Originally Posted by Allan Miller:
It used to be, far more than it seems now. Just go look up early On30 stuff. There's a lot of stuff out there that'd make a 'out of the box 3-railer' blush for realism.
There are plenty of whimsical layouts still out there, but I'd argue that now that On30 has become pretty mainstream (much to the dismay of the writers at Model Railroader who still won't use the On30 label exclusively), perhaps far more so than the more accurate gauge of On3, you're now seeing modelers really apply some decent skills to serious layouts in On30. I think once good, inexpensive models atarted coming out, people with serious concepts and designs jumped into On30 and streered it to a more realisitic use.
Even the On30 annual concurs that many are attracted to the whimsical nature of the gauge itself: http://on30annual.com/extra/on...tra_introduction.php
Whimsey in model railroading isn't something that spins my spurs. You'll never find a crashed UFO being recovered by the Army, a bigfoot figure hising out behind a tree, or any of the other whimseys I've seen numerous times on several layouts of different scales. But yeah, On30 seems to have brought more than it's fair share of this.
To each their own, but that ain't my shtick...