Official book of rules for model railroading

Interesting Find.  

There are no rules for model railroading!

gunrunnerjohn posted:

There are no rules for model railroading!

The Only Rule for Model Railroading:

If you are not having fun, you ain’t doing it right.

We don't need no stinkin rules

The first rule of model railroading is there are no rules !  

One of the great things about this hobby is the lack of rules.  I agree with the previous posts...we don't need rules. 

I have a copy of that around somewhere as well.  Actually, it's a neat read!  One part mentions that if you don't have a layout and are running on the floor, make sure you carefully put the loco and cars away, then carefully take up the track and transformer.

Not sure on that timetable, if I'd have a town called "Lovelyville"...

Pretty neat to find that.  That was from back in the day when you built a layout with the premise of imitating a real railroad.  Your layout had a purpose and you bought equipment to fit your operation.  It wasn't intended for guys who just buy and buy train stuff with no rhyme or reason or even a layout to run it on.  Just to look at the boxes.  I would rather follow the rules, a more apt term may be the tenets, of building a layout than collect a bunch of stuff for no reason.  I grew up reading books like that and Track Planning for Realistic Operation etc., so I still like that approach.  But, every one is different.  I have no problem with that.

Nice basement find: If you are a member of the LCCA • TCA • NMRA,  even a local model train club. They all have a rule book that covers a variety of topics.  On and off the layout.

Gary

 

There are no rules for model railroading!

Oh.....I don't know about that!

Depends on what segment of "model railroading" we're talking about.

One of the reasons I left 'The Dark Side' of this hobby....HO ()...is because of the 'rules' that that group seemed to obsess over.  Everything from incessant  picking-of-nits to running everything by a clock, deck of card orders, trackside signals, blah, blah...and at the direction of a dispatcher/club president/basement owner/etc.  

For me.....not fun.

But, that's just MHO, of course.

John Allen, a former icon of the hobby, used to have a Stegosaurus with 'cab number' on its side, saddled and ridden by some pudgy guy in a sombrero, doing switching chores in the yard on his HO Gorre and Daphetid railroad.  Years ago I attended an HO club meeting where such levity/heresy would've had you shunned forever.   Stress?.....they apparently thrived on it.  

Of course, to be fair, not all in the How Ordinary portion of the hobby are that rules-driven.  But it seems to be that the FUN folks are over here....in the O-my-goodness-we're-having-FUN segment!!

KD

"One of the great things about this hobby is the lack of rules.  I agree with the previous posts...we don't need rules." 

Well, now - without rules it's like NASCAR - round and round and round and...zzzzz....

Can't play a game without rules. The Lionel book above is probably  good thing - I never heard of it. Probably, it boils down the real thing to a digestible point, while maintaining some actual "functionality", if it fits in with other Lionel "reality" efforts. This sort of thing is available elsewhere in model RR'ing, but some of those things are not user friendly (read: many "operating sessions" that become tense and chore-like).

Probably, Lionel should re-issue it. I'd buy it.

I saw the name of this post and my teeth started grinding, could just imagine someone turning trains into dogma.........there are plenty of people in the O gauge world who are just as dogmatic as the HO scale modelers who have their own brand of rules/obsessions, I think that that happens when more than 1 person does something, there are always those, like the Puritans, who seem to take joy out of taking the fun out of things for other people *lol*. There are rivet counters who complain in a new model doesn't have the right number of levers in the cab or if the drivers are a scale .5" too big, people who hate command control, people who love command control and think people running conventional are just 'playing with trains' (as if that is a bad thing...., that is just human nature. 

I suspect that it was produced like most things the company did, to improve their sales. A book like this likely was aimed at trying to keep dad in the hobby long after the kids moved on from trains or from Christmas layouts.  This gybed with what I recall of the book on Lionel showroom layouts, when they built the famous postwar one in 1948, it featured what today we would call hi rail, over the display layouts that in the past emphasized the fun of the accessories and such. I have no way of knowing, but I suspect that even with this, there were relatively few "serious' modelers using 3 rail O back then, I suspect those wishing to model 'real railroading' moved over to HO, both because of getting more in a given space and also the amount that was becoming available in HO. I think Lionel created that book to try and entice people to stay with their trains and show how you could create your own railroad with lionel stuff, but I wonder how much impact it had. Just my opinion, but I suspect using 3 rail to simulate real trains, with operating sessions and the like, happened only in relatively recent years, maybe last 20-30, as scale equipment came out, and many of us got older and found HO to be a lot more difficult to deal with than O (not to mention, too, that during this time the introduction of scale equipment, sound systems, and then command control,made it more palatable to operations/scale minded folks). 

An interesting and educational find, but FUN in this hobby should prevail over any rules!  :-)

The ONLY "rule" should be to have FUN! Personally I consider all my train models to be TOYS! :-)

Amazing what some on this forum can make out of a simple thing!

It was simply a guidebook produced in the early 50s for those who had just purchased a Lionel train set. It contained ideas on how to expand the set and build a layout of some type.

Real railroads had "Rule Books" so Lionel simply chose to use this railroad terminology for their latest guide book. (Come to think of it, maybe it is a rule that you have to connect two wires to the track to make the train run!!!!) 

I think some could have more fun with the hobby if they didn't look for drama and angst where it doesn't exist.  

Jim

You can get the book here: http://www.thortrains.net/52rules3.html

All the pages are present. Save to file or simply print them.

Jim, your so right. I have a number of these small books. They are fun to read and were obviously made for kids to learn about block signals and what whistle to use when backing up or going forward. Things kids could learn in a fun and easy way.  Good for Lionel for producing these kinds of little free books. Everything from teaching stores how to sell Lionel to teaching kids the parts of railroad cars and engines, to a planning book for "Pop" on how to build a layout. I think they are wonderful things to collect. Don

no rules and if there are some for model railroading i don't follow them 

here's how i break em 

1 my roadname is fantasy

2 right now i don't care what i get in o scale throw me some ol postwars or a beat up 752 and i'll patch it for csx  or a 2020 for NS 

just imagine a blue and grey csx 752 set that would be funny and cool

Thanks Jim and Don for trying to keep this post on the fun track!!!

The booklet is just a cool find that takes us back in time and shows how Lionel did a fantastic job educating kids while they played with these amazing toys. Kids learned how to blow the whistle or horn with short and long blasts, how signals work, setting and keeping schedules, etc. It appears some are missing the idea that the booklet cover mimicked a railroad's rule book as a style point not a black and white rules are rules and must be followed.

Now everybody get back to having some fun with your trains!!! That is the rule.