Names.........

Would a rose by any other name still smell like diesel smoke?

I did a lot of thinking about what to name things as I was designing my current layout. I think names are important. They help set time and place. They tell your viewers (users? spectators?) a lot about your railroad.

Although my railroad runs through a real piece of terrain I chose not to use “real” town names for “on board” towns. This was a decision based on the type of modeler that I am. I like,  ah… I have a compulsion about getting things correct. If I were to model a real town I would have to hire a team of archeologist to go in and figure out what the buildings really looked like in 1926. If I model a fictional town I still have to get the feeling of the local right but I don’t have to model every board in every store front as it  was at 11:45 AM on July 2^nd 1926 . …. Don’t worry fellow modelers I only apply this standard to MY work…. Everyone else is free to pull the GN Empire Builder behind a Thomas the Tank engine for all I care.

 So how do I choose names?  Some of my names tell a spectator the function and  / or location of a place. Port Columbia doesn’t exist as a real town. The area and terrain are real but the city is an invention. There is a port at Morrow, which is a cool sounding name, but it doesn’t sound like a big city. I needed a city and port on the Columbia River. The name locates the city and tells us it’s function. 

Other town names give a general concept of the place. “Blackhorse” serves a ranch and farming area. “Tin Horn” is more complex. It is meant to suggest a mining origin to anyone familiar with the Blue Mountains of Oregon…. It is a modification of the real town name “Greenhorn”. What about Lost Pass? The name is my attempt to justify placing a mountain pass in an area when in reality there isn’t one.

What about “Cute” names? It’s your choice. John Allen’s “Gorre and Dephetid” (pronounced Gory and Defeated) is the most well known example. John Allen said that he got tired of the joke after awhile.

Now for the bomb shell…. The Central Oregon and Eastern has been renamed the Oregon Central. WHY? I started designing custom decals and I realized that in N-scale the extra 10 letters would make the height of the lettering just too small and hard to read. But I should probably think up a better excuse.