When we try to put a railway "in the landscape"

I was walking in the Yorkshire Dales yesterday, high above the massive and magnificent Ribblehead Viaduct. I took this picture of a Class 66 hauling its train onto the viaduct:


Can you see it?

Here's a zoom-in:



I was in awe at the true scale of this place and the achievements of the Victorian builders. No matter what scale we model, we will never have the space to truly represent the railway "in the landscape". :shock::shock::shock:   

What a magnificent panorama Mike, you must have had a good bracing walk to get to where you were yesterday.

Yes, our Victorian forebears certainly left many impressive statements for generations to admire, many the more impressive for being in some wild landscapes as this. Their urban landmarks may be grand and sometimes beautiful, but as you rightly say, the scale of the achievement is easier to understand in the unbuilt environment!

I can see the viaduct in the first image, but not the train, even when finding out exactly where it is in your second!

Hope you escaped that rain.

Great stuff,

Bill 

The Victorians were remarkable.  There was a chasm between the "have's" and the "have not's" but the "have's" certainly left a massive legacy.

I often wonder how, during that century, they could undertake so many huge projects and yet today, when those projects are in dire need of some TLC, we just don't have the money.

Our railways are collapsing, our sewers are caving in, our roads are pitted by potholes, our underground water pipes are leaking like seives, grand municiple buildings are crumbling away and most of our industry has gone.

Is that what "progress" means or have we been racing the wrong way in economic terms ?  The Victorians built the World's railways and yet today, we can't even keep a few trains running properly.  :roll: :roll: :roll:

Fabulous shots by the way Mike.  :thumbs

Lovely photos of an impressive structure, and even more impressive landscape. :)

Our problem as modellers is how to selectively compress things yet still leave them recognisable. Possibly that's one reason why some of us choose to model entirely fictional locations but incorporate elements of real locations to make them more convincing.

Even so, a few people have large spaces; a friend has Exeter Central station modelled very close to scale under his house (which is built into the side of a hill, so lots of cellar space). Compared to Ribblehead viaduct, even that is probably on the small side, lengthwise.

For the rest of us, we would probably have to model the viaduct with fewer arches, and make it lower, and run shorter trains to capture something of the character in a limited space.