BY FRED SCHEER

(Reprinted from The Relay, 2016, Volume 6, Issue 1)

Lance Mindheim

• 8 Realistic Track Plans for a Spare Room
• 8 Realistic Track Plans for Small Switching Layouts
• How to Design a Small Switching Layout
• How to Build a Small Switching Layout
• How to Operate a Small Switching Layout.

Jim Spavins

• Minimalist Model Railroading — Capturing the Essence of Railroading
• Minimalist Model Railroading — 15 More Track Planning Case Studies

All seven of these books are self-published and available on Amazon, where their prices range from $18 to $23. Several of Lance Mindheim’s books are available at some hobby shops, including Mainline Hobby Supply and M. B. Klein’s.

In recent years, I’ve noticed layout plans characterized by an economy of resources and a design efficiency expected of prototype railroad design engineers. For want of a better term, I’ll call it “spare design.” At their best, you’ll find layouts with practically no unnecessary track, yet complete, missing nothing essential.

Lance Mindheim shows spare design in his two track plan books, “8 Realistic Track Plans for a Spare Room” and “8 Realistic Track Plans for Small Switching Layouts.” Lance favors the walk-around shelf layout, an efficient design for serious operations, on which he employs prototype track configurations. His design economy extends beyond track to include an artist’s sense of layout composition. He contrasts busy focal points with the relief of green space, river crossings, undeveloped land, and abandoned track and industries. Knowing what to leave out, track plans improve and the eye is allowed to focus on one or several important scenes. Building a layout in this way makes it much more interesting to view and run. Then, by capturing more of the prototype’s procedures, layouts presented in these two books are in effect expanded as the pace of operation slows.

Lance’s format is straightforward. Up front, he presents standardized layout specifications and discusses his approach to building infrastructure. Lance favors fairly light-duty benchwork, a tactic to get layouts up and running and keep builders’ interest on fire. Each layout is introduced with a pithy description and a materiel schedule.

The universal premise is an 11’ x 12’ spare bedroom available for trains. Layouts in the “small switching layout” book claim their territory on shelf-style benchwork around the room’s perimeter, whereas layouts in what we’ll call the “other” book, not limited to switching layouts, add a center peninsula. Although Lance describes the 11’ x 12’ switching layouts as “small,” spare design is hardly an affectation only for smaller layouts.

Three more of Lance’s books build on and explain ideas shown in his plan books. In “How to Design a Small Switching Layout,” although the text is primarily aimed at switching layouts, most of this book is applicable to layouts with operating schemes beyond the switching district. It’s a clean, fresh take on a layout design guide. One of my favorite sections is “Space Efficient Industries.” Lance introduces the concept and gives examples of industries that provide more- and more varied “car spots” per square foot of industrial structure. He develops the idea of car spots as a key measure, rather than the number of sidings, industries, or industry size.

How to Build a Small Switching Layout is a special jewel. You get two books in one, which together take your layout from start to finish. The first 44 pages cover infrastructure and the remaining 60 pages are a guide to convincing scenery, structures, and details. Lance does it with no wasted words, nothing left out, and nothing that leaves you wondering what he meant. It’s now my number-one “go-to” scenery reference.

In How to Operate a Small Switching Layout, Lance gives us a complete guide to operating one of his model railroads. Included are basics, such as diagrams on how to switch trailing point and facing point turnouts. But also, we find chapters on strategy and tactics for moving cars and approaching the job, and Lance’s take on staging for an operating session.

His interest is in prototype operation rather than having play value for its own sake. Hence, we have explanations of why runaround moves ought to be limited, plus time studies on prototype tasks, accompanied by a table listing tasks and the appropriate amount of time to allow for them. A final section discusses how to improve the experience for yourself and your guests, and includes a section on preparing for guest operators.

Jim Spavins dubbed his particular approach to spare design, “minimalist model railroading.” As a discipline, it institutionalizes economy of design into a process. It’s an executive approach to model railroading, where the purpose is to focus on one or a very few key features of your prototype (the ones of particular interest to you), distill them into design goals, and make affirmative choices to “take the essence of that focus and relentlessly remove (or minimize) any features [that] would be non-essential to fulfilling [the] goals.”

Jim seems to recognize that opportunity costs — time, money, and space, for example — are among inherent limitations for most of us. Jim explains, “The suggestion with a minimalist design approach is to not start with a list of wants. Instead, begin by stating what the focus of the layout will be — or the essence of railroading you want to create.” In so doing, then “what to include” and “what not to include” in your plan will become much clearer by measuring these things against your goal[s], as opposed to assembling a collection of railroad features into a track plan. Compromises may be inevitable, but they won’t be at the expense of the core reason for your layout’s existence.

Jim’s two volumes show 22 railroads. For each one, he walks you through a fully developed design process to reach a final track plan. To illustrate the process, he starts with a pair of railroads, one freelanced and one prototype. With each, he first sets forth several goals and applies his process to develop a track plan. Then, going through several iterations, he progressively reduces the number of goals. For each iteration, he shows how his process supports adjustments to the layout plans. In his final distillation, goals are reduced to one, so more and more features become nonessential and are removed. As a result, the final layout becomes sufficiently spare to permit modeling in O gauge instead of HO without changing the layout’s size.

Speaking of size, minimalist model railroading isn’t a strategy limited to “small” layouts. For his books, Jim developed layout plans to fit one of three standardized spaces: a 10’ x 11’ spare room, a 12’ x 18’ train room, and a 29’ x 44’ basement.

Both authors embrace a spare school of design, a welcome addition to model railroad planning. They’re in the same school but follow different curricula. Jim is primarily about providing a breakthrough strategy and process, and illustrating how it works. You may employ it to write specs for a commercial designer or to design or modify your own layout. Whichever way, your focus and goals are likely to result in a satisfying product. Lance provides two volumes of superb turnkey plans. Clear goals are predefined, a more traditional presentation. In designing a layout, one could consider using Jim’s strategic approach together with Lance’s design and plan books. The two authors’ works complement each other nicely.

These books are fresh and different. Both authors write interesting material in pithy styles punctuated with plenty of sharp, clear graphics. Their resulting products make for easy reading. In my estimation, they’re good value.