From time to time, we get a letter from a reader who wants something more out of a review and offers to sacrifice the prototype section to make room for it. Since you may not see much prototype information in reviews written in other venues, I suppose our proto section offers up a tempting target for textual terrorism, so I thought perhaps you’d appreciate our editorial perspective on this facet of our publication.

When I came on board as the editor in February 2002, the practice of offering a proto section was already firmly entrenched, and I found it to be very appealing. I immediately saw the advantages, though I didn’t suppose I’d ever have to defend it. Over the years, I’ve attended events and shows where it has come up in face-to-face conversations. The vast majority have been from modelers who complained of other publications that did not have any method of placing a reviewed product within any historical or geographical time frame.

Whether it is a locomotive, a freight car, or a structure of some sort, modelers would like to know when and where it was originally built and used, and how it was changed over the years. From that basis, they can then decide how they might apply it to their layout. Some model railroaders are very savvy about railroad history and can place an identified product quickly from just a few clues. Many more have very limited tools for researching the past of a product, and so they enjoy having the opportunity to read up on an item.

Our staff adheres to a rather old-fashioned model of journalistic integrity that requires actual research and expertise on a topic. Each of us has a fairly well developed collection of reference books and extends it with other research resources including other experts on the subject. That isn’t to say we always get it right, but we’re usually in the neighborhood.

When I meet with folks outside our publication who are in the industry, they are often very appreciative of the fact that we manage to deliver critiques of products without becoming overly critical. They find that to be a hard process to fathom. How do we say that a model has a half-dozen prototypical errors without putting a boot to the manufacturer’s neck? The secret is the proto section, and so it is no secret at all!

As we discuss what a locomotive was like when it was delivered to a certain railroad and then how it was changed over its life, we develop a sort of timeline of change. Then, when we discuss the model, we begin to see the components of it against that timeline and see that this item and that item really represent different periods of time and wouldn’t have appeared on the loco at the same time. Some modelers don’t care, some will use modeling skills to change it, while others will appreciate that at least we pointed it out. Meanwhile, it doesn’t come off as mean, nor should it.

As a general rule, I find that the companies making models are doing better research on products than ever before, and so we find fewer glaring errors and more of the rinky-dink little stuff, though there are exceptions. To be honest, simply writing about a small piece of plastic shaped like a train thing would get rather boring if we didn’t get to connect it up to railroad history. All of us at MRN enjoy digging around in our books and finding new things, and we enjoy sharing what we find through our writing.

You should also know that leaving out the proto section would not open up space for anything else. Whatever we feel should be in a review, we put in, and that accounts for why our reviews run to several pages at times along with a half-dozen large photos. But that does lead to another issue:

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words…

This is something else that comes up from time to time. Why don’t we pull out a 105mm howitzer and blow some manufacturer off the map because they didn’t model the detail between the cab of a steam locomotive and the trailing truck correctly? Why didn’t we tell the world what a dreadful job they did of modeling that? I mean, there it was on that photograph we published, plain as day!

Well, that’s the whole point. First, we don’t own a howitzer, and second, if we did, we’d run trains through it. As we covered in the first section, we aren’t mean people. Besides, it’s plain as day in the photograph. A picture’s worth a thousand words. Literally. Why should we spend a thousand words to inflame readers, diss the manufacturer, and waste the space, when the picture has it covered?

Once again, some readers will look at the photo and throw up their hands in horror at what they see. Others will look at the photo and have no problems. I’m not in the business of telling others what to think. I’m in the business of showing you what you’ll get for your money and helping you to decide if it’s worth it or not.

A photo and a textual description of the same thing is a horrible waste of magazine real estate! This is particularly true if it runs on to several paragraphs. Quite frankly, the text accomplishes the task in a different manner than the image, one I like far less because it will never be as objective.

We live in different times these days, and the Internet is filled with writing that could never have found a market in days gone by when I cut my teeth with a typewriter. Forums and blogs allow foul-tempered flamers to fire unbalanced diatribes about trivial issues in an attempt at self-aggrandizement. To build oneself up at the expense of another is no great accomplishment, and yet such is the case with much of what I have read about products on the ‘Net.’

So it is, we rest our confidence upon the power of photographs against simple backgrounds to sharply portray the sample in our possession. We will use our words to describe what the photos cannot convey about the sounds, the operation, and the relation to the prototype in history. — John Sipple