3D printing for the Nineteenth Century Modeler

And what variety there is!  Here are some of the designers working with Shapeways to bring out products that you might not otherwise find:

Panamint Models  Truck and component designs from the mid-XIX century
Bone Valley Models
Image Replicas by Walter B. Vail Some interesting experiments with locomotive bodies - and a Michigan-Cal shay model for less than $25!
Myner Models Mostly HOn30 stuff.
Hurley's Model Railway Supply Interesting detail parts
Light Scale Models mostly narrow gauge and mining equipment
The Dalles Hostler's Models Houses, dog and out, and detail parts
Sierra Studios Log bunks
Austin Rail Products Alternative bodies for MDC cars, to add some variety to the fleet
Singular Trains Trucks and some beautiful Canadian-prototype passenger equipment
Eight-wheeler models Trucks, paper wheels, and turn-of-the-century characters

The Next Big Thing

Is this.  3D printing is not new; if it were, trucks and other major components would be an idea, rather than a product.  But it's a great idea, and it has incredible potential, because it promises to get around one of the requirements that has always bedeviled model railroading - the challenge of volume. 

The key problem in tooling for an expensive and inflexible manufacturing process like die-casting has always been volume - how do you generate a sufficient number of sales to recoup your investment?  Given that casting and molding have usually been preferred techniques for mass production, since they minimize manpower requirements, the challenge has been to maximize the potential sales volume for your investment.  Alternate methods such as etching have been tried, but they've always been low-volume methods, because the combination of cost and skill level have combined to keep the number of potential customers low - which in turn forces costs upward.  Resin casting, which is cheaper and easier, has been a step in this direction, since you can easily make rubber molds and cast parts and pieces in 2 part resin.

But 3D printing literally breaks the mold: you invest not in a set of molds that can be used to replicate the same object, but a printer that can be programmed to produce a tremendous variety of objects.  Obtaining the unusual, in other words, is no longer a matter of being one of a group of at least five thousand people who are willing to put up the money to obtain it; it's now a CAD drawing away. 
Reactions to this are naturally mixed.  Tim Warris, the creative mind behind the beautiful Port Kelsey Railway and Fast Tracks has a typically perceptive take: it's the ultimate disruptive technology.  Tim thinks that's frightening, and I can see why he would think that: he's engaged in the sort of William Morris-style craftsmanship that every Industrial Revolution threatens to engulf.  I'm less pessimistic than Tim is.  After all, Fast Tracks wasn't put out of business by Atlas or Shinohara; it followed them by a couple of decades, just like William Morris followed the Industrial Revolution.

As someone who engages in an occasional act of attempted craftsmanship, there are a couple of great merits to 3D printing: not only does it make things available that would otherwise be attainable only at great cost in time or effort, it allows me to focus my work on areas that I'm really interested in.  For a guy like Tim, who loves to handlay track, that could mean obtaining hardware such as switchstands.  Many carriers had their own switchstand designs, and commercial manufacturers further increased the range.  Today only a relatively limited number are available from manufacturers in the larger scales, because of the economics of the manufacturing process.  But I'm anxious to see what else come down the pike, because I'm an optimist on matters of this kind - and much as I love to build wooden kits, the fact is that every new method or technique I have seen has ultimately served to enhance the range of choices in the hobby, rather than reduce them.

Annus Mirabilis

Here's another great period British film - this one from 1963; it depicts the recovery of British Railways from a heavy snowstorm. The British Invasion-style soundtrack fits curiously with the railway scenes, many of which underscore the awkwardness of Britain's transition from the industrial age to the modern era. This may be 1963, but only the film quality and the diesel engines distinguish the railway scenes here from those of "The Night Mail." Not much had changed since 1936: the manually-operated signal boxes were still warmed by coal fires, and all of the employees are well past middle age. The film clearly means to convey some sense of the importance and usefulness of the railway system - can't miss the passengers chuckling over all of the cars stuck in the snow - but it's a defensive assertion, made in the face of encroaching modernity, a last argument for the preservation of Things As They Are.

Philip Larkin designated 1963 as a watershed year in his famous "Annus Mirabilis," for reasons that have less than nothing to do with this blog:

"Sexual intercourse began

In Nineteen Sixty-Three

(which was rather late for me)

Between the end of the "Chatterley ban"

And the Beatles first LP."

It was certainly a memorable year in Britain, for a lot of reasons, intimately connected with the culture: apart from that LP and the ending of the Lord Chancellor's longstanding ban on the publication or sale of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, there was the Profumo Affair, another one of those salacious incidents that leave the impression of ineradicable change.

And of course, there was also the Beeching Axe. In March, 1963, the British Railways Board published "The Reshaping of British Railways," which recommended the wholesale closure of large segments of the railway system. In spite of rising losses and the clear need to conserve funds for modernization of the surviving system, there was an immediate outcry - the press dubbed the proposed plan "The Beeching Axe," after its author, Dr. Richard Beeching, and the folk singer Cyril Tawney commemorated it in song. In spite of the outcry, the government went ahead and pursued mass closures. Many branches vanished, as did the Great Central line from Nottingham down to London; the great Midland line from Settle to Carlisle narrowly escaped closure.

So when you see this video (or, for another taste of the same period, this one), you are seeing something of more than normal interest: this is a cameo of British Railways before the Beeching Axe fell. Steam has four years to run yet in revenue service; the Chatterley ban is still in force, and women wear white gloves in Pullman cars, while men run locomotives in frock coats. You might be forgiven for wondering what decade it is - because it's one of those moments where things are in the process of going two ways at once.

The Night Mail

Here's a unique little find - "The Night Mail," a famous British documentary from 1936 that followed the passage of the "Down Postal" from London to Glasgow over the line of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway.

Here it is, in three parts:

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WO7JxYlhOM
Part 2:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pQJzZDIQTs&feature=related
Part 3:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=902G8widi00&feature=related

The poetry is an Auden piece, commissioned specially for the film. The scenes are slightly shocking, in the way films of the past always are: they dressed so differently, and they did things differently, too: no special protection before you duck under a train in those days, and no computers - those men working in the signal towers are manipulating primitive lever-operated mechanical interlocking machines. It was still a world firmly in the steam age.

There's something touchingly tragic about the organization and the technology that's on display here - they're superificially impressive, but already a bit outdated: when The Night Mail was made, the first jets were less then ten years away. This was an England that was passing slowly away: Stanley Baldwin was Prime Minister for the elderly George V (whose cipher you can see on the mail vans: "GR"), and George Orwell was somewhere out there in the dark in the Midlands gathering the material for The Road to Wigan Pier.

So all that being said, how on earth do you improve on a classic like this, while simultaneously conveying some impression of how the world has changed since 1936?

Easy - you do it with Legos!