The Abstraction of an Idealization: Cartographic Representations of Model Railroads

The designed terrain of a model railroad has—if the builder wants to be considered a ‘serious model railroader’, not a ‘toy train railroader’—several functions: it legitimizes the railroad layout, it creates a temporal contextualization for the rolling stock and it conceals parts of the model railroad that are hidden from view. An essential medium for conveying the conventions of the design of this terrain, based on a common sense understanding of landscape, is model railroad-related literature. This literature in turn often makes use of cartographic representations. These representations are arranged between the polarity of track plans (with recourse to abstract symbols) and topographic representations, which use a concrete symbology to create abstract line symbols for track representations. In addition, block images provide a three-dimensional impression of the layout to be depicted. All in all, a rather simple, intuitively accessible representation dominates, which leaves open individual scope for design within certain conventions. This article reports the results of an explorative study in the context of current research on landscape theory.