One of the ways I try to round out the creative landscape of my model railroad is by building a bit of lore. It’s loose, not fully formed, but it helps flesh things out and give me somewhere to explore beyond just the scenery or operations. I haven’t figured out the full story arc yet — maybe I never will — but there are visual elements and activities I want to include, and I think the rest will come together over time.
One of those elements is a zine. A self-made, lo-fi magazine. In my head, it’s created by this little gas mask–wearing avatar — a kind of railway-dwelling protagonist in an orange jumpsuit, hidden somewhere in the miniature world. He pieces together scraps from old newspapers and magazines blowing around the train station, feeds nickels into convenience store photocopiers, and churns out a strange little publication filled with musings, hints about safehouses and food depots, maybe tips on how to hop trains without paying. It’s ridiculous and fun, and honestly, it just adds texture.
The zine isn’t some crucial part of the layout’s story — but it’s a lovely complement to it. The two exist because of each other, and together they round out a shared world that’s bigger than either piece alone.
I make the zine because collage scratches a creative itch. It’s tactile. It’s messy. It’s problem solving, but in a way that feels totally present — paper, scissors, glue stick, stuff spread across the table. It also feels like a kind of escape. Like arts and crafts time from school — nostalgic, limited, and somehow more freeing than endless digital control. I just play around with it: laying out a bunch of bits and seeing what fits.
And that’s important to me, especially because I do design professionally. I’m lucky to have a creative job, but it’s extremely software-dependent. I can lay out a whole book with a handful of tools in no time, and it can look great. But there’s a tradeoff — a speed versus sensation thing. Designing on a screen is not the same as shifting bits of paper around by hand. When you’re working with digital files, you can scale and tweak everything until it’s perfect. But with collage, what you have is what you get. You can’t resize something by 2%. You have to respond to what’s in front of you.
It’s not about fixing mistakes. It’s about responding to choices — shaping things as they emerge.
And I like that. I like that it forces decisions. I move a thing. I add something else to balance it out. I dig through more magazines — model railroading or otherwise — and hunt for words or images that loosely relate to the vibe. Maybe I trim the border off an ad or frame a photo in black to make it pop more. Sometimes I steal elements from one page and glue them onto another. I grab pens and make little marks, print something out from my phone, build captions and speech bubbles by hand. Everything’s rough. Everything’s iterative. And always, I’ve got a coffee nearby, music on, window cracked, just in the moment.
It’s the same kind of feeling I chase when I’m building structures or scenery on the layout — reacting to what I’ve got, making something from it. That commit-and-respond rhythm is something I’ve started noticing across a lot of what I do. I don’t think creative work is about flashes of genius or breakthrough moments. It’s more like slow momentum — shaping something, seeing what works, and adjusting from there.
Because I think that joy is getting harder to find. The possibility of outcome — 3D printing whatever you want, ordering anything you need — kind of overshadows it. There’s less satisfaction in the challenge when you’re flush with choices. But with collage, with zines, with all of this, it feels like: I made something out of nothing. I used what I had. I shared it. Maybe it resonates. Maybe it doesn’t. But the doing was worth it.
That feels like a pretty good investment.
So what’s the takeaway?
Make something. Share it. Get something back — maybe from the world, maybe just from yourself.
