No umbrage was taken at all, mate.
I say "lunatic fringe" as my experience over the years has always had me to believe any interest among my fellows was going to be very limited. There is a sizeable population of scale modellers in this part of the country, mostly they are deeply interested in building the best models they can build, researching a favourite railway, and (at best) building a model railway that visually reflects the locale and company they find so fascinating. As a majority, though, they have little interest in the actual replication of purpose but more of their memories of a favourite place or of watching a favourite railroad from the side of the track.
Through my professional life, I found myself stationed around Washington DC almost as a matter of habit by the personnel wombles, and was a longtime member of the O Scale modellers group there. Back then, they were very much as described above, very talented model builders, historians, contributors to the magazines, writers; truly first rank amongst their peers nationally and some were very close friends and mentors.
Mention (let alone attempt) proto-ops and all but two that come to mind would glaze over and some were in active resistance to the notion the group tread that path.
I always designed my trackplans to support ops, but not expecting anything beyond my own individual participation. My interest in proto-ops as a "thing" probably started during those rainy afternoons when we would run track from room to room down the upstairs hall and send clockwork Hornby to each other (while not actually being in view of each other) in some sort of sequence.
As a young man I had a very short career "on the railroad", so what I learned just added to the interest. As a profession, though, it was in the '70s, a tough time for the industry and indeed for anyone my age trying to start any sort of a career; I went into the military afterwards.
There were folks who had a group nationwide who got together for this sort of thing, though. Huge model railways and lots of adherence to the rules and practices of the real thing; one could easily feel like they did a day's work. Still, I enjoyed participating.
Where I live now, there is a decent size group of modellers. I was hoping to get one or two interested in this, something beyond model building per se. I built the current model railroad iteration, not to replicate a place or a single subject so much, but to be a platform; a stage for many plays. I also am trying to explore some new ground where one strikes a balance between such strict adherence that one feels they worked a shift on the real thing (which puts all but the most rabid off) yet gives a taste of how railroads work.
We started a year ago with seven out of the larger local group interested, none of whom had any experience in ops. I fully expected that to whittle down to perhaps three who found it enjoyable. A year later we have ten, which rather amazes me, and each session we do sees six to eight depending on everyone's schedule. I'm pleased with the interest, but it does mean I have to keep ahead of them, add interest, ensure reliability, test and retest, but be mindful of that balance between enjoyable realism without going overboard and turning a session into "work".
I'm actually impressed you saw the computer angle of all this, especially after the first reaction. It proves your mind is working. Although my exposure to programming is limited to coursework in those early formative years of Basic et al, control theory is control theory. A stream of process that gets one from current state to desired end-state follows the same course whether a computer program, a railway schedule, the design of an engine, the environmental control of a building, or indeed anything that can be termed a "system".
In that, a railway is nothing more than a mechanical computer. Indeed, one of the first industrial applications of computers outside academia and research organisations in this country was on the railroads, probably the leader if not the pioneer in the late 1950s and early '60s was New York Central. They saw the potential and the applicability by similar function and employed great whacking mainframe installations to do huge calculations of car sorting, tracking of consignments and carloads, down to the minutiae of controlling the force of the car-retarders in gravity operated yards ("humpyards") that took as inputs the windspeed and direction, the weight and rolling resistance of cars measured in real time, gradient and distance of the track that car was to roll down, and calculated the force required of the retarders such that the car would roll over the hump and have exactly the right braking applied by the retarder to come to a stop in the yard without crashing by stopping too late or wasting space by stopping too soon.
I've wandered off a bit, you think? Grin!
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