Tomorrow is the Big Day! I’m giving my second Toast Master’s speech at noontime. The speech assignment is “Organize your speech”. The “topic” is “Building new worlds”.
Building New Worlds!
1. Opening/Intro
1A. Capturing the audience’s attention:
If you are a creative person like myself, and are looking for something fun to do that doesn’t involve a mouse or screen, you’ve come to the right place.
There is a new and exciting hobby that can be used to escape from reality, allowing you to build your own world.
A world of Vast Mountains, Rivers, Cities, and Farmland – Maybe even a railroad!
All of this new world will fit into a spare room or can fill an entire basement – the size and amount of effort are up to you.
This amazing and wonderful hobby is Model Railroading.
1B. Tell them what you’ll going tell them:
I’ll be sharing with you in the next several minutes the following four main aspects of this truly exciting hobby:
I. Building scenery, that is, terrain and landscape
II. Structure building
III. Train Operations
IV. Collecting
These 4 aspects won’t mean much now to you, but I promise, you’ll have a better understanding in a few minutes than you did before coming into this room.
One or more of these areas of fun could attract you to Model Railroading – you do not have to be interested nor participate in all of them to enjoy this hobby.
I’ll also be describing some of the things that help make these model railroads come alive.
2. Body – Talk about the four main points
This world building hobby isn’t anything like what your dad built at Christmas time: a totally flat track in a circle around the Christmas tree.
As we all hopefully learned in grade school, the real world is not flat.
This brave new world of ours can consist of mountains as well as gullies.
2A. Let’ start with our first of four areas of fun: Building scenery. This major aspect can be divided into several smaller areas such as:
i. Terrain building, meaning the creation of
1. Elevated places such as Hills or Mountains, allows a major scenery feature “The Tunnel” to be built.
2. Terrain building also allows you to build Rivers, Ponds, Streams, Water Falls or even Dams.
3. Once you have hills, then ravines become possible. Those ravines, along with the use of rivers, allow you to create a second major scenery element: “The Bridge”.
You can build the Hiawatha bridge in Mendota Heights, or maybe a dam similar to the Hoover dam – it’s really all up to you and your imagination.
4. Lastly, for terrain building, there will be the flat areas – quite useful for railroad track and later, for something called “structures”.
ii. This leads us into the second area of building scenery: The laying of the rails and railroad ties onto the flat areas, in the mountains, on bridges or inside tunnels.
This also includes the surrounding ballast or roadbed under the rails.
You can either use pre-fabricated “track”, or you can hand lay your roadbed ties first and then hand lay the rails.
iii. Once the terrain is built, and the track has been laid, the final area of building scenery is “Landscaping”.
This involves the placement of trees, turf also known as grass, rocks, either boulders or just various sizes of rocks on the side of the rural road or in fields, etc.
Then, there are bushes, weeds, and reeds in the ponds.
2B. Our second area of fun in this hobby is the building of “structures” (most people outside of the hobby just call them “buildings”) – many different types of structures can be built using pre-made kits or via building them from scratch.
Examples of structures are:
1. Factories in an Industrial area
2. Office buildings in a Downtown area
3. Houses in a suburban Residential area
4. Farms and barns in a rural area
5. Lastly, storefronts on main street for your commercial area.
The selection of buildings is limited only by your imagination and how they fit in within your chosen theme.
Structures are usually built to place on the terrain you’ve built.
However, some people just like to build the models, and then just display them on a shelf – they may not even have a terrain/layout.
2C. Once you’ve created the terrain, laid the track, sculpted the scenery, built and added your structures, you are now ready for the third area of fun – and remember – not all aspects will appeal to everyone, this 3rd area is something called: Train Operations.
Basically, this means simulating actual train movement.
This area of fun is where the “hardcore” model railroaders interest lies.
This is the process of scheduling freight to move from point a to point b, picking up freight cars, dropping off them along the line.
Many model railroaders actually have “operations get-togethers” where fellow model railroaders are invited over to “play” trains together, moving perhaps a dozen or more freight trains, each composed of several dozen freight cars to the various cities or freight terminals on their layout.
Each person is given a task list, and a role, and it’s their job to make sure each freight car is delivered to the right place at the right time.
2D. The fourth and final fun aspect of this hobby is Collecting – the buying of the various engines or cars to run on your model railroad.
Some people will enjoy this, while others don’t see a need for it.
The hobbyist can collect:
i. Engines – these are based on an “era”. There is the
1. Steam Era – 1800’s, early 1900s
2. The Diesel Era – mid 1900s/present day
3. The Electric Era – late 20th century to present day. This includes the “bullet” style trains, that have become famous in Japan and Europe, as well as the newer inter-urban “Lite rail”.
ii. You can also collect “Rolling stock”. There are many types of train cars, such as
1. freight cars
2. tank cars
3. gondola cars, and many more
This area – of collecting – also helps a new model railroader to better understand the various “era’s” and the types of trains used in those era’s.
3. Tell them what you told them
So, in summary, the four major areas of fun in model railroading are:
3A. Building scenery – Creating terrain features such as mountains, tunnels, bridges, rivers, ponds, and landscaping
3B. Building the various structures or buildings to place on the layout
3C. Operating via the simulation of freight operations
3D. Collecting engines, freight cars or passenger cars.
4. The Closing/Memorable Statement:
Your imagination is really your only limit (other than the wallet) to having an almost breathtaking world.
This world can easily be a place where the structures, scenery and track all combine to complement each other.
You can have a working railroad with realistic scenery that becomes something to be enjoyed, operated, and displayed so that those who see it will see it as a miniature world.
It does take some planning and observation of the real world to make it work, but it can leave you with a great sense of satisfaction and accomplishment that you can get from no other hobby.
Remember: You don’t have to have a tremendous knowledge of real railroads – after all, this new world is your world!
Both images are courtesy of www.spookshow.net
