Anonymous. Locomotive Plan Package Book 2 (1944)

     Anonymous. Locomotive Plan Package Book 2 (1944) Published by The Model Craftsman, one of several predecessors of Railroad Model Craftsman, this book reprints plans and articles from that magazine, along with what are (somewhat ambitiously) called instructions for building the locomotives depicted. I suspect Bill Schopp as the author of most of the articles, which display his characteristic vagueness and assumption of high skill levels in his readers, as well as his colloquial style.
      The plans are a mix of general arrangement drawings “simplified for the modeller”, shop cards with limited information, and elaborate drawings reproduced from the Locomotive Cyclopedia (Simmons Boardman.) Thus, they mostly provide too little information, and sometimes too much. The instructions are laughably incomplete, even I think for the kind of craftsman for which they were intended. Eg, “The drivers may be made up on the lathe, but some fellows may wish to buy castings”. The castings would have to be trued up on the lathe, too. The suggested materials range from wood to tinplate cut from cans, which reflects the dearth of modelling supplies during wartime. It’s left up to the modeller to glean what he can from the drawings and develop patterns for cutting parts. There is a brief description of how to make a pattern for casting drivers from Linotype metal, and how to progressively modify it for larger counterweights.
     Reproduction of the halftones is abysmal, even for the times. Model Craftsman used photo offset to copy the original pages. The line drawings also suffer from this process, with small details sometimes blurring together into almost indecipherable blobs of ink. The scale is usually 1/8" to the foot, which is too small to resolve smaller parts precisely enough for accurate modelling. The reader is often referred to photographs that weren’t reproduced, since they would not have fit into the layout of the book.
     The book does have historical interest, as an example of how awful the so-called good old days really were. Building models was not for the fainthearted. Modellers of all kinds had to contend with a lack of parts and materials that we just don’t tolerate anymore. Kits were few and far between, and consisted mostly of rough castings and chunks of unfinished materials. Modellers had to have a skill set that for the most part could only be acquired in an apprenticeship for tool and die maker or machinist. It’s amazing what these craftsmen accomplished. I have a series on building a “kitchen table locomotive,” which gives the kind of detailed help that the average person with average skills needs, but this series of articles wasn’t published until the mid-60s, by which time decent quality kits were available.
     The time it took to build the models almost completely from scratch of course reduced or eliminated the time available for building a layout. This suggests the main reasons for founding the clubs: pooling what little time they had enabled te modellers to build a layout they could share, as well as providing larger pikes than they could hope to build in their small and cramped homes. * (2006)