It's intriguing to me that MRRers seem so uninterested in military equipment or layouts.
If you look at another guy-dominated area of the miniatures world, scale modeling - plastic or cardstock - war machines are by far the most popular subjects, with anything related to WWII having an especially strong appeal. This seems to be true for modelers from North American, Europe as well as Asia.
Yet, in the MRRing sphere, I almost never see things like armored trains, rail artillery, troop trains, war-time trains hauling tanks or anything like that. I can't recall ever seeing an explicitly war-time layout (although I once read that Hermann Goering had an elaborate layout that included bombers which flew along wires for attacking the trains).
Since MRRing, like scale modeling, is a heavily guy-oriented pursuit, I'm wondering why MRRs are different in this respect. Any ideas or comments?
Mainly, I think you don't see to many Military based layouts is, because unless you have a Military Base, Depot, repair facility, or Naval station, some place where a military train can go, lots of model railroaders don't find a need for a dedicated train. Even modeling the rail served portion of a military base(I keep thinking back when I was stationed at Ft. Hood in Texas) could take up a lot of layout real estate, even if compressed. Might make for an interesting switching layout.
On an operation type layout, though, scheduling a movement of, armoured vehicles, a military unit moving to a training site, or heading out to a combat zone, would add some variety, and keep the dispatcher busy. (Would a military train have priority?) This would be good during WWII as both the Allies, and Axis armies used rails specifically for movement for troops, equipment and supplies.
But today's military, with its heavy lift aircraft, "roll-on, roll-off" ships, and the use of contracting out movement of supplies to commercial truckers,(even in combat zones, as we recently saw in Iraq) the only use of trains would be getting supplies to a point of departure, or a repair facility. Today's military would rather have supplies move in a commercial boxcar, so it wouldn't be targeted(Gone are the days of "U.S. Army" painted on the sides of a boxcar). Moving troops to a departure site now is a Greyhound bus.
Modeling a military train during WWII, is easier then it was a few years ago(Which I agree with you, why haven't we seen more). A few companies do offer troop cars. Roco does sell armoured and artillery vehicles, for both Allies and Axis armies.
Modeling a military train today, would be nothing more than a few modern armour vehicles on some TTX flats, with maybe an AMTRACK car, or the railroad's caboose for security personel.
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