Observations on Tomix & Kato and Japanese model trains

[KenS]

Where are the N. American train design schools?

 

I think you can blame the railroads: good (appealing) design doesn't necessarily cost a lot of money, but it does have a cost, in development time, specialists, and perhaps in lost space or other constraints. North American freight railroads (like most others) have been focused on trying to simply stay in business for the last half-century. And while that's started to change over the last couple of decades, they still run on a very slim margin of profit (even with the improved costs from smaller crews and a focus on bulk traffic, about 80% of Class I income goes to operating costs, before investments in new equipment, or profit).

 

With that environment, functionalism (and cost reduction) has won out over esthetics.  In fact, a utilitarian design is probably good advertising: it says "we're not charging you extra for useless frills".

 

The class 70 looks like the standard N.A. freight design that's been unchanged since the early road-switchers: cab at or near one end, full-height hood for the mechanical section behind the cab, with external access from a walkway for maintenance. There's little advantage to streamlining a freight locomotive, or even a passenger train at sub-100mph speeds (witness the boxy fronts of most Japanese commuter trains). Streamlined passenger trains (before the Shinkansen) were mainly a marketing feature designed to appeal to passengers. Even the full-width "Safety Cab" was slow to be adopted, and didn't really take off until around 1990, although examples exist back to the 1960s, and was motivated by crew safety (and perhaps liability concerns) rather than esthetics.

 

Most bodies operating passenger trains in N.A. today serve a captive audience of commuters and market their service based on cost, or convenience compared to driving in commuter traffic (to the extent that they market at all). And most are publicly-funded agencies, so cost is often more important than all other criteria. Like freight railroads they're more focused on lowest-cost equipment, which the manufacturers meet with minimal variations on freight railroads (the long-lived F40PH was basically a coweled version of the GP40). There's little in this market to drive a significant investment in design.

 

Maybe the recent attention to "high speed rail" in the U.S. will cause the manufacturers competing for that business to invest in some esthetic design for the intended passenger audience, although my fear is that they'll just slap an F40PH-style cowl on an existing shape, replace the engine with a transformer, and call it "done". But maybe we'll get lucky and get another timeless design like the GG1, which still gets my vote for best design, 76 years after it was introduced (and to get back to the original topic of this thread, models: the Kato model of the GG1 is very nice; I just bought one).

 

All that said, I think the Class 70 is a remarkably ugly take on the standard N.A. wide-cab design, and much less appealing than, say, the Class 66, which is also an EMD design.

[Mudkip Orange]

We need to clone an army of zombie Raymond Loewys.

[cteno4]

Where are the N. American train design schools?

 

I think you can blame the railroads: good (appealing) design doesn't necessarily cost a lot of money, but it does have a cost, in development time, specialists, and perhaps in lost space or other constraints. North American freight railroads (like most others) have been focused on trying to simply stay in business for the last half-century. And while that's started to change over the last couple of decades, they still run on a very slim margin of profit (even with the improved costs from smaller crews and a focus on bulk traffic, about 80% of Class I income goes to operating costs, before investments in new equipment, or profit).

 

With that environment, functionalism (and cost reduction) has won out over esthetics.  In fact, a utilitarian design is probably good advertising: it says "we're not charging you extra for useless frills".

 

The class 70 looks like the standard N.A. freight design that's been unchanged since the early road-switchers: cab at or near one end, full-height hood for the mechanical section behind the cab, with external access from a walkway for maintenance. There's little advantage to streamlining a freight locomotive, or even a passenger train at sub-100mph speeds (witness the boxy fronts of most Japanese commuter trains). Streamlined passenger trains (before the Shinkansen) were mainly a marketing feature designed to appeal to passengers. Even the full-width "Safety Cab" was slow to be adopted, and didn't really take off until around 1990, although examples exist back to the 1960s, and was motivated by crew safety (and perhaps liability concerns) rather than esthetics.

 

Most bodies operating passenger trains in N.A. today serve a captive audience of commuters and market their service based on cost, or convenience compared to driving in commuter traffic (to the extent that they market at all). And most are publicly-funded agencies, so cost is often more important than all other criteria. Like freight railroads they're more focused on lowest-cost equipment, which the manufacturers meet with minimal variations on freight railroads (the long-lived F40PH was basically a coweled version of the GP40). There's little in this market to drive a significant investment in design.

 

Maybe the recent attention to "high speed rail" in the U.S. will cause the manufacturers competing for that business to invest in some esthetic design for the intended passenger audience, although my fear is that they'll just slap an F40PH-style cowl on an existing shape, replace the engine with a transformer, and call it "done". But maybe we'll get lucky and get another timeless design like the GG1, which still gets my vote for best design, 76 years after it was introduced (and to get back to the original topic of this thread, models: the Kato model of the GG1 is very nice; I just bought one).

 

All that said, I think the Class 70 is a remarkably ugly take on the standard N.A. wide-cab design, and much less appealing than, say, the Class 66, which is also an EMD design.

 

Yes this is the state of american product design for the most part. its now the norm to either chuck any sense of aesthetic design in the process and just have someone hack it out or worse xerox someone else's designs and worse yet xerox and hack!

 

Previously most companies realized that aesthetic design like this is a very tiny fraction of the overall development costs, but always paid for itself in many, many times over and in ways if done well.

 

First you get your product noticed. when folks are choosing they will gravitate towards the one that has the nice lines, even if everything else is not equal, just a natural fact.

 

second usually folks trust something that is designed well, it says they took the time to do this right so they probably also were careful in the rest of the product (not always true in practice, but most folks tend to fall this way w/o other stimulus).

 

third giving attention to aesthetic design also can additional benefits in to the overall design. sometimes it forces some rethinks or can catch things that folks doing the physical or mechanical design never thought of, many times in terms of the human interface to the item.

 

Last it just shows you care. this is going to be worth something in the long run as its not there a lot in our current business world. bottom line and stock price run everything and little is given to thinking the big picture or the longer term. aesthetic design is one of those longer term and deeper thinking elements that usually does not pay off right away but builds.

 

case in point the apple stores. why are these so popular and so successful when others that have tried computer stores like this have failed miserably. if you look at the stores they have spent a lot of time with the aesthetic design and it makes the place have the right look from all angles in the place and just bolsters the Apple product design that also kicks ass.

 

the NA rrs are always just trying to stay afloat, but i dont think its them that is saying no aesthetic design or make it ugly so we dont look like we are spending money. its GE and others doing that as they have little competition and little forethought. I doubt the public would knee jerk that rrs were wasting money if their locos really had some nice design to the, i think just the opposite, they might take a bit more notice of rail and have a bit more of a positive thought with it -- important when you want to expand rail service in general.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[Triplex]

Ah, the old country-vs-country debates. I'm not going to imagine anything I can say will resolve anything.

 

There are two general forms this dispute usually takes, which are often conflated: which country's railways are better at doing their real-life jobs, and which are more interesting or modelgenic.

 

Yes, North American railways should have more passenger service. And yes, it was a stupid idea to stop giving passenger trains operating priority over freight. Long-distance trains often being seriously late is not any way to make rail usage appealing to the public.

 

However, the passenger trains most North American fans most favor aren't the types most associated with Japan, high-speed rail and commuter trains. We (yes, I'm one of them) tend to be more interested in the traditional long-distance locomotive-hauled trains. The overnight trains are naturally the most romanticized.

 

I could ramble for a long time on what aspects of railroads in different countries are interesting. I've come to the conclusion that there is no "perfect" prototype. My mindset is focused on how things fit together.

 

Sometimes, what's appealing to me is efficiency. At least as often, inefficiency is interesting from the railfan perspective. This is why the two aspects of the dispute should not be confused.

 

I don't find streamlining intrinsically attractive. For every N&W J-class, there's a Lehigh Valley K6B 4-6-2.

 

I'm more used to the dispute between Americans and British, but its nature is the same.