12-01-2011, 12:21 AM
Brakie Wrote:Looking at N Scale there is less "Selective compression" or "compressive selection" especially on the Godzilla size N Scale layouts.
As I already pointed out - how much you would need to compress depends on the modeling scale and your goals for the layout. It is very obvious that going to smaller scales allows you, in the same space, to either model a scene with less compression, or to more scenes, to put more distance between modeled scenes.
But in N scale, a mile (5280 feet) is still fairly long - 33 feet instead of the 60 feet it would have been in H0 scale. Distance track center to track center for tangent (straight) track is 1 3/16" instead of 2", so in theory - in 24" of depth, you could have 10 parallel tracks in H0 scale and 18 parallel tracks in N scale, still leaving room at the aisle for a small safety zone and at the back for a building flat.
I would submit that both "compressive selection" (selecting smaller scenes to model, instead of trying to model e.g. huge yards) and "selective compression" (representing something by a shorter variant, using fewer tracks etc) are still significant factors to both to people modeling in N scale and to people modeling in H0 scale.
As for the 16 car passenger train (of 80-foot cars). In N scale is about 8 1/2 - 9 feet long (depending on how many engines you want at the front), needing 9 - 9 1/2 foot sidings, staging tracks etc.
Whether it would have been sensible to do a 9 foot train instead of e.g. a 4 1/2 foot train (i.e. 16 cars instead of 8 cars) in a room that is 6.5 x 11.5 feet depends on what your goal would have been - just watching a long train roll by, or having room for several sidings and a train length or two between each siding.
Design is (IMO - YMMV) above all an exercise in tradeoffs and finding a balance. There is a large element of personal judgement here - it is not necessarily sensible to set up a simple formula and just say : in H0 scale we reduce train lengths to 25% of the prototype, while we in N scale reduce train lengths to e.g. 45% of the original (to compensate for N scale allowing objects being 1.8 - 160/87.1 times longer in the same room length).
One of the points made in Byron Henderson's article on "caricature, copy or close enough" - trying to be totally faithful to the prototype at all times doesn't necessarily always result in a good design.
Smile,
Stein