One Factor Of Fun: Purposefulness

MR Video Plus put up a video tour of John Tews's Timber River Railway last week. I've always liked this layout, and the video was especially good coverage. If you aren't an MRVP subscriber, you can find several YouTube videos, like this one:

However, the MRVP production quality and editing make their version worthwhile. There's also a web site on his layout. It's become one of my favorites for several reasons. One is that it simply exudes fun, like several other layouts on my blogroll. But it occurs to me that one big reason for the fun is the sense of purposefulness it gives.

An ore or log train is special, because it's clear what it's carrying and why, whereas boxcar traffic is invisible inside the car. The short ore cars are also appealing.

I've thought about adding ore operation to my layout over the years, but haven't gotten very far. I have picked up ore cars at swap meets and upgraded them, in particular to give them shorter coupling distances. Here's a Roundhouse with Herald King decals and taconite extensions:

Here's a factory-painted Roundhouse with coupler mods compared to a Walthers GN car:

here's an AHM repainted with the former Champ ore car decal set for B&LE:

These AHM cars are a B&LE prototype, longer than the Minnesota-Wisconsin style cars, so they're best not lettered for GN, DMIR, or whatever. However, they're very close to other 1950s ore cars for SP, UP, CP, and possibly others. It's too bad someone doesn't bring back the dies and produce them with good paint jobs for these roads -- in particular, they're right for the Kaiser Eagle Mountain mine, which MR featured in a 2016 project layout. The Roundhouse style SP 26 foot cars carried pellets to Kaiser Steel in Fontana. The B&LE style cars lettered for SP carried ore for export to Long Beach.

Another way to seem more purposeful is to add contemporary conspicuity stripes, which have been required since about 2010. I've been adding them to cars that should have them. My favorite product is from Smokebox Graphics, and they're precut and self-adhesive:

They're actually reflective, unlike Micro Scale decals or factory-painted versions. Here are a couple more cars I did yesterday: