Take a Tour Of Lovecraft's Arkham Aboard An HO Scale Train
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He has even put a lot of extra thought into real-world railroad enthusiast Lucius Bebee [http://www.ottgallery.com/HistoryoftheMiskatonicRR.html] and his "nine-times-removed distant cousins, the Bebees of Arkham."
"Arkham is a normal town," Ott said. "People who go looking for shoggoths in the alleys or byakhees on the roofs miss the point. And they won't find any. Arkham is a normal turn-of-the-20th-century town but with serious weirdness going on at the edges. That makes the place fascinating, and also what makes the model hopefully engaging."
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Ott said the project grew out of a rather unpleasant experience living in Lovecraft country. "I chose to build Arkham as a tongue-in-cheek act of revenge," he said. "Lovecraft used the city of Salem as his model for Arkham. For four long cold years I lived in a cramped apartment a short driving distance away. When I returned to my native sunny California, it seemed natural to record my not-altogether-positive impressions. I was building a new HO train layout anyway. I decided to name it the Miskatonic Railroad, re-read Lovecraft, and things grew from there."
Ott doesn't just do Lovecraft, either. His Ott Gallery [http://www.ottgallery.com/] site is devoted to "old time railroad models and HO scale projects" from the Victorian/Edwardian era. He has an N-gauge setup of a fictional railroad to Citizen Kane's gold mine in Colorado and a HO-scale layout of San Diego in 1908. The site also has tributes to various locomotive recreations and links to places he gets his materials.
Source: The Ott Gallery [http://www.ottgallery.com/]. Photos courtesy of John Ott.
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//cdn.themis-media.com/media/global/images/library/deriv/1019/1019329.jpg
He has even put a lot of extra thought into real-world railroad enthusiast Lucius Bebee [http://www.ottgallery.com/HistoryoftheMiskatonicRR.html] and his "nine-times-removed distant cousins, the Bebees of Arkham."
"Arkham is a normal town," Ott said. "People who go looking for shoggoths in the alleys or byakhees on the roofs miss the point. And they won't find any. Arkham is a normal turn-of-the-20th-century town but with serious weirdness going on at the edges. That makes the place fascinating, and also what makes the model hopefully engaging."
[gallery=5208]
Ott said the project grew out of a rather unpleasant experience living in Lovecraft country. "I chose to build Arkham as a tongue-in-cheek act of revenge," he said. "Lovecraft used the city of Salem as his model for Arkham. For four long cold years I lived in a cramped apartment a short driving distance away. When I returned to my native sunny California, it seemed natural to record my not-altogether-positive impressions. I was building a new HO train layout anyway. I decided to name it the Miskatonic Railroad, re-read Lovecraft, and things grew from there."
Ott doesn't just do Lovecraft, either. His Ott Gallery [http://www.ottgallery.com/] site is devoted to "old time railroad models and HO scale projects" from the Victorian/Edwardian era. He has an N-gauge setup of a fictional railroad to Citizen Kane's gold mine in Colorado and a HO-scale layout of San Diego in 1908. The site also has tributes to various locomotive recreations and links to places he gets his materials.
Source: The Ott Gallery [http://www.ottgallery.com/]. Photos courtesy of John Ott.
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