few, studied some theory, and has some background in the field.

Some newcomers to design will be successful with smaller and less-involved projects. But most need a lot of study to attempt a large complex layout. There are just too many variables. And I think the over-recommendation of model railroad CAD can cause the design process to seem deceptively simple to the newcomer -- often with unhappy results.

I think it's also tough to design these things by committee, on-line in a forum. I see that many designs get better with lots of input. But most of these changes are just variations on the original theme and there is often a major systemic problem (or missed opportunity) that's never raised and never addressed, either because it isn't obvious or because nobody wants to mention the "elephant in the corner". Because that's often a complete "do over". and even in CAD, that's painful.

Fixing those major issues takes a lot of time and the best way would be to have a knowledgeable friend sit down with the designer and spend a lot of time working through all the issues -- a fresh start. But since so many of us seem not to have experienced modeling friends nearby, the on-line committee is the best alternative, I suppose.

On the other hand, I do recognize that it is a hobby and every design doesn't have to be optimized to the nth degree. But especially for a large layout, there will a lot of time and money invested. It seems to me it would be worth it for the owner/designers to do the homework up front -- but so often, they just jump directly to CAD.

Wow, I didn't plan to write that much ... hopefully some of it is interesting.

regards,

Byron