Selective Compression

[steinjr]

This is an interesting discussion! Stein, I am impressed by the amount of work you put into it.

Oh, not much work - I just copied and pasted from a couple of previous discussions elsewhere :-)

For me the acceptability of any selective compression seems a subjective perception.

I agree. And the compression ratio does not have to be the same all along a layout. An extremely common thing in layouts (so common that most of us doesn't even think consciously about it) is e.g. that the distance between towns/modeled scenes often is compressed a lot more than the distances within the town/scene.

Or as Byron Henderson describes a specific design challenge when modeling a town: "On a project I am completing now, one of the challenges is a scene that was about half of a mile long in real life. It needs to fit in about 600 scale feet of benchwork between two curves. While a simple 4-to-1 compression would theoretically fit, it wouldn’t capture the personality of the signature elements, which include a truly massive industry, a very modelgenic station, and a couple of smaller typical Midwestern rail-served businesses.

Fitting it all in while including a bit of the street grid that helped define the real scene required flipping one spur to point west instead of east and placing a station on a curve. This allowed the track configurations around the large plant to more strongly resemble their real life counterparts."

I'm sure a lot of modelers would say that my LaRoche Manufacturing company stretches the limits of believability with its size being only a little larger than the freight car serving it, but I like it .



Maybe its position in the back of a scene makes it less obviously undersized.

Putting stuff at the back of a scene often allows you to make them look bigger - the brain is "fooled" into (or rather - finds it less jarring) to think that we are only seeing part of the structure - there is more somewhere behind it.

For this specific building, FWIW, I think that the combination of seeing the large silos (belonging to another industry) in the background, having lots of track, the obviously cramped space between the track and the rocks behind it and having an road with a truck there makes me think that this is a small receiving/shipping building shoehorned into a narrow spot on the railroad - where the industry will be loading or unloading single boxcars, and then transport them by truck to their actual production facility, and not the actual production facility.

Smile,
Stein