The Unintended and Inevitable Tyranny of Railroad Prototype Modeling Or:  All Points on the Prototypical to Highly Freelanced Spectrum are Honorable and Deserve Support The increasing availability of ever more accurate scale replicas of railroad equipment has led to more railroad prototype modelling - RPM for short.  This, along with advances in electronic control such as DCC and sound, has fostered an increased focus on realistic operations.  It may indeed lead to increased participation in model railroading, and development of other ways to enjoy this great hobby which I haven’t listed or can’t even imagine.  But the increase in RPM will inevitably lead to a decrease in the hobby in the kind of creativity, imagination and individuality necessary for overt freelance modelling, and we should guard against that decrease becoming excessive. My apologies for the sensational title, but I wanted to get your attention.  I hope that this entire article is not an example of a bad case of “good-old-days” syndrome in the author!  In more ways than not, RPM will be and is a boon to the model railroading hobby.  Increased participation, more wide-spread life-like modelling, operations and other advances which have accompanied the rise of RPM are all good things.  I do not think that overtly freelanced model railroading will ever be eliminated because the creativity of the human spirit cannot ever be completely squashed.  But highly freelanced modelling will be less the norm and harder to achieve, as RPM comes into ascendance.  Let’s not forget that highly freelanced layouts were the norm for a long time.  If you wanted to have a fleet of cars and locomotives, it was just about as easy, if not easier, to come up with your own roadname as it was to model a prototype.  You were doing a lot of scratch building, painting and re- lettering in either case.  Scratch building with fidelity to prototype isn’t easy.  And the lack of prototypical accuracy in models you could buy further encouraged freelancing.  “Well, it doesn’t look much like a prototype, so why pretend that it is?”  Today, the world has changed, and in many ways it is easier to model the prototype. The loss of creativity starts with roadnames.  Remember John Allen’s celebrated Gorre and Daphetid - the GD Railroad for short?  That kind of creativity and humor is less likely with RPM.  And what about humorous place names or names of wayside establishments?  Again, not completely killed off by RPM, but frowned upon or at least not encouraged.  The more realistic approach is to model, in as great a level of detail as possible, including names, the actual places and industries along an actual stretch of track, right? I am not demeaning the skills needed for RPM, but they are a somewhat different set of skills than used when overtly freelance modelling.  In RPM, you need to study the prototype closely and exercise incredible skill in attempting to replicate the actual, 1:1 scale articles you are modeling.  But you are perilously close to, or already on the slippery slope of rivet counting. RPM devotees must be good modelers – with top-notch assembly, painting and weathering more valued than ever.  But you also need to be a good researcher and historian.  Highly freelance modelers need to be able to create liveries and heralds, marketing brands, and fabricate entire fictional back-stories to support the imagined premises behind their creations.  That’s a different set of abilities.