Fidelity vs Practicality

Fidelity (noun): faithfulness, loyalty, exact correspondence to the original (Concise Oxford Dictionary). The word ‘fidelity’ refers to how faithful a reproduction of something is to the original item. This has application in the hobby of model railways because, whenever we make a judgement about a particular model or layout, what we’re doing is assessing its fidelity compared with our perception of the prototype.

I use the word ‘perception’ of the prototype very deliberately because, in my experience, it’s quite rare to have a definitive resolution to a question about some aspect of the prototype’s way of doing things. I doubt many topics have generated more heated debate over the years than the colours applied to various models.

While it’s possible that modern scanning and colour reproduction technology have to some degree helped to take the heat out of this issue, the root cause of the ‘colour wars’ of past years is essentially because we all tend to perceive colours quite differently. We often fail to take account of the difference scale makes to colour perception and the fact that we are probably physically a lot closer to a model locomotive than we are ever likely to be to the real thing. Light alters colours