Key Design Influence - Pelle Soeborg

Whoa! Check this out!

Readers of Model Railroader magazine will likely have seen the incredible modeling of Pelle Soeborg. The combination of his superbly captured railroad scenes and high quality photos shot from a railfan’s perspective put Pelle in a class of his own. Having spent much of my railfanning days in the Mojave Desert and the Sierra mountain passes, I find his model railroad images captivating for their realism, simplicity and expansiveness. Simply inspiring.

Soeborg has authored several articles for MR, his photos frequently appear in the advertisements of suppliers and significantly, he has recently published ‘Mountain to Desert - Building the HO scale Daneville & Donner River’.

Not content to just absorb the appealing images and descriptions found in Pelle’s book, I have spent some time recently considering why these scenes transcend the efforts of so many.

Dissecting the genius

Now I’ll be the first to admit, that distilling great art to its core elements may only lead to the realization that the artist has singular insights and talent that can’t actually be divined. Let’s just say that layout design is a risky business and leave it at that.

Quite frankly, it’s an essential activity that feeds directly into determining the layout vision for my forthcoming project. If I can really incorporate the principles underlying these scenes into my planning, I am much more likely to produce a layout that produces maximum satisfaction.

Before reaching for the microscope, here are some key aspects already touched on without actually trying. The first is the notion of modelling discrete scenes. Pretty standard idea right? So what’s different about these photos compared to so many of the others on offer? I believe the answer comes down to a lack of compression. More on this in a minute.

The second obvious attribute to capture is framing the scene from the railfan perspective. All of Pelle’s work on this layout reproduces modern railroading in the mountain and desert areas of California. This alone would be enough to get my attention, but what is key is that while there are many layouts representing places in California, few succeed in nailing the ‘feel’ of being trackside the same way that Soeborg has. This has a lot to do with the angles and framing of each shot. It also has a lot to do with lighting the scene. Given the consistency of all photos found in the book, each taken from a different angle, I’m content to accept that the layout looks darn good. Period! It’s not just clever photography, the layout is special.

Here’s some examples from the back cover and there are dozens more inside the book and on Pelle’s website.

Minimally compressed scenes

The layout itself is in an 11 x 22’ room. Judging by thousands of layout articles and dozens of layout web sites, railroaders would see this space a something to be filled, jamming as much layout into the space as possible. Along the way, the mainline is shoe-horned into all the nooks and crannies to ‘maximize the mainline’, twice maybe three times around the room, sidings and spurs sprout at every step, after all, now that the space is here, it’s a chance to cram all those modelling ideas in.

Look closely at Soeborg’s track plan. Note the complete absence of spaghetti. Key to this design are the three scenes - Daneville on the left wall, the cement plant on the left side of the center wall and the Donner River scene on the right side of the center wall. That’s it, folks! Three scenes in 242 square feet.

Each scene is at least eight feet long. The front cover shows a portion of the Donner River scene and is about 4-5 feet long and about 1 1/2 feet wide. By letting the scenes be long, each looks much more natural. The sidings and spurs are just what’s needed to serve the small number of industries in the town. The industries are spaced out preserving the open feel of places like Mojave. All the scenery techniques used by Pelle build on this fundamental open-space theme.

I spent hours looking at the cement plant scene. Having the mainline pass by it on a long sweeping convex broad radius curve looks totally believable. Again the scene is only about a foot and a half deep. Offering the eye several very broad radius curves toward the front and by deemphasizing the locations where there are tighter curves, the viewer is left with the impression that all the curves are generally broader than the actual 33” minimum radius.

What about operation?

There’s no question that operation takes a hit from devoting more space to each scene that is actually modeled. Yet what is modeled, is brilliant, and I think this bias is the way to go. The two desert scenes are tied together operationally, while the Donner scene is simply a remote mountain location. No industries to serve here.

How many of us would look at that 8 feet of mountain main line and feel the urge to put two or three industries along there? Depending on what you are modeling, that may be totally appropriate. But it would not be at all reminiscent of Donner Pass, no matter how well the modelling of the industries was done. And it would likely destroy the feeling of distance captured in the photos, wrecking the other essential element - modeling the railfan perspective.

Modeling the Railfan Perspective

Pelle has chosen an effective design that is in complete harmony with the feel of the locations he is modeling. If you are ever in the Mojave, pick a nice isolated spot away from the freeway on one of the main lines to get the idea. Bagdad on the BNSF Needles Sub east of Ludlow is a good example and there are many more. It’s hot, dry, expansive. There’s an energy about the desert that somehow blends the open space and the solitude and the harshness of the landscape. For this railfan, the open desert is a perfect companion for the modern freights slogging it out across the shimmering distance. Powerful stuff, and immensely lens-worthy.

Railroad photographers frequently emphasize the distance, the grades and the ruggedness of the terrain. Views along the tracks show up the dominant linear character of the right of way. Tight curves are a total deal-breaker here.

In addition to the basic seductive power of the California desert landscape itself, the way the rails pass through the scenes is very important. Roads rise and fall more readily than the tracks which cut a deliberate sweeping line through the landscape. Broad radius curves on single track can sometimes do a better job of representing tracks across the desert than tangent.

In the mountain scenes, the simplicity of the trackage emphasizes the mountain itself. The effect doesn’t depend on gimmicks, like ceiling-to-floor mountains, rather it’s the proportions of the scene that make it convincing. Here too, roads are supporting players, emphasizing the rise and fall of the landscape in contrast to the much more linear right of way of the track. The many vertical lines of the tree trunks contrast nicely with the single sinuous rail line i.e. it’s mostly mountain with a rail line clinging to it.

A lot less is a lot more

There are a lot of lessons in Pelle’s work on this layout. I for one, am very grateful that this book is available - twenty bucks very well spent. By keeping the scenes fewer in number and well separated from one another, more space is available for each one to be a very faithful representation of it’s respective prototype. Each scene can be longer and preserves the strong linear flavor found in all railroad locations. The track layouts in each scene are visually appealing for railfans using broad sweeping curves in preference to tigher curves with short tangents in between.

While switching operation is clearly not the main purpose of this layout, there is some realistic switching that is possible. By dialing back the operational possibilities, the scenes themselves have been allowed to fully come to life. I find the whole effect to be very appealing. I am further encouraged that for equivalent layout space as modeled in HO, the losses of operational possibilities can be gained back through modelling in N Scale.