Iain Rice. Mid-sized and Manageable Track Plans (2003)

     Iain Rice. Mid-sized and Manageable Track Plans (2003) Rice is one of the worthy successors of John Armstrong. He designs layouts rather than track plans, but beginners and moderately experienced model railroaders, who are the intended audience of this book, either haven’t understood the difference or haven’t come to understand its importance. Every layout is based on an actual prototype (one of which is John Allen’s Gorre & Daphetid), and each displays Rice’s ability to think in terms of the layout as a whole. Close study reveals some typos and a couple optimistic grade calculations and other technical glitches. But these hardly detract from the book’s success. Rice wants us to imagine what we can do with our space, and in this he succeeds brilliantly. *** (2007)