Modeling Gaffe 9- The Peninsula Metropolis

The “Modeling Gaffe” Series Returns!

 

All too often we resort to placing buildings AFTER the track has been laid, which isn’t quite how you should approach it. Planning before you build is everything, and while nobody sticks to their plan 100%, it can prevent such a visually unappealing disaster like the peninsula metropolis.

Many model railroad cities posses density problems, density being defined in this article for ease of understanding as this: A single family home is low density, a rowhouse is medium density, and an apartment hi-rise is high density. All too often, in as little as two city blocks a model railroad city can go from rural farmhouses to massive skyscrapers. Obviously this is not a realistic way to approach such planning and could easily be remedied with a creative use of backdrops if you must have a city and country scene close together in a layout room.

Sure, cities like San Francisco are built on peninsulas, but those are surrounded by water. (usually the first place where a city develops is near a body of water) Lakes, Rivers, Streams, Seas and Oceans are all interesting things to model and many cities posses such features near their downtowns.

Cities that are rail-served have their railroad lines either on cheap land or flat land, and where was that land usually? Near a body of water. (unless it’s a wealthy area) Railroads usually follow the paths of least resistance and frequently follow riverbanks, canals (like the Erie Canal or the St. Lawerence Seaway) or even lakeshores. These naturally smooth and flat areas of land also lend themselves to large railroad facilities such as yards and engine servicing facilities, but beware of flood hazards and perhaps model some sort of levee or seawall to keep nature at bay.

Returning to the gaffe at hand, the Peninsula Metropolis is rarely, if ever, going to be an easy to maintain or build endeavor. Because you typically have to lay the track before you detail or build any of the major scenery (you know, like actually ENJOY running your trains a bit before doing scenery?) you have a really excellent chance of damaging your trackwork while you lean over your mainline to plop in that aparement block or downtown scene. Maintenence would probably also be a headache, dusting and repairing structures is difficult if you really have to reach to access what you want to fix. This can be avoided by creating a smaller peninsula, but then you run the risk of losing realestate for your metropolis.

Theoretically, you could bury the mainline along the peninsula under the city itself, not unlike the approach into NYC’s Grand Central Station, but what’s the fun in that? (and if built without competent access hatches and bullet-proof trackwork, why bother?) Similarly you could elevate the mainline, but it would look silly with all but the most gentle curvature unless you’re modeling an actual elevated railway, Japan, or Britian.

Most model railroaders aren’t urban planners, however it doesn’t take one to create a believable city. Think of the types of buildings you would typically see next to the right-of-way in most North American Cities….mostly older buildings thanks to the railroad spurring development of major cities and allowing them to grow to their current levels by efficiently moving goods and people, especially in from 1865-1965 and again today. Prime trackside buildings would include spacious brick warehouses, perhaps large department stores or Manufacturing Industry. If you have to model a commercial district you can mix up the buildings a bit, but the more modern buildings probably wouldn’t be built near the tracks without some regard to noise abatement.

If you’re modeling after 1920, most cities were mindful towards grade-separating the major roads from the railroads for safety reasons. You have no doubt seen overpasses on a model railroad, and that’s an interesting and common feature to add to a city scene.

Most of all, the most important thing you can do is spend time with a map of a city you’d like to model on your railroad. Note the characteristics of trackside structures and how they’re laid out both in how the roads are planned to how the railroad snakes through the district. For a HUGE map of Chicago’s Rail system, check out this map at mappery.com. http://mappery.com/maps/Chicago-Train-Map.jpg Try to avoid the peninsula metropolis at all costs, please?

Modeling Gaffe 7- Industrial Afterthoughts

How many times have you seen, or attempted to do the following:
“well there’s this oddly shaped space on my layout, what should I do with it?….That’s IT! I’ll fill it with an industry, I’ll add a siding…PERFECT.”

How could you possibly go wrong? Well, if you’re like the person who placed their industry out in the middle of nowhere, straddled by four track mainlines on either side, you’ve gone wrong.

Perhaps it’s a smarter idea to think of industry placement like a player of Sim City…you can’t make tax money if you cover the entire map with roads and railroad tracks. You need an acceptable ratio of buildings to track on your layout, especially those that are NOT served by the railroad.

Large industries, even stip mining operations have small, medium or large towns where the workers live. They may be as clearly defined and spectacular as The Companeria Minera de Pinoles mining town in Penoles Mexico , they may be as blended into the residental and commercial areas as some US cities, with homes and businesses right next to the tracks.
(Photo by Jack Delano, LOC.gov)

Only rarely did the people of the early 20th century live far away from their place of employment. If this was the case, the railroad probably provided some safe and relatively fast means of conveyance, like a employee’s special passenger train, or sometimes the company hired buses if the roads were ok. Only after 1945 did people consider the idea of suburbs where work was placed in the middle of a long commute in either direction. Sure, large cities had some nearby small towns that had commuter or mixed freight rail connections, but it wasn’t a staple of every major, medium and even small sized city like it is today with vast tracts of isolated homes in a desert of suburban sprawl.

Major industries were often placed near rivers for a cheap, reliable source of water to use in their factories, for barge or ship transporation, to provide hydroelectric power (like Northeastern US mills) or just as a place to dump toxic waste in pre-EPA days. You will probably find the oldest industrial buildings along a river.

If they couldn’t be near water, they tried to pick a large, flat piece of cheap land that featured minimal vegetation. This would allow road and rail access to be easy. Automobile, Aircraft, and other large manufacturing plants follow this patter wherever they can. Some industries, like stamp mills and ore refineries took advantage of steep hillsides, but they were just as at home on level ground as on a hillside.

The only other factor that large industries considered was the location of raw materials or parts for manufacture. I noticed when looking at a map of Birmingham, AL it was uncanny that the steel mills were geographically equidistant between the ore deposits in Iron Mountain to the south and the coal fields to the north! Grain silos are centralized industries too. They need only a railroad mainline and grain fields surrounding the silo to prosper. Lumber mills are another obvious example. Placed near a river or railroad connection was preferrable, but they always had to be near the trees. They were often dismantled and moved as loggers slashed and burned the forests of the West, East, North ad Southern US.

What does this mean for your model railroad you may ask? A LOT actually.
-Space your raw material harvesting industries (mines, oil fields, grain silos, logging camps, vegetable or fruit packing houses) enough distance from the mills to warrant freight car traffic.
-Place your (grain, ore, lumber, steel, aluminium or oil) mill/refinery as the main industry of a town, and build the town around the industry.
-Make your manufacturing plants the centerpiece of another town altogether, so you can also have a reason to haul your refined product (metal, petroleum products, lumber, or food products) from mills to the manufacturing plant to the warehouses.
-You never see an important, but usually ignored industry THE PRODUCT DISTRIBUTORS take those freight cars full of manufactured goods and transfer them to a warehouse (either by truck or by rail again)
-Finally, the product will reach a warehouse, freight house or cold storage company. The rail-based journey of goods is complete, and look! You needed about 3-6 different types of freight cars to handle the demands of each stage of bringing a specific product to market. The possibilites for realistic railroad operation are endless and with plenty of modelgenic industries out there give it a try!

Modeling Gaffe 6- Poorly Modeled Derailments

For many modelers there is a morbid interest in modeling a derailment. Twisted metal, splintered wood, trucks, wheels and couplers strewn about makes for an engaging and attention getting scene on a model railroad. However so few modelers actually attempt to make it look realistic…why?

At best, you’ll have a rusty boxcar down an embankment, too inaccessible for scrappers to recover it economically. This is acceptable as there are a couple places in Canada, Alaska, Washington State, and other places where this has occured.

At worst, you’ll find some cliche, cheap tyco car in dayglo-red lying on it’s side with a few figures around it, if that.

Accurately modeling a derailment will undoubtedly take a lot of effort and time, but the results will be worth it. Even suggesting a that a derailment once occured somewhere adds interest too. You could have a broken coupler, perhaps a few bit of handrails, roofwalks, or brake rigging lying in the weeds. Sculpting the slide marks in the earth where the cars and locomotives slid into the dirt would be interesting. Perhaps a severed telephone pole or a damaged signal bridge lying trackside for a stronger suggestion of what might have happened.  

 

A couple of things to realize when planning to model a derailment would include:

-In real life, the trucks support the cars only by their bolsters and gravity. There isn’t a giant 2-56 screw holding the trucks on, so they’d rarely be attached to the car if the car tipped over.

-Metal has a tendency to bend when put under stress. While this would be somewhat hard to model, modeling dented metal would pay dividends in realism when modeling a derailment.

-Wood loves to bend, then splinter. Wood freight cars aren’t too durable in a derailment and are prone to telescoping in on each other or just ripping apart. cutting away a portion of a wooden car and replacing the damaged area with damaged scale lumber would enhance realism.

-Weathering is a MUST when dealing with derailments. From mud to scratch/gouge marks and dents to missing handrails or ladders. Chipped and rusty paint, sooty and rusty roofs and other details bring it to life.

-Wrecked Locomotives almost always show signs of damage in even the most minor derailments. It’ll take some serious modeling skill to accurately model a wrecked locomotive. Although it has been done quite nicely by Jerome. Here’s an example of a Wrecked SD40-2   in HO scale. 

This Selection from Railpictures.net is a good break down of different types of derailments.

Cornfield Meet (Head-On collision)

Rear-End Collision

Spectacularly destroyed Conrail SD40-2

NS Sd70 bashes coal gondolas aside

High Speed Derailment

Ever wonder why there’s a cross at the tehachapi loop? This is why.

Conrail Pile-Up, spectacular results!

Twisted mess of hoppers and coal

Deadly PRR passenger train wreck in 1951

PRR Steam tender ripped apart in derailment

LMX GE in dug itself a grave

Washout

Fishing covered hoppers out of the Mississippi!

Jackknifed coal hoppers create a twisty mess

L&N SD40’s in the mud

Completely Decimated CV Geeps with punctured grain hopper

Sideswipe

UP AC4400 loses half of its cab enroute

Down an embankment

UP frieght turned into crumpled mess after rolling down embankment.

Into a River

What happens when a wooden trestle decides to give way?

DME Sd40 slides into the Mississippi River

Big derailment with modern cars in a photogenic location.

CSX SD70 slides into a river for a drink

Trucks vs. Trains

What happens when a locomotive and an inflammable tanker truck meet.

MP-UP Caboose poking a hole in a woodchip truck trailer

BNSF freight hits frozen pizza truck, local teenagers flock to help cleanup.

Conrail freight hits gravel truck

Switching Accident

Splitting a switch with an SW 1500

Shoving Empty Cars is a no-no.

More Hopper Carnage

Tank Car shoved off the end of a switchback

Bad Track

NS hopper with spread rails in a yard

Tank cars on the Ground in a siding

UP Coal Hoppers derail, almost undamaged

Spilling Woodchips

Jacknifed Ethanol Cars burn.

Coal Gondolas flop on their side and take out a building!

Finally, a really modelgenic scene:

N&W Caboose shoved off the end of a spur, then just abandoned, with the siding repaired.

Modeling Gaffe 5- How am I going to Unload this car?

How many model railroads have you been to where a wide variety of cars are just parked next a (probably inadequately sized) industry with no way to unload even a boxcar?

This irksome trait is found almost all the time in beginner layouts, for which they are excused, but also on too many modelers who consider themselves “serious” railroad modelers. It’s especially annoying when they enjoy superdetailing and weathering their models, while their buildings are either straight-out-of-the-box or simple structure kits. I’d say a majority of model railroad industrial building kits won’t support (regular) rail service. Walther’s has succeeded in making some nicely porportioned kits that look believable enough to support traffic, but most other manufacturers fall short, with a few really excellent exceptions.

More often than not you see modelers ignore the specific hardware found on the cars and either:
-Create inadequate loading docks that are either too high or low for boxcar and reefer traffic.
-Ignoring completely how you’d logically unload a specific type of freight cars, like that gravel old gondola on the coal trestle with a SOLID floor, mimicing a drop-bottom gondola, and failing.
-I VERY rarely see a realistic unloading/loading apparatus for covered hoppers, be them cement, grain, plastics, or sugar. Almost always they disappear under a little metal shed and are “unloaded” as if by magic!
-Woodchip hoppers and scrap steel/structural steel gondolas are frequently just put on the siding, to be “magically (un)loaded”
-An overwhelming majority of modelers ignore TANK CAR unloading apparatuses, despite being repeatedly written about in modeling magazines. (in some cases, all you need is a valved spigot sticking out of the ground.)
-Don’t even get me started about Intermodal Facilities or Piggyback Trailer loading facilities, they’re almost never modeled correctly, and I can say with certianty that only a handful of modelers actually have dedicated the space to these industries that dominate the modern scene.

Team tracks, while oddly ignored by many modelers, provide perhaps THE greatest flexibility of any industry, take little space and can (with proper detailing) accept ANY type of freight car.

The best remedy for addressing this problem is RESEARCH! Go out into the world and take photographs of interesting industrial buildings and attempt to match the details found on them, remember that Industrial buildings only have the bare-essential details on them compared to commercial/residential structures, and we at least must model that bare-bones detail.

IF you’re period modeling, the Library of Congress (US) has the HABS/HAER Historical Building database, with scale drawings, written historical documents and plenty of detail photographs. Also University Libraries or even your local library has plenty of photos of local, state, and sometimes nationally important industrial buildings. Some time spent researching here will benefit you in the future. I’d bet OSHA has modern documents profiling how to safely unload many types of freight cars. Army Transportation Corps manuals also have this information.

Don’t forget to check out modeling magazines or books, some authors really care about this sort of thing, and provide really valuble information about how a freight car was unloaded. Safely and properly.

All the resources for the proper and realistic (un)loading of freight cars are out there, you just have to make the extra effort to find it.

Modeling Gaffe 4 – Vehicular Anachronisms

Ok, for those who don’t have a precise knoweledge of what an anachronism is, think of it this way: If you were a citizen of the 1870’s, which method of communication would be appropriate for you to contact your family In New York if you’re stuck in an Odgen, UT train depot and won’t be there in time for Christmas?
a) Whip out your Cell Phone and make a call.
b) Walk over to a phone booth and make a call.
c) Go to the local Western Union office and send a Telegram.

Answering “C” would be the appropriate answer, but wouldn’t you know how many people, model railroaders included, would have chosen “B”?

Modelers frequently screw this up with their choice of automobiles and trucks for their layouts, and there’s no excuse, really. So this brings us to the tale of:

You see it even on some of the finest layouts around the country, and this saddens me.
Why, when:
-The Meticulous Prototype modeler re-details their rolling stock fleet to perfectly fit the era (either by “modernizing” or “backdating” such things as Brake equipment, trucks, couplers, trussrods/steel underframe)
-They don’t purchase any diesel or steam locomotive that doesn’t strictly fit their modeled era
-They invest time, money and research into detailing their structures with period details, getting the right advertisements, window displays and prices written on signs in the windows.

Do the same modelers NOT take the same care with their choice of automobiles and plop a ‘58 Corvette in a 1946 scene and dub it “ok” when that corvette probably never would have met a revenue steam locomotive at a railroad crossing in it’s entire life?

The worst offender in the vehicle catagory is definately the cliche1956 Ford F-100, which has been produced in almost every scale. It’s usually found in some junkyard on the layout, a total rust-bucket like it’s been there for 45 years of harsh canadian winters with spring floods….and the modeled year is 1951!!

Delibrately posed to prove a point this Athearn Ford-C cabover truck is weathered only like you’d find one in 2009, with completely faded paint, heavy rust and grime, flat tires, etc. The Ford C was made from 1958-1991 so, like the corvette I mentioned earlier, it would have never seen mainline steam, nor would it fit into my 1954 layout, but SO MANY modelers make this mistake it’s getting old and unacceptable.

There is no excuse for this behavior as the Auto/Truck’s model year is printed on the packaging 95% to the time! Picking an era and sticking to it is a major step towards realism and automobiles can provide the most vivid clue.

Cars change every model year, and trucks usually change designs every 5-10 years. There are periods in which the change was quite rapid though, and most of those fall within “popular” modeled periods.

Visit this car show gallery and follow along with the commentary below:

1922 saw the genesis of the car beyond the wooden-framed, doped cloth covered flivvers.

1935 was the first major jump from “running boards and long noses” to the beginning of the full-bodied cars. Fenders became part of the body.

1939 saw the best of the streamlined cars, they were sleek, chromed, fast and were getting “fuller” in shape, running boards began to disappear on Automobiles.

1949 saw the dawn of the “upside-down bathtub” designs that were WIDE, fat and round.

1955 began the transition into the “fins” era, the designs were still subtle, but a hint of what was to come. The Profile becomes somewhat more square.

1957-9 had perhaps the most outrageously overdone “production” cars with HUGE fins and ungainly shapes. Running boards diappeared on pickup trucks and “highlight lines” (creases in the side of the body, usually horizontally across where the door handle is) were all the rage.

1961 saw the beginning of the slab-sided boxes. Minimalist detail until the mid 1960’s when such cars as the galaxy redefined the GIGANTIC size of the automobile. (these cars were so large, you paint it battleship gray, letter CV-60 on it’s hood and christen it as our next aircraft carrier.)

mid 1970’s, when the hideous “retro” attemps at vinyl tops, bad grilles, and awkward looking bodies were the mainstay of american roads

The 1980’s saw the rise of Computer-aided (er in these cases, hindered) design. Most cars were built as if the designers only knew straight lines at odd angles.

The 1990’s saw the rise of the “bar of soap” designs for aerodynamic reasons. The Ford Taurus was perhaps the worst offender. Trucks became aerodynamic with rounded edges for the first time since the 1940’s.

…you probably can deduce the current collection of cars on the road today, I’ll leave you with that.

Modeling Gaffe 3 Abuse of Retaining Walls

Ever since I was a small child, looking wide-eyed at the photos in modeling magazines, I always cringed when I saw an impossibly tall and long retaining wall. They just aren’t realistic. Yes, there’s the Reno & Alameda Corridor “Trenches”, Yes there are extensive retaining walls in MODERN transit systems, but on a mainline in the middle of nowhere? Certianly not!

 

Retaining walls are meant to hold dirt, loose rock and other debris back from buildings, rail lines and roads. Well designed retaining walls also reduce erosion or landslides. What most modelers don’t know is that most retaining walls are usually overbuilt. I’m not sure where the modeler’s cliche of a rickety old retaining wall barely supporting the earth behind it comes from. It’s all too common though, perhaps unwillingness to study something so ordinary as a retaining wall leads many modelers to freelance it?

Click here for a detailed diagram showing the wide variety of retaining wall construction methods.

Of course there’s always the “colorado” excuse for sheer, 15 story rock faces with the Transcon-style 4 track mainline snaking it’s way along a ledge, sure it looks spectacular, but where else but Colorado, Switzerland, or Canada are you going to find such a place? Well for starters, on a model Railroad I guess!

Even in colorado, the retaining walls look rickety and somewhat tall, but they aren’t. Look closer here.

The abuse is atrocious. On one HO model railroad there was a field stone retaining wall 12 inches tall (86 scale feet!) suppposedly to “keep the bottom track visually open to viewers”. Think of that, an 8 story building, holding back millions of yards of dirt, and all with fieldstone?! I think NOT. Even a reinforced concrete retaining wall would have to be built like a dam to hold back those forces!

A favorite use by modelers of retaining walls is the “stair step” railroad look. It’s in no way realistic, yet we see it time and again on our model railroads? WHY? Model Railroader Magazine had an article a decade back showing various ways to avoid this unfortunate design trend effectively. They suggested snaking the higher mainline over the lower, creating a series of “honeymoon” tunnels and somewhat steep hillsides, which looked more natural and visually appealing.

(Photographer Unknown)

Model railroaders love to use retaining walls at junctions, and here they (finally) have a place. They can range in height, the lower the better, as long as the embankment isn’t too steep and it looks like it could hold the embankment back and take the intense vibrations experienced by a heavy freight train rolling atop the embankment.

So, remember that when in doubt, don’t install any old retaining wall, install the right one for the job OR just skip the needs for them entirely and wisely plan your railroad’s grade to avoid the use of them wherever possible. You railroad foreman will be very happy if he doesn’t have to maintain another huge, 12 story fieldstone wall liable to cumble into bits any second.

Modeling Gaffe 2 Road Access

These “modeling cliche” articles are intended to engage you, my readers in a debate, not a scathing or arrogant “I’m a better modeler than you”  contest. These are real problems that all too often occur for no good reason on model railroads around the world, and by recognizing it as a problem more people will begin to realize how important these fixes can be towards making your model railroad not only attractive looking, but realistic too.

This is a huge problem on a majority of club layouts around the country, and it’s also present in more home layouts than I really want to know.

Lack of road access.

Roads predated any modern form of transportation and haven’t been replaced by anything since, so why is there a total lack of adequate roads on a model railroad? It doesn’t make sense. Why completely destroy your illusion of a miniature world by omitting roads? Do you think you don’t have enough space? Do you think that the railroad should serve every single building on your model railroad?

Also, with thousands of scale vehicles available in almost every major railroad modeling scale (with the annoying exception of American O gauge 1:48) there is a great incentive to embrace the roads that frequently parallel or cross our scale railroad lines. As woodland scenics successfully proves with their “Auto Scenics” there is a lot of narrative quality based around road vehicles that add a lot of character to a scene on a model railroad. It’s also another fun facet of the hobby, with the 1:87 vehicle club being a stand-alone force in the modeling world with some modelers just building HO scale autos and trucks and ignoring the trains partially or even completely.

The road itself is an incredibly interesting thing to model. From a rutted, muddy logging road, to a shaded gravel lane to a residential street to old concrete highway or even a modern freeway (which have yet to see modeled at all despite them paralleling railroads from the beginning of the Interstate highway system in the 1950’s.)

Check out these models of:
-A dirt parking lot with chain link fence
-A paved county road pitted and old from many harsh winters in CNW territory.
-An Automotive repair and rail-served scrapyard.
-A concrete two-lane road ans coal dealer
-A classic 1970’s era Dairy Queen with an accruately modeled drivethrough curb structure
-A 1970’s era interstate highway bridge over a busy FRISCO mainline
-Accurately modeled concrete street trackage
-An old dead-end street with plenty of essential details added, like the K-rail barriers and red diamond “stop” markers
-Old meets new as a brick-street transitions into modern, wide concrete avenue. Also note the awesome telephone company work yard with fleet of telephone co. Vans.
-Beautiful 4 lane avenue with grade crossing turn-off
-An absolutely amazing older interstate highway with 6 lanes and an amazing FRISCO grade-separated bridge that’s a standalone masterpiece.
-Another view of the interstate highway

Most of these astoundingly real scenes work BECAUSE the roads are so realistic. They don’t “waste” space because they’re interesting models in their own right. (Mike Budde Modeled most of these awesome scenes. For more of his work, look for back issues of “Mainline Modeler” a defunct model magazine from the 1990’s)

There should be no excuse why you can’t model adequately wide, detailed and attractive looking roads. The average US street is 30-35 feet across, roughly 12 feet per lane plus space to park on at least one side.

I hope these photos inspired you to go out there and start grading for your future roads.

Modeling Gaffe 1- The John Allen Disorder.

John Allen did it right, and the final product looked good. Hundreds of modelers attempt to put “eleventeen” bridges across one little puddle of water and it looks stupid, cliche and poorly designed. Why is this so?

The main thing that 99% of model railroaders who attempt to emulate this  don’t realize about this reasonably unrealistic situation is that John Allen built the scenery first, then SCRATCHBUILT the bridge to fit the space. It looks natural, and the bridge actually looks like it was built in-place, not as if a modeler took a kit out of the box and plopped in the chasm.

The other main thing to consider is that a railroad would much rather fill in the water feature if it was shallow and narrow, and provide drainage than waste the money it would take to order, place and maintain a bridge.

Think about it: If you were a railroad structural engineer working with an accountant, would you decide to build an impressive array of truss-bridges to span a 70 foot gap of water for your 6 track yard? No! You would probably either sight the yard along the banks of the river or fill it in and provide adequate drainage pipes to move what usually would be seasonal water.

Railroads avoid water crossings at almost all costs. That’s why when they do build a bridge, it’s either eventually replaced with a fill (if it was originally a low, long trestle.) or the most direct route across the obstacle. They’re usually overbuilt to last, and some bridges are still doing their job over 100 years later. Multiple crossings of the same body of water typically would be consolidated into a single, Strong and wide bridge when possible.

I think (and I’m guilty of it too) that the Atlas bridge kits have made modelers lazy. One bridge I’m constantly shocked that most water features on a model railroad tend to conviently fit the width of the bridge instead of kitbashing the bridge to fit the river width. Most people don’t even bother mixing types of bridges to correctly fit the needed application.  The scourage of most model railroads is the ATLAS “curved chord truss bridge”. This was based on an Austrian prototype, and this particular type of Curved-Chord bridge is extremely rare  in the US. (There are many different types, some of which are much more common.) Here’s the bridge I’m talking about:

 The other problem is that there’s no “breathing space” between the river crossings, it would be like rafting through a tunnel if you went under all those bridges!

There isn’t a prototype for the photo above, and for these good reasons, It would be best to avoid this horrible modeling cliche.