Modern Image - is the phrase outdated?

[Pacific231G]

I would suggest that the number of modellers seeking their inspiration from the pre-Grouping era has increased quite a bit from a generation or two ago. You only have to look at the commercial offerings of pre-Group liveries to see that is now a significant market.

 

The European term "Epoch" started out as a marketing term though didn't it? Manufacturers of the fifties and sixties generally only offered stuff from the current scene, odd exceptions like Triang's Lord of the Isles and historical icons like Rocket and Der Adler apart. Then when steam departed they had a problem, their most popular lines were now history. The Epoch idea was to give buyers who were not experts in railway history a guide to what would fit together without looking incongruous.

 

From a layout classification point of view though I think basing classification on date is flawed, certainly if you apply it across more than one country. However the Epoch system does have a description behind it that makes a good deal of sense. Probably it's going a bit far to break things down into sub-epochs, as NEM 801 does on a country by country basis, but someone like Warley could use the broad numbering and then there would be a difference between the BR Blue period of the 70s (Epoch IV) and the period of rebranding and early privatisation (Epoch V). Whether railway modellers who are generally small 'c' conservative and largely suspicious of overseas influences (see some of the forums over on Overseas Modelling) would accept that is another matter of course.

There always have been a proportion of modellers who choose more distant historic periods though it's slightly disconcerting to realise that in about 1950 when Peter Denny settled on the Edwardian Great Central Railway of 1907 he was choosing a prototype closer in time then- though separated by two World Wars- than the end of BR steam is now. That Edwardian/Belle Epoque period is an attractive one when "modern" railway operating methods were established but coaches were shorter and hauled by some particularly attractive locomotives and I do like layouts such as "Clarendon".

Even so, unless you go back into the nineteenth century where you start to find far fewer photographs available for reference, you have a situaton where what people still insist on calling "Modern Image" i.e the mid sixties onwards is almost half of the total time period modelled by the overwhelming majority in years if not in proportion of layouts. 

 

I was really only quoting the Epoch system to make the point that "Modern Image" as used by many exhibition organisers includes three of the six epochs so is far too broad a brush.

The epoch system does have a number of anomalies especially as the key marker events tended to be different in each European country.  In terms of railway history the big ones in Europe were the end of the Second World War which was more of a break-point for most European railways than it was in Britain and the effective end of steam at the end of the 1960s which mark the beginning of Epoch three and four respectively. The boundaries between the other epochs seem far more arbitrary and Epoch 1 is definitely far too long including everything from the start of the railway age to 1926.

I'm fairly comfortable with modelling Epoch 3 France which more or less corresponds to the "traditional railway" era of BR that I grew up with and is mainly steam with some diesel, local "pick-up" goods services so plenty of shunting in even small stations and a fair number of rather old carriages still in use.  I understand though that in most other European countries Epoch four (1971-1990) is the most popular with modellers as there is still plenty of scope for shunting wagonload goods trains with a variety of wagons and passenger trains were still made up or broken down into sections for different destinations at junctions. You'd also still find a reasonable number of branch lines, mixed goods wagons on quaysides, and even goods trains on narrow gauge lines.  

 

You could come up with a reasonable system of eras for Britain but rather than numbers I'd suggest for headline/exhibition guide classification,

 

Early railways (up to about the turn of the 19th Century, end of Broad Gauge),

pre-grouping, (1900-1923)

grouping or Big Four) era  (1923-1947)

British Railways traditional era  1948-1968

British Rail modern or blue era (post-Beeching diesel and electric, )1969-1990)

possibly Late British Rail era to cover sectorisaton, virtually no wagon load goods,   

Privatisation era. 

Edited November 3, 2017 by Pacific231G

[Reorte]

Sorry Rob I disagree.

 

Despite me being a diesel and electric modeller I am a railway modeller first and steam locos are as important as diesel or electric traction. That is one of the reasons "Modern Image" meaning diesel or electric should disappear from our terminology. We should put the Steam verses Diesel debacle in the same waste bin as "modern Image" . 

As far as categorising a model goes? Certainly. It makes little sense to lump everything post 1968 to now in the same bracket. The railway now is a completely different place to what it was in, say, 1970 after all (how many layouts set in 1970 could easily be close to accurate steam ones if you just replaced the rolling stock, and as for steam verus diesel, because of the overlap, meaningless?) When and where say everything that's needed, without labels.

Edited November 3, 2017 by Reorte

[whart57]

I think someone pointed out earlier in this discussion, what lies beyond the railway fence is actually more indicative of period than the rolling stock. Well that and what you allude too, namely the type of traffic running on the rails. Perhaps we should get a bit radical and think beyond the paint jobs, so for headline classification I offer

 

Pioneers:              The early years, the singles, the Cramptons, up to the universal adoption of the coal fired boiler. (As against coke, which I suggest is when the pioneering and experimentation came to an end and railway technology had matured)

 

The Railway Monopoly:      The years when the railway was the only form of long distance land travel. In terms of types of train, engine variation, station and town architecture and so on, there is not much difference between 1880 and 1913, and this era really ends with the First World War. Historians similarly talk of the "long nineteenth century" because to them the century starts with the French Revolution in 1789 and ends in 1918.

 

The Consolidation Era:       The years when the railway was starting to see serious competition and reacted by consolidating with or without government control. In Britain this would effectively start with the railways coming under government control in 1914, go through the Grouping years and end with the implementation of the BR modernisation plan and the Beeching closures. Given how many Edwardian locos and carriages were still clanking along at the end of the fifties I would argue that Nationalisation was initially no more than a paint job. Off the tracks too there might have been some Art Deco stations and in the streets the now traditional British semi was making its appearance.

 

The Railway Transition:      Beeching saw off the traditional branch line and the traditional wagon load freight, and steam power disappeared. Road competition became a serious threat, as did air travel for long distance. Architecture in and around stations changed, tower blocks appeared on the horizons and housing estates were no longer laid out on a grid pattern. Railways were still run as monolithic blocks and were generally treated like Cinderella by governments. This period would take us from the early sixties to the early eighties. Beatles and Bowie you might say.

 

The Railway Reorganisation:      The period when governments - who owned and operated most of the railways across the world - restructured and later privatised railways according to best business practices (allegedly). A lot of this was cosmetic, new liveries on tired old stock, new signs on stations that dated back to Victoria's day, but the railway did look different, hence a separate category

 

The Railway Revival:          Which is where I hope we are today, with railways being modernised, high speed lines being built, new stock, new stations.

 

 

The point I would make is that different parts of the railway system might be in different classifications in the same year in history. Blue Deltics are part of the railway transition but the rest of the railway was still in the earlier era. Likewise it took a while for the impact of reorganisation to reach the backwaters. What type of railway being modelled is to me more significant than what year it is set in

[Nearholmer]

One of the slight issues with eras/epochs in any discussion about anything is that it is easy to get trapped into thinking that they have “hard edges” and don’t overlap, whereas most of life is about transitions and “soft” edges. Any era/epoch designations are shorthand.

[Pacific231G]

One of the slight issues with eras/epochs in any discussion about anything is that it is easy to get trapped into thinking that they have “hard edges” and don’t overlap, whereas most of life is about transitions and “soft” edges. Any era/epoch designations are shorthand.

That is of course very true.

In 1974 or 75 I enjoyed an excellent holiday with a one week Austrian rail pass. The OBB main lines were mostly electric with modern equipment and coaches in shiny new liveries and the unelectrified routes were almost universally dieselised.However, while staying in Vienna I spent a splendid day exploring some of the local railways between the capital and the Czech border around Mistelbach.  I knew there was still some steam up there, it was why I went, but I didn't expect to get to travel on a scheduled steam hauled mixed train that stopped at every station and shunted a couple of wagons at several of them. It was well into Ep. IV but the farmers were stil using horse drawn carts and most of the local roads were unmetalled. 

[Clive Mortimore]

AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

 

Surely it is easy to say layout name, scale/gauge, railway /region /nationality and time period,

 

Red Garden Park,  7mm narrow narrow gauge Soviet Young Pioneers Railway, pre fall of the USSR.

Kings Cross, N gauge late 1960s with the last locomotive hauled suburban trains.

Ashburton, P4 gauge, 1/76th scale, Great Western Railway, set in the days when the world was wonderful.

 

No need for sales pitched epochs, eras, or what have yous.

[GreenGiraffe22]

My 2 cents - using decades to categorise seems like the most simple and sensible thing to do. In fact, the most useful thing to do, albeit maybe a bit time consuming for the manufacture, although I think Hattons have done this with their Ps,  would be to write in the model description the time period in which it wore that livery / configuration. I see Hornby use decades in their model descriptions, which is useful,  but their Merchant Navy 21C1, for example, is literally just 1941. (A few specific weeks in 1941 I believe?)

 

Using Bachmann eras for example it says "UK rail era 3. The Big Four - LMS, GWR, LNER & SR (1923 - 1947) -"  which is quite unhelpful to an uneducated modeller who might be trying to model something specific, I mean, I don't know much about the other big 4 railway companies but certainly within the Southern Railway quite a bit changed within that time, a C Class in Wartime black, for example, would only come under "...The Big Four...(1939-1947)".

 

Edit: copied and pasted the Bachmann era description from Hattons, didn't expect it to form a link 

Edited November 3, 2017 by GreenGiraffe22

[whart57]

That overlapping can be quite lengthy, and makes classification by decades tricky. Think of a Southern Electric layout set in the 1930s, would you regard it the same as a GWR branchline from the same period?

[Nearholmer]

Whart

 

There is an obvious solution: use a system of epochs based on the Southern Railway.

 

As in:

 

- Paleosouthern (from the dawn of railways until the first EMUs in 1909)

- Mesosouthern (1909 to the Brighton Line electrification in 1933)

- Neosouthern (ending when the last EMU ceased to be green, which was probably about 1980)

- Decline

- Fall (recently!)

- Renaissance (goodness only knows when that will start)

 

Other railways could then be spoken of as, for instance: 'West Country bucolic in the Neosouthern period'.

 

Given that time across the entire globe is measured from Greenwich, which is on the Southern, this system should be acceptable everywhere, thereby ending the debate, and allowing everyone to get on with playing trains.

 

Kevin

Edited November 3, 2017 by Nearholmer

[Flying Pig]

AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

 

Surely it is easy to say layout name, scale/gauge, railway /region /nationality and time period,

 

Red Garden Park,  7mm narrow narrow gauge Soviet Young Pioneers Railway, pre fall of the USSR.

Kings Cross, N gauge late 1960s with the last locomotive hauled suburban trains.

Ashburton, P4 gauge, 1/76th scale, Great Western Railway, set in the days when the world was wonderful.

 

No need for sales pitched epochs, eras, or what have yous.

It's no good, Clive. You strike down the monster Modern Image and from its corpse a hundred other categories arise and stagger towards you moaning unhelpfully. It would be like something by Ray Harryhausen, if only he wasn't from a different era (possibly Early Crest, when they invented toothpaste).

[jjb1970]

Does it matter?

 

None of these concepts really work for the privatised era because of the short life of liveries.

[Pacific231G]

Whart

 

There is an obvious solution: use a system of epochs based on the Southern Railway.

 

As in:

 

- Paleosouthern (from the dawn of railways until the first EMUs in 1909)

- Mesosouthern (1909 to the Brighton Line electrification in 1933)

- Neosouthern (ending when the last EMU ceased to be green, which was probably about 1980)

- Decline

- Fall (recently!)

- Renaissance (goodness only knows when that will start)

 

Other railways could then be spoken of as, for instance: 'West Country bucolic in the Neosouthern period'.

 

Given that time across the entire globe is measured from Greenwich, which is on the Southern, this system should be acceptable everywhere, thereby ending the debate, and allowing everyone to get on with playing trains.

 

Kevin

I'm sorry Kevin but the answer is staring us in the face. The MOROP system of epochs is weak on the period before 1926 lumping it all together as a single period but of course because railways were developed in this country we need more subtlety.

 

The main epochs of the railway after it emerged from waggonways, tramroads, plateways and similar general northernness, were-

1. Early individual railways. Liverpool and Manchester, London and Birmingham, London and Greenwich, Great Western etc.

2. The consolidation into major railways. London and North Western, London Brighton and South Coast, Great Eastern, Great Western, Caledonian etc.

3. The grouping into Southern, LMS, LNER, Great Western

4. British Railways era. Nationalisation into regions based on the big four except that the LMS and LNER were stripped of Scotland meaning that only the Great Western and Southern survived masquerading as the WR and SR. All model railways were based on the GWR/WR or the SR/SR. I know this from the letters pages of model railway magazines of the time

5. British Rail but everyone knows that from diesel hydraulics to the first High Speed Trains the Great Western spirit was still lurking. During the whole of this period almost all model railways were based on Great Western branch lines.I know this from the letters pages of model railway magazines of the time  

 

6. Early Privatisation. Various odd new names appear such as Virgin and EWS but the Great Western is reborn as First Great Western serving most of the places that the GWR went to before it set out to civilise Birmingham and Birkenhead.

7. Later privatisation. The Great Western Railway takes its proper name again and aknowledges IK Brunel as its founder. I didn't actually know that IKB had set up a bus company and always thought he was the GWR's engineer rather than its founder but it says so on all the currrent GWR publicity so it must be true. The Southern Railway name also reappears but as it doesn't include the LSWR half of the 1923 Southern Railway and for other reasons it's not really the same.  

 

From all this it should be obvious that the one thread running through the whole of world railway history is the Great Western Railway. That means that it's only necessary to relate any model of any railway anywhere in the world to what was happening on the GWR at that time.

So to take the  Pacifics as an example, Gresley's A1 was built in the Churchward era  while the A4 was of the Collett era while Bulleid's Pacfiics were from the Hawksworth era.

You can apply it more widely so for example the Union Pacific's "Big Boy" was also a Hawksworth era locomotive.

 

This seems simple and obvious to me and I'm sure our European and American friends will adopt the new GWR based system of eras enthusiastically.

Edited November 5, 2017 by Pacific231G

[Nearholmer]

A well argued case, and it clearly needs an objective body to decide between these rival suggestions.

 

I propose that the question be put before the Governing Council of the Old Southeronians (assuming they haven’t all now moved on to their celestial Waterloo).

[BoD]

I think we are all waiting for the next 'big change' to come along so that the term modern era can be ditched.

 

I wonder if those living in the Pre-Tops era wondered when Post-Tops would come along.

[whart57]

Sound suggestion, except for one small insignificant detail - electricity. The GWR was in fact a pioneer of the concept of taking power generation away from creating motion from it - the atmospheric railway experiment on the Bristol and Exeter - but the experience clearly spooked them. So when the Brighton and Lanky were pioneering electric trains the GWR thought it was now safe to mount the wheels from inside frames. When the Southern rolled out an extensive electric network the GWR was onto its third iteration of the Star class. And when time came to replace steam the GWR thought - "ooh, horrible electricity, all that cabling and sparking - lets have diesels instead"

 

Even now the GWR can't commit to electric traction, it needs some strange hybrid. The spirit of "not invented here" hangs over that space between London and Bristol.

 

So that inability to adopt electric traction means your Western classifications miss out half the world.

[James Makin]

Split it into just 2 periods - 'pre' and 'post-RMWeb', anyone?

[Pacific231G]

Sound suggestion, except for one small insignificant detail - electricity. The GWR was in fact a pioneer of the concept of taking power generation away from creating motion from it - the atmospheric railway experiment on the Bristol and Exeter - but the experience clearly spooked them. So when the Brighton and Lanky were pioneering electric trains the GWR thought it was now safe to mount the wheels from inside frames. When the Southern rolled out an extensive electric network the GWR was onto its third iteration of the Star class. And when time came to replace steam the GWR thought - "ooh, horrible electricity, all that cabling and sparking - lets have diesels instead"

 

Not having to put up all those masts and overhead knitting seems a very good reason for modellers to stick with the GWR. One day we'll have very small fusion reactors which will have to be put inside locomotives- I wouldn't fancy sitting above an underbody thermonuclear device- and they'll probably have to be steam locos to transfer the heat generated to the wheels. When that happens the Wharncliffe viaduct can be restored to its original appearance (to be fair the OHE on the viaduct was carefully designed to be particularly discrete) . 

Edited November 5, 2017 by Pacific231G

[whart57]

Or Southern third rail systems.

[PhilJ W]

The term is now outdated, it belongs to an era when the future for railways looked a lot brighter, but then along came Beeching....

[Nearholmer]

Hmmmm....., surely it was Dr B who ushered-in MI, it was exactly what the doctor ordered in his little blue and white book.

 

He almost certainly didn't invent most of it, but he did draw all the threads together, made the recommendations about 'tough medicine' that others had shied away from, and pushed the modernisation agenda very hard indeed.

 

Here he is, talking about it, in a style that nobody would ever get away with now. This was the era when "The Expert", especially one with solid science credentials, could confidently hand-down tablets of wisdom, and everyone would accept them. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LKfaR6PosxQ

 

You need to be a bit patient, because it isn't until c15 minutes that he gets to the modernisation, as opposed to 'pruning' part.

 

Kevin

Edited November 5, 2017 by Nearholmer

[Clive Mortimore]

Hmmmm....., surely it was Dr B who ushered-in MI, it was exactly what the doctor ordered in his little blue and white book.

 

He almost certainly didn't invent most of it, but he did draw all the threads together, made the recommendations about 'tough medicine' that others had shied away from, and pushed the modernisation agenda very hard indeed.

 

Here he is, talking about it, in a style that nobody would ever get away with now. This was the era when "The Expert", especially one with solid science credentials, could confidently hand-down tablets of wisdom, and everyone would accept them. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LKfaR6PosxQ

 

You need to be a bit patient, because it isn't until c15 minutes that he gets to the modernisation, as opposed to 'pruning' part.

 

Kevin

Hi Kevin

 

So if the Modern Image started with the good doctor then my green diesels ain't modern image, sorted.

[Nearholmer]

I thought we’d established that it started with St Cyril.

 

Of The Doctor, i said “ushered in”, which isn’t quite the same thing as “initiated”.

Edited November 5, 2017 by Nearholmer

[The Bigbee Line]

An interesting topic, hmm when do things start...

 

I actually looked up the Modernisation Plan from 1955 and had a quick read..  http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/docsummary.php?docID=23

 

Not as dry a document as I imagined...  Especially the bit that mentions that steam loco's have a 40 year life and these is no mention of their elimination, indeed a considerable sum was earmarked / suggested to improve depots.

[whart57]

The term is now outdated, it belongs to an era when the future for railways looked a lot brighter, but then along came Beeching....

 

The future for railways looks a lot brighter now than it has for a long while. Mind you you do need to look wider than just our own travails with driver-only trains. China is building and promoting railways big time, the long mooted tie up with Thailand to build a line from China to the Gulf of Thailand may actually happen. And then we have those container trains that reached Britain having slogged their way over Asia and Europe.

 

As for Beeching, he didn't introduce the Pacer .........

[grahame]

Why use any of the artificial constructs (epochs, eras, decades, weird out of date historic terms - like modern image and pre-grouping) which are limiting and can be confusing, and all have issues as many have pointed out. Just call a spade a spade and say what it is, the location and the  period (in real years) that it is meant to represent.

 

I think most will understand that - particularly those who do not know what the jargon, that some are suggesting, is meant to mean or refers to. 

 

G